Pinkies Up for Kamala Harris

Sivona was walking home from the gym Sunday afternoon when her phone started buzzing with dozens of texts. The news had just broke that President Joe Biden was stepping down from the 2024 race and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris; the 30-year-old New Yorker, who works in corporate, is a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and says, “The group chats for anything AKA-related were going crazy. Before I could even ask to volunteer, I was already volun-told in 20 different chats.” The women on these threads started organizing themselves into specialized subgroups to divide and conquer everything from fundraising to volunteer opportunities to combating misinformation. “There were people saying, ‘I already have a policy firm,’ or ‘I already have a nonprofit that focuses on elections,’” Sivona continues. “It’s like, how can we help each other in the work we’re already doing.”

Now that Harris is likely to be the Democratic nominee, questions have begun to fly among the pundit class about how she’ll land with different groups of voters: Will she be able to win over rural voters? Independents? Suburban moms? But there’s little doubt that she can count on the support of the more than 360,000 women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Harris has been a part of the historically Black sorority since first pledging in the ’80s as an undergraduate at Howard University, where the organization was founded. She has touted her AKA bona fides at various points in her political career and sported its signature pink and green and string of pearls on the cover of Vogue.

Now, the pink and green are putting on for Harris. “Everybody’s rallying behind her that I know,” said Ronee, a fellow Howard University AKA who currently lives in Washington, D.C. “We’re gonna be out there to vote. The Divine Nine is definitely out there backing her.”

The “Divine Nine,” or the Pan-Hellenic Council, is the group of historically Black fraternities and sororities that came up on university campuses through the early 20th century and into the Civil Rights era. They remain an important pillar of social and civic life for many Black Americans, and the groups’ more than 2 million members represent a broad array of political views, cultures, and experiences. Officially, the national Alpha Kappa Alpha organization, like all of the Divine Nine organizations, is nonpartisan and doesn’t endorse candidates for political office (for that reason, this story refers to sorors by their first name only). “AKA’s primary focus is supporting and advocating for justice and addressing issues without centering on any particular individual,” the organization’s president said in a statement to NBC Chicago that went on to emphasize the special relationship AKAs have with Harris. “Seeing a WOMAN rise to such a prominent position fills us with pride and hope for a future where diversity and equality are at the forefront of decision-making.”

Regardless of the organization’s stance, members of the first Black sorority in the country are doing all they can to ensure that their soror becomes the country’s first Black female president. “We have chapters of AKAs forming groups to support her,” says Tina, a soror in Detroit. “We can’t outright say we’re supporting Kamala … but it’s an underlying thing that we are pushing for her.” Brittany, another soror in Washington, D.C., says her circles also sprung into action immediately. “I got the Win With Black Women Zoom information within a couple of hours. We were passing around a donation link; there was information about where folks could go to register. No time was wasted.”

Many AKAs could hardly contain their pride at seeing one of their own make a bid for the presidency, and several tell me they were moved to tears by Harris’s candidacy. “There is an excitement that just overcomes me,” says Kyra, who’s based in Atlanta and has been a soror for more than 40 years. “There’s a thread of hope that continues to rise because we’re in the middle of making history.” In a sense, making history is something AKA women expect of one another. The group’s values of excellence and professional achievement have become a calling card that has earned the sorority a healthy amount of ribbing from other Black Greek-letter organizations over the years. (“AKAs about to be insufferable for the next four years,” one poster wrote. “You love to see it.”)

Wendy Osefo, another notable AKA who is a professor, author, and Real Housewives of Potomac star, tells me with a laugh that she was “not surprised” at Harris’s ascension. “Our membership boasts notable members both here and abroad who have left their mark on history books,” she says. “Harris’s nomination is yet another example of the characteristics that Alpha Kappa Alpha women exude, and I am honored to call her my sorority sister.”

Lynn, a 59-year-old AKA from Detroit, noticed a distinct shift in the mood around the election. She went from feeling sadness and uncertainty at the news of Biden stepping down, but it quickly morphed into elation at his endorsement of Harris as his successor. “It was surreal,” she says. “I was in shock, I was happy, I was a little tearful.” Lynn likened the feeling to the hopeful surprise she felt at the election of Barack Obama in 2008. She was shocked to see what she considered so much progress undone with Donald Trump’s win in 2016, but now, she feels some of her hope restored in Harris having a real shot at the nation’s highest office. “This is a person that looks like me, that is around the same age as me, that pledged the same year.”

Not everyone felt such unadulterated joy, however. For Sivona, the moment was complicated by the knowledge that American women in public life face unrelenting sexism and that Black women in particular face unspeakable levels of misogynoir. “My initial thought was a little bit of fear, honestly,” she says. “It was almost a fear of protection, having to have a Black woman go through what they have to go through to be president.” But after some more reflection, Sivona connected the moment to her own work doing DEI efforts at a large corporation. Being fearful, she realized, doesn’t serve anybody. “There’s no reason to move from fear, and there’s better reason to move off of hope and promise, and that’s where I need to shift my energy,” she says. “Instead of fearing for her, it went to, ‘We got her back.’”

In practice, having Harris’s back is likely to involve a massive organizing effort to get voters registered and to the polls in November — work the Democratic Party is used to counting on Black women to do for it. Earlier this month, while she was still campaigning for Biden, Harris made this ask directly to her fellow sorors during her speech in Dallas at the biennial Alpha Kappa Alpha Boulé (in non-sorority parlance, that’s a convention). “In this moment, once again, our nation is counting on the leaders in this room to guide us forward,” said a pearl-clad Harris. “When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”

“Sorors,” she appealed to the audience, referencing one of the sorority’s most well-known chants, “this is a serious matter.”

Now that it’s likely to be Harris’s name at the top of the ticket, AKAs — along with the rest of the Black Greek-letter organizations — are newly energized to get out the vote. Within a day of Biden’s dropping out of the presidential race, the Divine Nine announced an “unprecedented” voter-outreach and -education plan involving thousands of chapters across the country. Harris spoke at the Boulé for another Black sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, on Wednesday in one of her first events after announcing her candidacy, where she was met with thunderous applause from the thousands of women in attendance before she could even begin speaking. And Osefo points out that while all AKAs are not a monolith, those who support Harris “plan to mobilize in droves and will do everything in our power to ensure that our soror will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January.”

Harris’s AKA affiliation is a deep source of pride for many of these women, and if she becomes the president, it’s likely to stoke the existing spirit of friendly competition among Black sororities. “I’m pretty sure she could have chosen any sorority to pledge,” Tina says of Harris. “It’s another mark of excellence.” But there’s also a recognition that the stakes of this election go deeper than just sisterly ties.

“We have one of my fellow sorors on the ballot really to protect democracy,” Kyra says. “I love the fact that she’s an Alpha Kappa Alpha, but we are protecting our democracy. And Black women are the ones to do it.”