close
close

Semainede4jours

Real-time news, timeless knowledge

    • How black women in Michigan voted for Kamala Harris
    bigrus

    How black women in Michigan voted for Kamala Harris

    Harry Posted on

    Char Goolsby sat on a brown leather couch at the Carey House in Detroit’s historic Boston Edison District; it has become both an operational hub for polling this election season and a neighborhood campaign headquarters for Vice President Kamala Harris.

    He was careful to keep these duties separate; He led nonpartisan get-out-the-voters efforts for Black Voters Matter in neighborhoods in Detroit and Highland Park on alternate days as he and his team of volunteers ran phone banks and hosted campaign events. Carey House for Black Women for Harris.

    The nonpartisan volunteer group knocked on 2,800 doors in Highland Park in five days, picking up and assisting people they met who answered their doors, people sitting on their front porches or waiting at bus stops there and in Detroit. Register and give them a free ballot box to vote early.

    And he has hosted 18 campaign events for Harris at his home since July 29.

    “This study is very important,” he said. “Everyone’s vote is important”

    Goolsby hopes the work she and her team of volunteers are doing leading up to the election will make enough of a difference to swing the outcome of the extremely tight race in Michigan from former President Donald Trump to Harris; The first female president of the United States, but also the first Black woman.

    Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said it’s entirely possible. Support for Harris among women overall, and Black women in particular, has been rising since July, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

    “We’ve seen a real commitment to it from sororities, from Black women’s sororities,” Walsh told the Free Press on Tuesday, adding that Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of nine historically African-American fraternities and sororities He stated that it was. Hymn 9.

    “These women are extremely motivated. They played a really important role in getting Biden elected. They were a big part of (Hillary) Clinton’s campaign, but I think there’s an emotional connection now that’s clearly an incentive to get her up and get her back, to be there for her.” to be and identify with it.

    “We’re seeing some kind of movement among Black women all over the country. This isn’t a one-and-done thing.”

    Fear of Trump’s second presidency motivates some to vote

    The day before the election, Goolsby was tired. A heated blanket warmed his lap as he answered phone calls, responded to text messages and directed people in and out of the house.

    In the next room, Janifer Binion, 71, of Detroit, examines maps spread out on tables, greeting volunteers and assigning them their next research assignment.

    Since late July, Goolsby has been steadily moving forward, knowing that Black voters in Detroit have the power to influence the outcome of elections statewide and possibly the entire nation.

    “We allowed our home to be open to other people who wanted to host events,” he said. “Kamala was the clubhouse sister,” said Goolsby, who also has a full-time job as a union organizer for the Service Employees International Union and battles lupus, an autoimmune disease that saps her energy.

    “The reason I joined the campaign was because of my health issues, and if I didn’t have a job I would have to purchase health care through the ACA,” she said, referring to the Affordable Care Act. This makes protecting access to healthcare a very important issue for him.

    Another source of motivation for her and other Black women she knows is fear.

    “This is the first election I’ve ever been really scared of, and I don’t get scared easily,” Goolsby said.

    He worries that former President Donald Trump will implement certain principles if he wins the White House again. Project 2025’s conservative policy agendastrengthening police departments in ways that could ultimately lead to more deadly consequences for people of color. george floyd Died at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 michael brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and Patrick Lyoya in Grand Rapids in 2022.

    “I fear for black men because Project 2025 will give police departments more immunity, which will make them look like modern-day slave catchers,” Goolsby said.

    The erosion of reproductive rights since Trump’s last presidency worries her, too: “I’m scared my daughter might have to register her pregnancy with the government. That’s just crazy.”

    She recalls the stories her great-grandmother told her about what it was like to live under Jim Crow laws in the segregated South, and says: “I worry that I’ll have fewer rights than my great-grandmother had.”

    Voting for Harris ‘means something for black women’

    Despite her fears, Goolsby said when she thinks about all the people she and other volunteers have mobilized to vote this year, it gives her hope that a better America is still out of reach.

    “My daughter and I went to the Women’s March on Washington in 2017, and I was so encouraged to see all these women, different types of women from all over the country,” she said. “I find myself encouraged when I see working people coming together, when I see the community coming together, when I see women, when I see white men saying they are for Kamala. That encourages me. We have allies that we didn’t even know we had.”

    Morgan Foreman is also encouraged.

    He is running for a state House seat for the first time, hoping to win his bid to represent the 33rd District in southern Washtenaw County. Foreman, 35, who lives in Ann Arbor, also campaigned for Harris this election season.

    “We have the potential to elect our first female president in America who is also a woman of color, and that means something to me,” Foreman said. “The other day when I went to vote, the guy in line was making me a little uncomfortable. He said: ‘Well, if you were so busy, why didn’t you vote absentee?’

    “And I said, voting in person, filling out that ballot in person, and putting it on the table means something to me. It meant something to me, and I think it means something to a lot of Black women, too.” .

    “I work with other Black women organizers around the state, and when the top of the roster changed, the energy changed, and we finally felt like we had hope.”

    He said they were driven in a way they never had before to support Harris, who is both Black and South Asian, and to work hard to elect a candidate to the highest office in the United States who looks like them and understands their situation. “Struggles,” Foreman said.

    “Every door they knock on, every phone call they make, sorority meetings, churches and places they attend, places they talk to people,” she said.

    “I think they have the power to lead people to Kamala. … I think a lot of Black women in our circles have also been able to persuade people who are saying, ‘I’m staying at home’ or ‘I’m not doing it.’ To ‘Do politics’ is to change them to vote in this election and hopefully in future elections.” “We did it.”

    Echoes of 2016 increase activism

    Donyale Stephen-Atar, 58, of Warren, is a Detroit native. He first encountered politics as a student at Eastern Michigan University in the 1980s. It was part of a movement demanding that universities disinvest in South Africa.

    This campaign season, she has been volunteering phone banking and texting to support Harris’s presidential campaign, and has also been individually assisting with the NAACP’s nonpartisan efforts to help with voting and voter education.

    It was so inspiring to see Black women rally behind Harris, she said, referencing national Zoom calls from the weekly Win with Black Women.

    “Every week, every time I attend these calls, I get emotional, a sense of happiness,” he said. “It’s too much. I can’t even express it.”

    She is the social activism chair of the state chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and said the work is nonpartisan, but she has yet to meet a Black woman who supports Trump for president.

    “I haven’t met a single Black woman who said she didn’t vote for vice president,” Stephen-Atar said. “The scary thing about (Trump’s election) in 2016 was that we had a candidate who told you who he was. He told you he didn’t respect women. He told you he didn’t respect anyone who was different from him. He lied… And now here we are again.

    “As Maya Angelou aptly said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them.’

    “So for most of us, people who have never been involved in politics before and have never voted before because they don’t trust the system or they think the system doesn’t really work for them, they said, ‘I am. I’m getting up and I’m going to do what I can. If I can give money, if I can’t give money, If I can do both, I will go to work.

    “I will take people to the polls. I will call their relatives. I will do whatever is necessary to prevent 2016 from happening again. … We do not want to experience this again.”

    Contact Kristen Shamus: [email protected]. Subscribe to Free Press.

    Harry
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like