The air in the Hampton High School auditorium seemed lighter, freer, as if the women filing in had been holding their breath for too long and finally exhaled.
Old friends hugged and new ones were being made as volunteers handed out “Harris for President” posters and women waved them high, like flags of victory. They set up tables for voter registration, phone banks, texting banks, canvassing and postcard campaigns. While people waited in the auditorium to talk strategy, volunteers in the hallway called out:
“Girl, we’re doing it!”
“We’ve got this!”
“What do you need?”
Something has changed in the weeks since President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Women (and the men who love them), people of color and little girls with dreams of a possible first female president, have been jolted out of a malaise into an almost immediate sense of purpose, joy and hope. The momentum is only expected to accelerate with Harris gaining the party’s nomination on Friday and announcing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate Tuesday.
The mostly female crowd this Saturday was on fire.
“It feels like 2008, but this even feels bigger than 2008, because the energy is different!” said Tyee Davenport Mallory, senior adviser to the Virginia Harris for President campaign and all Virginia Democrats, from the stage. People in the crowd, a blanket of all races, ethnicities and ages, cheered at her reference to President Barack Obama’s 2008 run. “We’re not going back! … We can do anything for 100 days, right? Just be ready to be tired every day!”
Locals have been hopping onto the national Zoom organizing calls such as “WinWithBlackWomen,” “Latinas for Harris” and “Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris” and contributing to the campaign’s record $200 million raised in the first week. Local graduates from historically Black colleges and universities are wearing their school colors more boldly and are tolerating the gloating alums of Howard University in Washington, Harris’ alma mater. More women are wearing pearl necklaces, a symbol of Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Carrie Edmondson Short said this flaming feeling of hope has been beautiful to witness. She is co-founder of the COVA Coalition, a coastal Virginia network of grassroots groups that support progressive women candidates. She showed up at Saturday’s Grassroots Summit organized by the Greater Hampton Roads Black Democrats and drank in the energy. COVA planned to take a break until late August after organizing a large June summit. But after Biden’s July 21 announcement, COVA has been inundated with requests from people wanting to get involved.
Short joined the “White Women: Answer the Call” on July 25, which attracted more than 160,000 women, according to reuters.com. She supported Biden but said the media focus on his age was becoming exhausting, making it a burden to “sell him.” She’s felt lighter, less anxious with Harris facing former President Donald Trump, now the oldest candidate in history.
“There was a pit in our stomach,” Short said about the desire to rally. “We were ready.”
Sharon Campbell Waters was ready, too.
She believed in Biden, but gladly threw her support behind Harris. Within hours, she received an organizing Zoom link being shared through texts and social media among Black women nationwide. So many women tried hopping on the call that Waters had difficulty joining. But the meeting went on for hours with donations surpassing $1 million. She said the video chat felt like a soul-lifting church sermon.
“It was exhilarating!”
The call had the familiar, tried-and-true elements of civil rights rallies of the past, she said. Her parents helped organize the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which challenged the city’s segregated bus system. She was a child but remembers feeling the crackle of possibility that comes from women on a mission.
Black women, often sorority members, pulled together a plan over a weekend: They printed and dispersed more than 35,000 flyers about the boycott. They organized meetings and worked with men to create a transportation network for workers not riding the buses. They ignored the naysayers who said the city would never yield. The protest lasted more than a year and broke the system.
Waters sees this election as a similar fight for issues, such as reproductive rights, and dignity, a stand against Trump’s often racist and misogynistic rhetoric.
“This isn’t just a moment,” Waters said, her voice rising. “This is a movement! That’s why I know we’re going to win. We’re not sitting in the back of the bus anymore. I can’t tell you how much that I know, that I know, that I know. We’re going to win this thing!”
Wanda Brockington of Chesapeake, a retired dean and professor from Norfolk State University, was heartbroken when she learned of Biden’s announcement. She admires his compassion.
But then the talk switched to Harris, and the call for the D9 — the nine historical Black sororities and fraternities — to assemble, went out like the Bat signal calling for help in Batman movies. Brockington is a member of Delta Sigma Theta.
The swiftness and sense of purpose reminded her of her late father’s political work. He was a fraternity man — Alpha Phi Alpha – and in the 1960s worked at Shaw University, a historically Black university in Raleigh, North Carolina. He let students use his office and phone to organize demonstrations, including sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South. The students formed SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The D9 trash talk, Brockington said, but know when to represent as one and go to work.
“This is about all of us,” she said. “I am energized, revitalized. I have hope. I believe she can do this. She has the skills, the desire and the heart.”
Isabella Doty, 11, of Norfolk learned about Harris’ run from her mother. She was 7 when she stood in line with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother when the family voted for the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020. Now, the idea that a woman could be president makes the Blair Middle School student ecstatic about possibilities.
“I was thinking it could boost the rest of the girls’ confidence, that we can do what boys can do,” Isabella said. “It shows girls can do whatever they put their minds to.”
Midmorning of the Saturday Democratic event, Joni Ivey plopped into a chair outside of the Hampton High auditorium. She propped up her silver sequined Chuck Taylors — the classic shoe is a fave of Harris — and relaxed for a minute. She’s been involved in local politics since the 1970s, most frequently working with U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott’s campaigns. She watched as volunteers continued to march in, older women and men, teenagers, many wearing pearls and Chucks.
“You can feel the change in the air, ” Ivey said. “It’s just so organic. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Denise M. Watson, denise.watson@pilotonline.com
