A ‘Wall Of Determined Black Women’ Rallied For Kamala One Year Ago

By Grace Panetta
Political reporter
The 19th

When July 21, 2024, arrived, Black women were ready.

President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down as the Democratic presidential nominee and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, making her the first Black and South Asian woman to lead the top of a major party presidential ticket. That afternoon, Black women led the party in starting to coalesce behind her. And that evening, more than 44,000 Black women gathered for a previously planned Zoom call that became a rallying cry and raised over $1.5 million for Harris’ nascent campaign in less than two hours.

Longtime top Democratic strategist Donna Brazile spent her day juggling TV hits on ABC News, where she’s a contributor, with working the phones to help lock down support for Harris. Minyon Moore, the chair of the Democratic National Convention, was at work on plans for the party’s big nominating event, just a month away, in Chicago. Glynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, and Jara Butler, chief impact officer at Supermajority, were both in Texas with their respective families. Jotaka Eaddy, a social impact consultant, investor and founder of the weekly Win With Black Women Zoom calls, was at her childhood home in South Carolina.

The 19th spoke to half a dozen leading Black women in Democratic politics about their recollections of July 21 and that historic Win With Black Women call.

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While Harris quickly locked down support, nothing about that day was inevitable. Harris’ path to the Democratic presidential nomination resulted from her two-decade trajectory from local office to the second-highest in the land. And over a historic 12 hours, Harris and the Black women supporting her applied decades of their organizing experience and new technology to the unprecedented moment.

Black women are the base and backbone of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. But in progressive spaces, Black women are “sometimes placed on a pedestal” to be seen and not heard from, said Butler of Supermajority, a grassroots organization focused on engaging a multiracial coalition of young progressive women. On July 21, 2024, Butler said, Black women “threw the gauntlet down.”

“And to me, that was a loud roar – you see us and you’re going to hear us,” she said. “And it was something that they couldn’t ignore. I think that’s what was so palpable about it.”

Black women who spoke to The 19th recalled the day in timestamps, flashes and vignettes: the group chats that blew up, the frantic phone calls and texts. The feelings of inspiration, rapturous joy and solemnity about the gravity of the moment in equal parts. A show of force that evening on Zoom that “helped to catapult and shift history,” said Eaddy.

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“We never forget, nor will we ever mute the power that we had in that moment and the trajectory of the power that we had after that moment,” she said. “Because what we did is that we sparked something special.”

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Jotaka Eaddy started Win With Black Women in August 2020 to coordinate support for the Black women who were in contention to be Biden’s running mate. Weekly calls, held Sunday nights, grew to focus on uplifting and elevating Black women in all areas of American society. Past calls had featured celebrity guests including Oprah Winfrey and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. But the call invites were mainly distributed through a listserv of about 6,000 to 7,000 people and word of mouth. No previous call, Eaddy said, had seen more than 1,000 attendees, and she expected no more than that to join the July 21 call.

That day was a team effort of Black women around the country. Eaddy, Carr, Butler and Allison began huddling with their teams and strategizing with their networks. Moore and Brazile, two of the country’s leading Black women Democratic strategists, worked behind the scenes.

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Eaddy had a plan going into the 8:30 p.m. Win With Black Women call. Her Zoom account allowed for 1,000 people at a time to join, so she planned to allow 950 people into the Zoom and save 50 slots for elected officials and high-profile figures.

That afternoon, Beatty predicted on television that 20,000 to 30,000 Black women would join that evening’s call. Around 4:30 or 5 p.m., Eaddy was on her Zoom line, talking with colleagues, when she noticed hundreds of people already in the waiting room for the 8:30 p.m. meeting.

At around 7:30 to 7:45 p.m., Eaddy tried to log on to prepare for the 8:30 call, only to find herself locked out of her Zoom account because too many people were on the call. She scrambled to change the meeting to a webinar, with a 3,000-person capacity, and sent out a new Zoom link to the Win With Black Women listserv as her phone was blowing up. “I think I had 500 missed phone calls, and my parents were there, and I had my dad just hitting the X button,” she said.

That webinar also quickly reached capacity. But “Black women, as they always do, get creative,” Eaddy said. One woman on the call, Artis Hampshire-Cowan, called up a connection she had to a Zoom executive who worked on the back end to allow more participants – more than 44,000 – to join the call.

“It was good organizing and great timing to give the nation’s most committed pro-democracy forces and organizers a place to meet and commit to the road ahead,” Allison said. “It was pretty remarkable.”

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The oft-cited 44,000 number accounts for the women who made it into the Zoom webinar. But it doesn’t capture the sheer resolve of the tens of thousands of others who wanted to be part of the moment.

Some 30,000 more were listening on the livestream app Clubhouse, Eaddy said. Other participants were livestreaming the call on platforms like Twitch, Instagram Live, YouTube and Google Meet. There were phones held up to computers put on speaker and “Zooms of Zooms” – one woman later told Eaddy that she set up a free conference call line that 10,000 people dialed into to listen to the call. Eaddy estimates that well over 200,000 people either tuned in or listened in.

“It showed the power and the determination for Black women to be in unity, to be in action and to be in sisterhood, all focused on Vice President Kamala Harris and her historic bid for what we believe was her due right at the top of the ticket,” Eaddy said.

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That Win With Black Women call inspired a Black Men for Harris call the next evening, and Eaddy found herself advising other groups who wanted to follow suit with similar Zoom webinars. All those groups, she said, raised a collective $20 million for Harris’ campaign.

For many Black women, Harris’ loss to Trump in November was devastating. But as they look ahead, they reflect on lessons learned in 2024 – and want to carry the energy, power and enthusiasm they captured into 2026 and beyond.

“My hope for the midterms is that Black women never cease to hold dearly the power that we have,” Eaddy said. “And if they forget it for a moment, if it just fleets for a moment, that they tap back into July 21 and what that felt like, and what we sparked together as Black women.”