How black women in Michigan voted for Kamala Harris

Char Goolsby sat on a brown leather sofa at the Carey House in Detroit’s historic Boston Edison District, the home he has turned into both a get-out-the-vote operations center this election season and a neighborhood campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris.

She’s been careful to keep those missions separate—doing her nonpartisan get-out-the-vote efforts for Black Voters Matter in Detroit and Highland Park neighborhoods on different days than she and her team of volunteers manning phone banks and hosting campaign events at the Carey House for Black Women for Harris.

Over a five-day span, the nonpartisan volunteer group knocked on 2,800 doors in Highland Park and rounded up people they encountered who answered their doors, along with people sitting on front porches or waiting at bus stops there and in Detroit, helping them. register and giving them free rides to the polls for early voting.

And since July 29, she has hosted 18 campaign events for Harris at her home.

“This work is so important,” she said. “Everyone’s vote counts.”

Goolsby hopes the work she and her volunteer crews did before the election will make enough of a difference to tilt the outcome of Michigan’s incredibly close race away from former President Donald Trump and toward Harris — potentially securing a victory not not only for the first woman president of the United States, but also for the first black woman.

That’s entirely possible, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Support for Harris among women in general, but especially among black women, has grown since July when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.

“I’ve seen a real commitment to her from the fraternities, the black women,” Walsh told the Free Press on Tuesday, noting that Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of nine African-American fraternities and sororities known as Divine 9.

“These women are very, very motivated. They were a very important part of electing Biden. They were a big part of (Hillary) Clinton’s campaign, but I think now there’s an emotional connection that’s clearly an incentive to pick her up and have her back and be there for her and identify with her.

“We’re seeing a kind of mobilization among black women across the country. It’s not a problem.”

Fear of a second Trump presidency motivates some to vote

The day before the election, Goolsby was tired. A heated blanket warmed her lap as she answered phone calls, answered texts and directed the flow of people in and out of the house.

In the next room, Janifer Binion, 71, of Detroit, rummaged through maps spread across tables, greeting volunteers and giving them their next canvassing tasks.

Since late July, Goolsby has been going non-stop, knowing that Detroit’s black voters have the power to sway the outcome of statewide and possibly national elections.

“We’ve allowed our house to be open to other people who want to host events,” she said. “They were the Kamala Club sisters,” 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 got involved in the campaign is because of my health issues, and if I didn’t have a job, I would have to buy health care through the ACA,” referring to the Affordable Care Act. This makes maintaining access to health care a critical issue for her.

Another motivator for her — and other black women she knows — is fear.

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

She is concerned that if former President Donald Trump wins the White House again, he will implement some of the principles Project 2025’s conservative policy agendaempowering police departments in a way that could ultimately lead to more deadly outcomes for people of color. George Floyd died in 2020 in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer, as well Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri and Patrick Lyoya in 2022 in Grand Rapids.

“I fear for black men because Project 2025 would give more immunity to police departments, which would turn them into what slave catchers would look like today,” Goolsby said.

The erosion of reproductive rights since Trump’s last presidency also worries her: “I’m afraid that my daughter might have to register her pregnancy with the government. That’s absolutely crazy.”

She remembers the stories her great-grandmother told her about what it was like to live under Jim Crow laws in the segregated South and said, “I’m worried that I’m going to have less rights than my great-grandmother had.”

Voting for Harris ‘means something to… black women’

Despite her fears, when Goolsby thinks about all the people she and other volunteers have mobilized to vote this year, she said it gives her hope that a better America is not yet at hand.

“My daughter and I went to the Women’s March on Washington in 2017 and I was so encouraged to see all these women, all different types of women from all over the country,” she said. “I find myself encouraged when I see the workforce coming together, when I see the community coming together, when I see women, when I see white guys saying they’re for Kamala. I am encouraged by this. We have allies we’ve made’ we don’t even know we had.”

Morgan Foreman is also encouraged.

She is running for a state House seat for the first time, hoping to win her bid to represent District 33 in southern Washtenaw County. At 35, Foreman, 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 black woman, and that means something to me,” Foreman said. “When I went to vote the other day, this guy in the queue kind of beat me up. He said, “Well, why didn’t you vote absentee if you’re so busy?”

“And I said, it means something to me to vote in person, to fill out that personal ballot and put it in the … tab. It meant something to me and I think it means something to a lot of black women. .

“I’m working with other black women organizers in the state, and when the top of the ticket changed, the energy changed, and I finally felt like we had hope.”

They were motivated in a way they never had been before to support Harris, she said, who is both black and South Asian, and to work hard to elect a candidate for the top job of of the United States to resemble and understand them. fights, Foreman said.

“Every door they knocked on, every phone call they made, every sorority meeting, church and place they attended, where they talked to people” counts, she said.

“I think they have the power to turn people to Kamala… I think a lot of black women in our circles have also been able to convince people who said, ‘Stay at home’ or ‘No, don’t do politics,’ I have managed to change them to vote in this election and, hopefully, in subsequent elections.”

Echoes of 2016 spur activism

Donyale Stephen-Atar, 58, of Warren is a native Detroiter who first got involved in politics as a student at Eastern Michigan University in the 1980s, when he was part of a movement that called for colleges to divest from South African investments.

This campaign season, she is volunteering with phone banking and texting to support Harris’ campaign for president, while also separately assisting the NAACP in its nonpartisan get-out-the-vote and voter-education efforts.

It was so inspiring to see black women rallying behind Harris, she said, referencing the weekly national Win With Black Women Zoom calls.

“Every week, every time I get these calls, I’m overwhelmed with emotion, with a sense of happiness,” she said. “It’s a lot. I can’t even express it.”

She is the social activism chair for the state chapter of her Delta Sigma Theta fraternity and said the post 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 they didn’t vote for vice president,” Stephen-Atar said. “What was scary about (Trump’s election in) 2016 was that we had a candidate who was telling you who he was. He told you he doesn’t respect women. He told you he doesn’t respect anyone different from him. he lied… And now here we are again.

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

“That’s why for a lot of us, people who have never been involved in politics before and never voted because they didn’t trust the system or they thought the system really wasn’t working for them, those people said, ‘ I wake up and I will do everything I can do if I can give money, if I can’t give money, I will.

“I’m going to get people to vote. I’m going to call relatives. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to make sure we don’t have a repeat of 2016. … We don’t want to go through that again.”

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