The PEOPLE for KAMALA HARRIS

How a women-led movement, born in the devastation of 2016, propelled a woman to the top of the ticket, galvanized her early campaign, and put eaocrats on the brink of making history

- Rebecca Traister

In August 2020, when Joe Biden was teasing the fact that he was choosing his running mate from a group of Black women, Jotaka Eaddy, formerly of the NAACP, was concerned with what she felt was the media and political Establishments' racist and sexist treatment of the potential candidates, who included Stacey Abrams, Karen Bass, Susan Rice, Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Kamala Harris.

Eaddy placed a call to Minyon Moore, a Democratic National Committee official who, along with Donna Brazile, Leah Daughtry, and Yolanda Caraway, is part of a group of veteran Democratic strategists who call themselves "the Colored Girls." Moore advised Eaddy to organize other Black women to defend and build support for these candidates.

Eaddy founded the Win With Black Women call, a weekly virtual gathering of Black women, held on Sunday nights, that typically draws anywhere between 150 and 1,000 participants; they have featured Oprah Winfrey, Dawn Staley, and practically every Black woman to run for office in the Democratic Party in the past four years. Yet the calls were founded, to some degree, on behalf of Harris's historic inclusion on the presidential ticket.

So on Sunday, July 21, of this year, when Biden surprised his campaign and the political press by announcing he was stepping aside and endorsing Harris as his successor, Eaddy realized that night's call might draw a lot of people. She was working to accommodate as many as 3,000, then found herself negotiating with Zoom executives to make room for the tens of thousands more clamoring to get in. Zoom ultimately made it possible for 44,000 participants to join, while 30,000 people who'd initially been denied entrance got on a Clubhouse link and another 10,000 got on someone's conference-call line.