Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris moved them to the foreground

In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, the head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, spoke in stark detail about how she was brutally beaten in a police cell for seeking the right to vote.

“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” she said.

Hamer and other Black people in heart of the Deep South had lived under a cruel racial apartheid regime in the United States for years. Her goal was to speak at the convention and offer an alternative to the segregationist delegation of Dixiecrats from her state.

“And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she said. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

In the 60 years since Hamer’s speech, the Democratic Party has relied on Black women as the most consistent organizing force and a reliable voting bloc. But at the same time, they would often be relegated to the background, while white politicians and then later Black male politicians ascended to the highest ranks.

On Thursday night in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a very different speech at 2024’s Democratic National Convention. Her speech marks an important moment: Black women have finally reached a point where they are at the forefront of the party.

Harris has borrowed the slogan “For the People” from Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black woman to run for president. And she is only one of three Black women to have served as a United States Senator.

“It’s for a long time been stated that Black women were characterized as the