From Oprah livestream to house parties, Black women marshal unprecedented outreach for Kamala Harris

(CNN) — Waves of emotion washed over DeJuana Thompson as she stood in the convention hall in Chicago last month watching Vice President Kamala Harris become the first Black woman nominated for the presidency by a major political party.

“I absolutely was overwhelmed with what can only be described as ancestral pride,” said Thompson, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

But “literally two seconds” later, reality hit her, she said. “I was like, ‘Lord, we have work to do.’”

Around the country, Harris’ historic candidacy has unleashed a surge of activism among Black women like Thompson, who have long been a key part of the Democratic coalition but are now working overtime to advance the nomination of a woman who also shares their ancestry. On Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey – in collaboration with a group known as Win With Black Women – will hold a massive, virtual rally in the Detroit area, aimed at uniting groups of Harris supporters to turn out the vote. Harris is slated to participate.

In addition to the few hundred studio guests in the live audience, the Harris campaign said that nearly 200,000 people have signed up to view the “Unite for America” event – which will take place across several platforms, ranging from YouTube to Twitch. The rally, which kicks off at 8 p.m. ET, is an outgrowth of a Zoom meeting that Win With Black Women hosted within hours of President Joe Biden ending his reelection bid on July 21.

That event quickly ballooned to more than 90,000 participants – between those on the Zoom and those tuning in through other means – delivering an early and powerful sign of Black female support for Harris’ historic bid.

“There is a real clear understanding that this election is a monumental election,” Win With Black Women founder Jotaka Eaddy told CNN.

Groups led by Black women also are launching new political ventures to aid Harris. Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically Black sorority Harris joined as a student at Howard University, recently created its first political action committee. Another Black sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, is undertaking its first ad campaign to get out the vote, with commercials running through September. The National Council of Negro Women, meanwhile, has joined together with its member chapters and dozens of affiliated groups, such as the Black youth organization Jack and Jill of America, on a drive to register Black women and young voters between the ages of 17 and 24.

“It hits differently when someone who looks like me is at the top of the ticket,” said Daria Dawson, executive director of the voter mobilization group America Votes and the first African American woman to lead the organization. “There’s a renewed sense of urgency.”

Hillary Holley, a veteran of Stacey Abrams’ unsuccessful campaigns to become Georgia’s first Black and first female governor, now runs Care in Action – the political arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket dramatically changed the outlook of activists on the ground and the donors who support their efforts, Holley said.

Before Biden’s departure from the race, Holley, who lives and works in Georgia, had invited donors to an August 8 meeting in Atlanta to deliver a pep talk of sorts for contributors, reminding them of the election’s stakes, even if they were less than enthusiastic about the president’s campaign.

But when Harris emerged as the party’s standard-bearer, interest in the event soared, Holley said – with 80 donors, all but a handful of them Black women, gathering in the basement of a home in southwest Atlanta, suddenly eager to do more.

“These Black women have been stepping up and really carrying Democrats over the finish line for years, decades and many, many election cycles,” Holley said, “because we knew we had to engage in elections to protect our communities.”

“Now, we get the best of both worlds,” she added. “We get to do it for a woman who deeply knows our struggles. We’ve been waiting for this moment.”

The campaign budget for Holley’s group has jumped to $15 million – up from an original target of about $9 million, she said. Care in Action now plans outreach to 6.8 million voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, with a goal of turning out women of color in those states who already are registered to vote but often sit out elections.

But Holley and other activists said their arguments to voters transcend Harris’ identity. Care in Action workers – who include nannies, house cleaners and other care workers – are focused on “financial freedom” and will point to Harris’ economic proposals as they work to persuade voters to back her in the weeks ahead, Holley said.

‘Black women lined this up’

Black women make up one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocs – with 90% of them backing Biden in 2020, according to the exit polls. Their support for the Democratic presidential nominee soared to 96% in 2012, when Obama was last on the ballot.

“The secret sauce of Black women is that it’s not just us, it’s how we motivate and influence,” said veteran activist Melanie Campbell, chair of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund. “We get the men to show up, our sons, our daughters, our nieces, our nephews.”

Back in 2020, Campbell was among the Black women who urged Biden to pick a female African American running mate. And she was among the Black women who publicly urged Biden to remain in the race, following his poor June 27 debate performance.

Campbell said she feared that Democrats – once Biden left the race – would move to bypass the vice president. The message from Black women was: “No, she got the 14 million (primary) votes he got,” Campbell said. “It was Biden-Harris.”

And the groundswell of Black female support for Harris became apparent on the day Biden ended his bid when tens of thousands of people joined Win With Black Women’s regular Sunday evening Zoom to rally behind the vice president, said Steve Phillips, a veteran Democratic strategist and donor.

“Black women lined this up,” he said.

The Win With Black Women meeting on July 21 quickly raised $1.5 million in about three hours, according to Eaddy, the group’s founder. She said $20 million has now been raised by an array of grassroots groups aiding Harris’ campaign. (Some of those organizations, including White Dudes for Harris, Win With Black Men and Swifties for Kamala, have been invited to join Thursday’s virtual rally with Harris and Winfrey.)

Battleground North Carolina

In North Carolina, a state that Donald Trump won by about 74,000 votes out of some 5.4 million cast in 2020, groups led by Black women are crisscrossing the state in a scramble to expand the electorate. Black residents make up about 21% of the state’s population, and North Carolina is home to nearly a dozen Historically Black College and Universities.

Thompson, the Alabama activist, is the founder of Woke Vote, an organization that in 2017 helped elect Doug Jones as Alabama’s first Democratic US senator in a quarter century. In this election, her work focuses heavily on a handful of states, including North Carolina and Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020.

The Tar Heel State marked Trump’s tightest margin of victory four years ago, and Harris is trying to become the first Democratic presidential contender to win the state since Barack Obama in 2008. Thompson, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign in North Carolina, is focused on turning out rural Black voters in the eastern part of the state often overlooked by traditional outreach efforts, she said.

Black female organizers in the state also are extending their reach far beyond other Black women.

Janice Robinson is the North Carolina program director of an organization called Red Wine & Blue, which engages in “relational” organizing. She is encouraging diverse groups of suburban women to turn out their friends, neighbors and relatives for Harris and other Democrats in the Tar Heel State.

At a house party on a recent Friday morning in the Charlotte area, about a dozen people – mostly White women – gathered with Robinson to strategize over coffee, pastries and orange juice. Holding up her cellphone, she walked them through a tool to share information about the election with other North Carolinians in their contact lists.

“People listen to the people that they trust,” she emphasized.

Her goal is to get 40,000 voters to the polls in North Carolina.

The North Carolina chapter of America Votes, meanwhile, is working with an array of other organizations to reach 4 million voters in the state – a record quadrupling of its outreach in past elections, said Ashlei Blue, the group’s state director.

Deputy director Nervahna Crew is a veteran of several presidential elections in North Carolina, including 2016, when she logged so many miles door-knocking and literature-dropping for Hillary Clinton that she developed a cyst on her right foot. Crew said she worked “overtime” in that election, in part, to honor her grandmother Mary Starkey, a stalwart Democratic activist from Delaware who desperately wanted to cast a ballot to elect Clinton as the nation’s first female president but passed away in 2015.

This election cycle, Crew’s nonpartisan day job keeps her mostly focused on voter turnout rather than working directly on behalf of a candidate. But her commitment to making history in the presidential election hasn’t waned, she said.

“At the end of the day, what you’re not going to do is blame Black women for not doing their job,” she said. “If we’re not successful this time around, it won’t be because we didn’t give it our all.”

CNN’s Ebony Davis contributed to this report.

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