Imani Smith, a rising senior at Howard University, was out grabbing food with friends when her group chats with her sorority sisters “started blowing up”. Ms Smith, on a social media break at the time, rushed to download Instagram to see article after article about Kamala Harris, the vice-president, running for president. She called her parents, excited.
“Representation is so important,” she said. “Just as a fellow Bison, just as young black women, being able to see someone who looks like us rise to this level…seeing her take this on, it’s really inspiring. When we look at her, we see ourselves, we see our mothers, our grandmothers.”
Ms Smith sees herself in Ms Harris not just as a student at Howard, the historically black university that Ms Harris attended. Ms Smith is also the president of the Alpha chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), a black sorority more than a century old with chapters across the country. Ms Harris joined AKA as a student in 1986 and has been an active presence in the group ever since.
Ms Smith isn’t the only AKA member celebrating – and organising. The sudden ascent of Ms Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket has been met with enthusiasm from many black women, not least of all her “sorors”, as AKA members call one another.
The sorority, founded at Howard, is part of the Divine Nine, a group of nine historically black sororities and fraternities with vast networks across the country. Their up to 2 million members could prove a powerful force to galvanise black and young voters – whose support for President Biden’s re-election had appeared to slip before he dropped out – to go the polls in November.
Black Greek life organisations are non-partisan and non-profit, so they can’t and don’t endorse candidates. But individual students and alumni involved are throwing their support behind the Harris campaign. Many AKA members convened on a Zoom call of roughly 44,000 people for the group Win With Black Women, which met the day Mr Biden dropped out of the race. The group raised $1.5 million for the Harris campaign in one sitting, The New York Times reported. The Zoom inspired a spate of similar calls since that have raised millions of dollars for Ms Harris. Social media has been buzzing with posts from sorority members calling on each other to organise and canvass and advertising get-out-the-vote clothing in the sorority’s signature colours, pink and green.
“Seeing her rise to the possibility of holding the highest position in the land, you’re almost unable to even put it into words,” said Deidra Davis, graduate adviser to the Alpha chapter and a member of Xi Omega, Washington DC’s Alpha Kappa Alpha chapter. “We have worked so hard for so many years for equal rights, for women’s rights, for civil rights. And to see this come to fruition, we are just bursting with pride and hope and just overall elation.”
Donna Miller, a county board commissioner for Cook County, Illinois, who’s an AKA member, was at a party with friends from the sorority when she heard the news that Mr Biden had endorsed Ms Harris. Ms Miller also attended the Win With Black Women call.
“We just all immediately said, ‘OK, now we have to get busy,’” she said. “We have to get to these swing states and volunteer and knock on doors and talk to voters.”
Ms Harris is a regular at AKA events. She spoke in July, before Mr Biden left the race, at the sorority’s annual Boulé, a national gathering. She gave a shout-out to those who attended Howard with her and spoke of how the organisation had influenced her since her “earliest days”, given that her aunt joined AKA in 1950.
“Sorors, all of us here are clear: while we have come a mighty long way, we have more work to do,” she said. “For 116 years, the members of our sorority have been on the front lines of the fight to realise the promise of America. This year, let us continue that work.”
She was also greeted with enthusiastic applause when she addressed Zeta Phi Beta, another sorority in the Divine Nine, at its Boulé on 24 July after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“In this moment, our nation, as it always has, is counting on you to energise, to organise and to mobilise; to register folks to vote, to get them to the polls; and to continue to fight for the future our nation and her people deserve,” Ms Harris told the Zeta Phi Betas. “And we know when we organise, mountains move. When we mobilise, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”
During Ms Harris’ vice-presidency, leaders of the Divine Nine have visited the White House on multiple occasions, including a visit to the Oval Office in May. At that meeting, Ms Harris recounted thanking the organisations in a speech after her selection as Mr Biden’s vice-president and reporters asking what the Divine Nine was.
“And to myself I say, ‘You’re about to find out,’” she quipped.
‘Anticipation and expectation’
Danette Anthony Reed, international president and chief executive of Alpha Kappa Alpha, said the sorority plans to focus on registering voters and “supporting and advocating for justice”, but “without centering on any particular individual”. Before the big news about Ms Harris, it had already launched a campaign, called “Take 4 or more in 24”, which encourages each of its members to get at least four people to vote. The group is also asking members to canvass and make phone calls to register voters and walk them through their voting options. The sorority further plans to help would-be voters address any obstacles to voting, such as “transportation barriers and voter suppression tactics”.
Ms Reed said that as the first black sorority, the group sees itself as “at the forefront of breaking glass ceilings”. AKA members are meeting Harris’ campaign with “a mix of anticipation and expectation”.
Ms Reed also emphasised that the sorority, which has upward of 300,000 members, and the Divine Nine as a whole have long been a political force to be reckoned with, “despite often going unnoticed”. They regularly lobby federal and state lawmakers in support of policies and raise significant amounts for causes to benefit black communities. She pointed out, for example, that AKA once raised $1 million for HBCUs in a single day.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the Divine Nine, the National Pan-Hellenic Council of Presidents, were planning a major get-out-the-vote effort, which they announced the day after Mr Biden left the race.
“We, the Council of Presidents of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (Divine 9), have met and agreed to meet this critical moment in history with an unprecedented voter registration, education, and mobilization coordinated campaign,” a statement from the council read. “This campaign will activate the thousands of chapters and members in our respective organizations to ensure strong voter turnout in the communities we serve.”
Ms Davis said the Divine Nine were in lockstep, or “all singing from the same hymn book”, when it came to focusing on “making sure that people are getting out and exercising this right that so many of us were denied just a few decades ago”. She noted that the Alpha chapter plans to launch an informational campaign to ensure that out-of-state students at Howard understand the absentee ballot process.
Students are also mobilising. Ms Smith said her chapter hosts an annual event called Freshman Move In, where members of the sorority bring water and help Howard freshmen move their belongings into their dorms as they settle in on campus. This autumn, that event is going to include a voter registration drive for both the first-years and their parents.
Tyrone Couey, founding member and president of the National Historically Black Colleges & Universities Alumni Associations Foundation, expects Divine Nine voter registration efforts to particularly pay off with young voters, both at HBCUs and the many predominantly white institutions with active chapters. He emphasised that this kind of activism from the Divine Nine wasn’t new, but noted that the groups were enjoying a new spotlight, given Ms Harris’ proud affiliation with them.
Some aspects of that limelight have been fraught. For example, Fox news commentator Brian Kilmeade drew backlash from HBCU alumni and others for allegedly calling Zeta Phi Beta a “coloured” sorority when discussing the recent event Ms Harris attended. (Mr Kilmeade claims that he said “college sorority”.) Renewed attention to these groups has also prompted social media discussions about whether non-black fans of Ms Harris should avoid using AKA symbols, like donning pink and green garb, doing signature step routines and invoking the sorority’s classic “skee-wee” call.
Ms Davis sees this spotlight moment as a “great opportunity to educate” people about who these groups are, what they do and their history. “We’re not new on the scene,” she said.
Ms Miller has no doubt that the groups’ prominence and power will soon become clear. She believes the organisations’ get-out-the-vote initiatives and members’ personal efforts to support the Harris campaign are going to make a difference.
“There are so many individuals who are members of the Divine Nine in so many different capacities, whether they’re elected officials, whether they’re leaders in corporate America, whether they’re entrepreneurs. All of these different entities coming together…is what’s going to make a huge impact,” she said, “because they are organising like never before.”
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.
