Yes, Donald – you should be afraid of Kamala Harris… here’s why

As soon as the announcement was made that Joe Biden would no longer be running for re-election to the White House, something magical happened: Black women across America stopped what they were doing and began organising.

On Sunday afternoon, a Zoom meeting for community leaders was hastily convened to discuss ways to ensure that vice-president Kamala Harris is selected as the Democrats’ nomination next month – and beats Donald Trump.

Originally, 1,000 Black women – city mayors and Senate hopefuls, community activists and civil rights leaders – were meant to join the call, to discuss fundraising and voter registration strategies. In what was intended as a determined show of grassroots support for a campaign to put a Black woman in the White House, that number quickly became 40,000.

They spent four hours voicing their unwavering support for Harris – sharing personal stories about working with her, surfacing her leadership qualities and underlining her unimpeachable qualifications for the role of US president. Before she rose to the vice-presidency under Biden, Harris had been the first African-American woman and south Asian American woman to serve as the attorney-general of California (though not without controversy – more on that later).

News that Biden had endorsed her as his successor sparked an immediate surge in Democrat fundraising, the kind of which had so far been lacking from the election. During the Zoom call, more than a million dollars was raised in donations to what is now the “Harris for president” campaign. Almost $50m rolled in over the hours that followed. (By comparison, in the 24 hours after Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, his presidential campaign raised $52.8m from