VPresident Kamala Harris’ nearly 40-year membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (AKA) has been reported since she first ran for elected office in 2003. Harris’ campaigns for the U.S. Senate and presidential elections drew support from members of AKA and the other eight Black Greek Letter organizations known collectively as the Divine 9. Although the Divine 9 is prohibited from endorsing any candidate due to its 501(c)(7) status, members donned their respective organizations’ colors in 2020 to support voter mobilization efforts.
Now that Harris has won enough delegates to run as the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, those efforts will resume. On July 22, the Divine 9 Council of Presidents announced a coordinated campaign to “activate the thousands of branches and members of our respective organizations to ensure high voter turnout in the communities we serve” in the 2024 election. Two of Harris’ first stops on the presidential campaign trail were addresses at the national convention of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated on July 24 in Indianapolis and at the national convention of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Incorporated on July 31 in Houston.
Harris’ decision seemed odd to some, given that, as one Fox News correspondent noted, the election was just over 100 days away at the time. But the history of black sororities shows that these organizations have long been important sites of political mobilization. In her bid to hold the highest office in the land, Harris is seeking to harness the energy, organizational efficiency and political savvy of these organizations.
Between 1908 and 1922, four small groups of young black women at Howard University and Butler University decided to create autonomous spaces for themselves and the small but growing number of young black women graduating from college and entering the workforce. Just decades after slavery, and conscious of the impact of racial and gender discrimination on black lives everywhere, the founders, later leaders, and members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. worked to create spaces that emphasized high academic achievement, sisterhood and commitment to black communities, and the shared struggle for black freedom. While each sorority launched independent projects and programs to create its own organizational legacy, the sororities also worked together.
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In 1960, for example, the four organizations joined forces to mobilize all of their members and communities around the common goal of empowering black voters.
In the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), and amid the growing student movement, the four black college sororities joined together to reorganize the American Council on Human Rights (ACHR), which they had originally founded in 1948 with three black fraternities. One of the goals of the ACHR was to lobby the federal government on behalf of black citizens. After the fraternities withdrew in the late 1950s, the sorority-led ACHR, which consisted, as one member put it, of “teachers, social workers, mothers, housewives,” directed a major aspect of its programs toward the 1960 election and the period afterward.
In September of that year, the ACHR launched a bipartisan campaign called “Go Vote.” Although the 15th (1870) and 19th (1920) Amendments to the Constitution gave Americans the right to vote, in 1960 not all black citizens, especially those in the South, were allowed access to the ballot box. Since the conclusion of Reconstruction nearly 80 years earlier, a range of racially discriminatory policies—including poll taxes, literacy tests, and racist violence—had been used to prevent black voters from exercising their rights.
Given these realities and a concerted effort spanning generations to combat these obstacles, the ACHR initiative in 1960 launched a multi-pronged strategy to register and empower 500,000 black voters across the country.
Through its network of 1,000 chapters of all four sororities, the ACHR hoped to reach African Americans who were “fugitives” or had moved from the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West, where black citizens could more freely exercise these rights in 1960. The ACHR encouraged its members to set up voter information centers in “churches, private homes, schools, colleges, (on) street corners, branches of other organizations, beauty parlors, hotels, and large apartment buildings.” There they could distribute information to voters who might not know about the registration process in their new state. ACHR leadership also advocated allowing those who would not be home on Election Day to vote by mail. They hoped that a strong push for mail-in voting could change the results in key areas where higher concentrations of black voters lived.
To support black mothers and caregivers, ACHR leaders encouraged the organization to offer babysitting and other support services. A national letter-writing campaign launched just before the 1960 campaign advocated for the creation of a federal civil rights law that could pave the way for black Southerners to gain the right to vote. Meanwhile, ACHR encouraged working, middle-class, and elite members to raise money to pay the poll tax for those who did not have the means to overcome the racially discriminatory financial hurdles to voting.
Read more: Stacey Abrams and other organizers in Georgia are part of a long – but often overlooked – tradition of black women fighting for voting rights
ACHR leaders also emphasized the importance of the black electorate to the two major political parties. In October 1960, ACHR invited all major party candidates to speak to an audience of black voters in Washington, DC. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy accepted the invitation and spoke to an audience of 500, including 200 black college students, some of whom were active in the student movement.
After Kennedy’s election, the ACHR continued its efforts to expand its political power through “Project Womanpower”—a commissioned study to identify black women who could be appointed to policy-making positions in the Kennedy administration. In April 1961, presidents of national sorority leaders met with the administration to present a list of black women who were willing and qualified to serve in federal policy-making positions, as well as a list of women students and graduates interested in the Peace Corps. As ACHR leaders asserted, if Kennedy’s administration truly wanted to conquer a “new frontier” in American history, then there was “outstanding potential among the nation’s 157,000 black college graduates.”
Although the ACHR ceased its work in 1963, the successes of the 1960 campaign illuminate the longstanding and concerted efforts of black student women to exert political influence and strengthen public outreach—a tradition that Harris knows and uses strategically. What emerges is a much longer history of black student women seeking to mobilize their membership and financial resources to influence U.S. politics. Students continue these efforts today by supporting local and state candidate races, federal nominations, Sorority Days at the Capitol, and local political action committees.
The opportunity to speak at these national gatherings of sororities, as Harris did in Indianapolis and Houston, provides access to a politically diverse network of multimillion members who can help register voters, raise funds, and lead conversations about the election and candidates at sorority meetings, in group chats, in church parking lots, at dinners, and other events. As discussions about voter mobilization continue, using Zoom calls to bring together over 40,000 potential voters, the organizations that make up the Divine 9 with a history of this work — and an existing infrastructure for engaging voters — need to be part of the conversation.
Brooke Alexis Thomas is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama and is currently working on a book project tentatively titled ““To capture a political vision: A history of black sorority political mobilization, 1935–1975.”
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