Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  More importantly, Harris was a viable VP candidate, a former attorney general in California and a fiery senator who handled herself with aplomb in her ill-fated run for president. Harris’s nomination and subsequent election were so prodigious San Francisco artist Bria Goeller created a 2020 version of Norman Rockwell’s famous 1964 painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, with law enforcement by her side, as she integrated schools in New Orleans. This updated adaptation included Harris strutting along a wall with a photoshopped image of Bridges’s shadow.

  Bridges said about the image: “It made me feel a sense of pride to be a part of that journey. But I also felt a responsibility to all of those who came before me. Because I’m also standing on the shoulders and in the shadows of people who made huge sacrifices for all of us.”

  Harris is standing on the shoulders of Bridges and Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, and Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman…and the countless other Black women who have served as pioneers.

  In the book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, the author Martha S. Jones wrote on the power of Black women this way:

  Terming Black women the “Vanguard” has a double meaning. Despite the burdens of racism, they blazed trails across the whole of two centuries. In public speaking, journalism, banking, and education, Black women led American women, showing the way forward. Some “first” Black women leapt out front because nothing less would get them where they aimed to go.

  Black women emerged from brutal encounters with enslavement, sexual violence, economic exploitation, and cultural denigration as visionaries prepared to remedy their own circumstances and, by doing so, cure the world.

  As the vanguard, Black women also pointed the nation toward its best ideals. They were the first to reject arbitrary distinctions, including racism and sexism, as rooted in outdated and disproved fictions. They were the nation’s original feminists and antiracists, and they built a movement on these core principles. The women of Vanguard continued to reach for political power that was redemptive, transformative, and a means toward realizing the equality and dignity of all.

  Jones said in a Time magazine article that the Black women’s movement from championing voting rights to being on the ballot is a natural progression that started in the 1800s—and protecting themselves from being prey was a major factor in their commitment.

  “I place the origins of that in the stories told by enslaved women who aren’t speaking expressly about politics but put their own experiences of sexual violence into the public sphere,” she said. “Then we come to the modern era and the stories of Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, women in the modern civil rights era whose politics are affected by and influenced by sexual violence. We can tie it all the way to the #MeToo movement in Tarana Burke, who continues to center those concerns for us.

  “The story of racism is often told from the perspective of men; Black women experience racism in ways that are distinct and defining for them, and sexual violence is a good example of that.”

  Harris rode the wave of Black women’s support. In one of her first moves as vice president–elect in late November 2020, Harris appointed Symone Sanders, a Black woman who was a former press secretary for the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, as her chief spokesperson.

  Parts of Harris’s acceptance speech when they clinched the election magnified the significance of Black women in the political process:

  Congressman John Lewis, before his passing, wrote: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

  And what he meant was that America’s democracy is not guaranteed.

  It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it, to guard it and never take it for granted…Because “We the People” have the power to build a better future.

  So, I’m thinking about…the generations of women—Black women…Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight.

  Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty, and justice for all, including the Black women, who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.

  All the women who worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century: a hundred years ago with the Nineteenth Amendment, fifty-five years ago with the Voting Rights Act, and now, in 2020, with a new generation of women in our country who cast their ballots and continued the fight for their fundamental right to vote and be heard.

  But while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.

  La Detra White, the entrepreneur in Atlanta, has applauded Harris for quite some time. She attended Howard University with the vice president and was part of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., chapter that initiated Harris into the organization.

  “The most respectful thing I could say is, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.’ The world makes a way for everybody,” White said. “You have to be ready to step into frame.

  “I feel like I grew up with Kamala. Her number’s in my cell phone. She’s phenomenal. She was ready. But was the world ready? There was nothing in the world that told me it was ready for her. Nothing.

  “I believe Kamala will provide another level of connection to the masses because she went to Howard,” White added. “This isn’t cheerleading. This isn’t bias. We’re taught to see the world as ours, not mine. We’re conditioned to accept someone daring us to not be able to do something. Everything she’s done, she’s earned—and none of it was easy.”

  Indeed, Harris has been a groundbreaking force her entire career. She never lost a campaign before running for president. She has been the first person like her to hold every office she has ever won: the first Black woman and person of color to serve as San Francisco district attorney; the first Black and woman to be attorney general of California; the first Black senator in California.

  With Harris’s and Howard’s prolific reputation for creating leaders, White’s teenage daughter, Hannah, enrolled at Howard in 2017.

  “Hannah went to Howard in a bubble—well-traveled, but underexposed,” White said. “It has been wonderful to see how our conversations have evolved over her time at Howard. She went from listening, to engaging, to leading the discussions on things that impact Black women.

  “She went from being a friend in the group to becoming president of her class of the School of Business. She has come into that because she’s been witnessing all of the wonderful but difficult progress that has transpired in our communities. And because she’s at Howard, she has a front seat on how her peer group has responded to and benefited from the progress and the struggle. She’s having the same experience the vice president had. That’s pretty powerful.”

  During a roundtable discussion in 2019, Harris said to Harry L. Williams, Thurgood Marshall College Fund CEO and president: “There are [three] things that shaped who I am today: my mother and my family, and Howard University.”

  It was in that atmosphere on the HBCU campus that Kamala Harris was raised—and that experience informs who she is as a politician. She wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold:

  “As was the case for most Howard students, my favorite place to hang out was an area we called the Yard, a grass-covered place, the size of a city block, right smack in the heart of campus,” the vice president wrote. “On any given day you can stand in the middle of the Yard, and see, on your right, young dancers practicing their steps or musicians playing instruments.

  “Look to your left and there were brief-case toting students strolling out of the business school, and medical students in their white coats, heading back to the lab.

  “That was the beauty of Howard. Every signal told students that we could be anything—that we were young, gifted, and Black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success. The campus was a place where you d
idn’t have to be confined to the box of another person’s choosing. At Howard, you could come as you were and leave as the person you aspired to be.”

  Howard University president Wayne A. I. Frederick called Harris’s selection in a statement: “An extraordinary moment in the history of America and of Howard University. It’s a milestone opportunity for our democracy to acknowledge the leadership Black women have always exhibited, but has too often been ignored. Let’s pause and take a collective breath that has been denied to so many.”

  Three years before she became the vice president, Harris implored the 2017 Howard graduating class to accept no boundaries in what they could do or become. “You can march for Black lives on the street, and you can ensure law enforcement accountability by serving as a prosecutor or on a police commission,” she said. “The reality is, on most matters, somebody is going to make the decision—so why not let it be you? Because, if we’re going to make progress anywhere, we need you everywhere.”

  The Black Woman Vote

  Black women changed the course of the country in the 2020 election, and stand to be formidable in the future, too.

  The election, many thought, would be a referendum against Trump and his unseemly antics. But America did not repudiate Trump; Black women did.

  Trump’s wild and unsophisticated posture and inflammatory racist remarks did not prevent as much as 20 percent of Black men from voting for him, an increase from 2016 and a stunning number considering the former president’s support of white supremacists.

  On the other hand, Biden received 94 percent of Black women’s votes, according to an Associated Press survey.

  “I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you,” Harris said. “You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.”

  “Once again, Black women were the gold standard for American voter participation,” Ben Jealous, former president and CEO of the NAACP, added. “The holy grail for us as a community must be getting Black men to vote at the same rate as Black women.”

  The Black vote presented Black people with perhaps its best chance to garner significant change in Washington, D.C. President Obama had a malicious Republican side of the aisle working against him every step of the way over his eight years, which did not prevent him from accomplishing much, but it did hinder him at most every turn.

  The Biden administration has the House and the Senate, thanks to the massive Black vote across the country. Harris’s position as the number two and Black women’s voices from the outside promise to apply pressure on Biden and others to make good on criminal justice and police reform, fairness issues around wages, education, and public health—concerns that shape the Black Lives Matter movement.

  In that spirit, Patrisse Cullors, a BLM co-founder, sent a letter to Biden and Harris the day the presidential race was called to congratulate them and call for the construction of a “fully resourced” agenda that addresses the challenges Black people face and make it a “top priority.”

  That kind of pressure, if Black women had anything to do with it—and they did—would be unrelenting. It was critical to get rid of Trump.

  As the Biden-Harris administration goes about its business, Black women, empowered by Harris and Abrams in particular, go about their work with a renewed passion and awareness of their influence.

  Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, for instance, emerged as a politician with a future that could extend beyond her influential city in Georgia. She was rumored to be a vice president candidate along with Florida representative Val Demings and Susan Rice, former National Security advisor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. All remain on the front lines, working and presenting examples for young Black girls and displaying the Black women efficiency that has turned heads.

  Bottoms, who turned down a Biden offer to be the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, exemplified the progressive nature of Black women leaders. She created the first LGBTQ Affairs Coordinator position within her administration just before Thanksgiving 2020, appointing Malik Brown to the historic position.

  “My hope is that we create institutional and equitable change for LGBTQ Atlantans,” Brown said to NBC News. “One day Mayor Bottoms and I won’t be at Atlanta City Hall anymore, but our hope is that the LGBTQ-supportive infrastructure that we’ve created will still be here.”

  Black women mayors were at the forefront of leading their cities during the concurrent crises of the pandemic and social justice demonstrations—a display of leadership and strength that has only gained in momentum.

  Bottoms became a national factor when she made an impassioned plea on television for the looting to end in Atlanta in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. And her remarks that a meddling Trump “should be quiet” elevated her to another plateau as a leader with gumption.

  Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was unabashed in her pain after Floyd’s death. “It’s impossible for me, as a Black woman who has been the target of blatant racism over the course of my life, not to take the killing of George Floyd personally,” she said. “Being Black in America should not be a death sentence.” She has worked hard to reform law enforcement in her embattled city.

  LaToya Cantrell was the first Black woman mayor of New Orleans, and she related to Floyd’s killing as “an African American woman who has felt the sting of oppression,” she said. “I am very much tired of this happening over and over and over again in the Black community, to Black people, in particular Black men.”

  Like Cantrell, London Breed was the first Black woman to serve as mayor of her city, San Francisco. But she made it clear where her heart lies. “Yes, I’m a mayor, but I’m a Black woman first,” she said. And the fact that she lost a relative to police violence gave her an emotional proximity to the horror that many do not have. Along with protesters, Breed said she was intent on not sitting “quietly by and letting it happen again.”

  Mayor Muriel Bowser, of Washington, D.C., was a strong voice against Trump and was the first in America to have “Black Lives Matter” painted in the city streets. The huge black-and-gold mural rests on what is now Black Lives Matter Plaza and leads menacingly up to the front of the White House. Bowser was intentional in choosing that location.

  She was “shocked and outraged” when federal law enforcement used force on peaceful protesters outside the White House to make way for Trump to walk across the street to pose for photos holding a Bible. And Bowser took a lead role in assuring a second insurrection of Trump supporters would not succeed in storming the Capitol a second time.

  Vi Lyles made history as Charlotte’s first Black woman mayor. She’s established herself as a “deliberate listener,” a leader whose position has been to hear the grievances and concerns of the protesters that had so much frustration about law enforcement’s violence against Black people.

  Mayor Sharon Weston Broome of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, like Lyles, met with protesters to let them know their concerns were heard. Black man Alton Sterling had been killed in 2016 in her city, and she used that gut-wrenching incident to build a coalition between local police officers and citizens to bridge the divide.

  And the stories went on and on. The refrain “strong Black woman” fits these leaders—and many more. It is far beyond a societal trope. They wear multiple hats, manage myriad responsibilities—and do it all with aplomb and grace. They are wives and mothers and family members. They lead a team of people working to bring America from a position of unjust to just, and sometimes at a cost.

  The “superwoman” syndrome is a real thing with real consequences.

  A 2019 study called “Racial Discrimination, The Superwoman Schema, and Allostatic Load: Exploring an Integrative Stress-Coping Model among African American Women” in the Annals of New York Academy of Sciences revealed that “racial discrimination has been linked to allostatic load (i.e., cumulative biological stress) among African American women.”


  Stress comes with the mission, which is not good for the body. The study added, though: “In the face of high levels of racial discrimination, some aspects of the superwoman persona, including feeling an obligation to present an image of strength and to suppress one’s emotions, seemed to be protective of health, diminishing the negative health effects of chronic racial discrimination.”

  The superwoman schema includes five elements: feeling an obligation to present an image of strength, feeling an obligation to suppress emotions, resistance to being vulnerable, a drive to succeed despite limited resources, and feeling an obligation to help others.

  As forces in the political landscape, the Black women who have forged ahead will continue to endure the added racism and pressure that comes with their positions.

  Dr. Amani M. Allen, associate professor of community health sciences and epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, the lead author of the study, said: “The problem is racial discrimination itself and the need for interventions intended to address racial discrimination as experienced in the workplace, by police, and in society at large.”

  La Detra White said she has felt workplace discrimination in corporate America, which sparked her to become an entrepreneur. Politics became important to her as an empowering tool. So she looks at Black women political leaders and she sees inspiration to forge ahead in business, using their strength as fuel.

  “When you see Keisha [Lance Bottoms] go up against Kemp [about whether to shut down Atlanta during the coronavirus], she’s not going up just against him,” White said. “That was Trump pulling those strings. And that’s added pressure. And Kamala, did you see the meme that called her ‘Joe’s hoe’ made by white Christian men? She will always be tested. And you can bet there will be death threats. Stacey [Abrams] caught a lot of grief. There are more behind-the-scenes stories than we’d ever want to know. But we never see their cracks. They show the likes of my daughter that you can take control of that center stage. It’s all incredible, yet difficult.