Kamala Harris and the political power of Black sororities

On 10 July, less than two weeks before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Kamala Harris attended a boulé: the annual or biannual gathering of all of the members of a sorority. But this wasn’t just any sorority, it was Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historic Black sorority Harris joined in college, and one of the Divine Nine – also known as the Pan-Hellenic Council – the most powerful Black sororities in America.

“To my line sisters, the 38 Jewels of Iridescent Splendor: Oh, you are such an incredible part of my journey,” she said.

AKA was founded in 1908 at Harris’s alma mater, Howard University, as a support network for Black women, who at the time faced increasing racial discrimination. Harris’s aunt was a soror in 1950. Among the sorority’s alumna were Coretta Scott King, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. For her Vogue cover in 2021, Harris was photographed in front of a background of draped fabric in AKA’s colours, salmon pink and apple green, and wearing its signature accessory – a pearl necklace.

In the two weeks since Biden stood down, and then became the presumptive nominee, Harris has spoken at two more Black sorority events. Last week, at the Sigma Gamma Rho’s 60th International Biennial Boulé, that she addressed Trump’s comments earlier that day questioning her race.

“When I look out at everyone here, I see family,” she said.

The political power of Black Greek letter organisations is not lost on Harris. She is in many ways proof of their influence: when Biden endorsed Harris as his choice for vice-president in 2020, AKA members raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through individual donations of $19.08, an amount that refers to AKA’s founding year. They helped get out the vote among Black voters – famously organising the “Stroll to the Polls” campaign, in which sorority members filmed themselves dancing and walking to polling stations – a demographic that was crucial to getting Biden elected.

Earlier this month, when Biden named Harris as his pick for nominee, the pan-Hellenic council released a statement saying it had “agreed to meet this critical moment in history with an unprecedented voter registration, education and mobilization coordinated campaign”. Together, the nine have four million members and a combined revenue of $150m, according to the New York Times.

What sets historically Black Greek Letter organisations apart from others, says Lawrence Ross, the author of a book on the Divine Nine, and a member of Berkley University’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, is that it isn’t an experience limited to college.

“We join alumni chapters. We continue to do the work of the fraternity or sorority. And it’s one of those things that becomes part of your identity”.

“Black women have a networking ability that is pretty unmatched … What do we do most is voter education, voter registration”.

A not-so-secret weapon

AKA members have been vocal about their pride and excitement that one of their members could become the most powerful person on earth. (Officially, the way that AKA members express this emotion is through the trademarked call “skee-wee”). Because they are registered charity organisations, fraternities and sororities aren’t allowed to officially endorse specific political candidates, but they can – and do – mobilise among their members to get out the vote.

Trump and the GOP “flatten Black people into two dimensions,” Ross said. “They don’t know really much about Black culture … It’s too late for them to understand what’s about to happen to them.”

Black Greek letter organizations’ voter engagement programs “reach millions”, according to the New York Times. 93% of Black women who voted in 2020 voted Democrat, according an Associated Press poll.

Black sororities have often been referred to as Harris’s “secret weapon”. But, Ross says, “It’s not a secret weapon to Black folks, right?”

They are a key part of understanding who Harris is. Comparing Harris to Obama is often a mistake, the critic Vinson Cunningham, who worked on Obama’s campaign, said recently on a New Yorker podcast. But one thing they do have in common “is a Black father who is not from America”.

For Obama, forming a Black identity that was distinctly American involved moving to Chicago, joining Trinity Church and sitting under the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright, Cunningham said.

“You can think of the parallel motion in Kamala Harris’s life as: going to a [Historically Black College or University], joining perhaps the most famous historically Black sorority, the AKAs.” By making these choices, Obama and Harris were both, “tying themselves to a more distinctly American form of Blackness than the one that is signified by their fathers,” he said.

Ross agrees. He compares it to the American chocolate boxes made by See’s Candy. “The best thing is the nuts and chews,” says Lawrence – and those are the ones Harris chose: as she deepened her Black identity, she chose the best candies in the box of American blackness to do so. “She went to Howard, which is the historically Black university. And she became an AKA where AKAs were founded.”

“Howard is like a four-year immersion in everything. It’s like, you decide to go to the Disneyland of blackness. You know, so you got Soul Food Land, and so on,” he jokes.

It also means that Harris understands the importance of historically Black Greek letter organisations within the Black community, he says.

Asked what the role they have played in US history, Ross is unequivocal: “You would not have the civil rights movement without the Divine Nine members,” he says, and rattles off some of the movement’s most important figures: “Dorothy Height, a member of Delta Sigma Theta, Martin Luther King, Alpha Phi Alpha, Jesse Jackson, Omega Psi Phi.” Rosa Parks was an AKA member. Ralph Abernathy and Huey Newton were Black fraternity members, too.

So how do Harris’s sorors remember her? Last week, Jill Louis, one of Harris’s AKA line sisters – women who were initiated in the same ceremony – told NPR’s I knew Her Then that Harris carried a briefcase. “She would not be alone, and it would not be deemed to be odd because we were about our business, the business of achieving that education and being able to move forward.” But she also ate lunch at a spot on campus called the Punchout: a sign that someone was cool.

Back then, Harris was “much like what you see today,” Lorri L Sadler, another of her line sisters, told NBC Washington in 2021. “She was very cool, she was very calm, she was very collected, she was very mature.”

“We’re non-partisan, but we are excited about the fact that she is the head of the ticket. It’s historic, and we’re gonna make sure that it remains historic. And it’s a very important election. It’s only democracy on the line,” says Ross.