Kamala Harris stresses abortion rights and Black political power in sorority speech

On the fourth day, Kamala Harris spoke, again.

Following Joe Biden’s Sunday withdrawal from the presidential race and endorsement of Harris as the Democratic nominee, she delivered what has become the core of her stump speech to more than 6,000 members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Incorporated.

Harris’s 15-minute address at the Black sorority’s biannual meeting in Indianapolis outlined what she described as some of the key accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration: eliminating some student loan debt – a mention met with resounding cheers – capping the cost of insulin, expanding lower-cost and no-cost healthcare to new mothers in 46 states, cutting child poverty in half and removing medical debt from the calculus behind credit scores.

She spoke of unfinished work that she would take on as president, including making childcare and eldercare more affordable, securing universal paid maternity leave and signing into law a bill that would restore and protect the right to abortion, which was eliminated by the conservative-dominated supreme court in 2022.

Harris also described her likely opponent’s plank as a set of grim, retrogressive ideas, which are detailed in the nearly 1,000-page policy treatise known as Project 2025. Donald Trump has denied any connection to the document, but several of its chief architects served in his first administration. What’s more, elements of the policy were included in the 2024 Republican party platform, as well as in speeches from this month’s Republican national convention.

“I believe that we face the choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris said on Wednesday. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

The women in the room, Harris said, were people who believe everyone should have affordable healthcare, where child poverty need not exist and where “the economy works for working people”.

Harris detailed some of Project 2025’s aims, including eliminating the Department of Education, cutting Medicare and ending early childhood programs like Head Start. The document also calls for weakening the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a nationwide abortion ban, among other goals.

“Let’s be clear: this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future,” Harris said. “These extremists will take us back. But we aren’t going back.

“Ours is a fight for the future and a fight for freedom. Across our nation, we are witnessing a full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights. The freedom to vote. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to live without fear of bigotry and hate. The freedom to love who you love openly … the freedom to learn and acknowledge our true and whole history, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”

The statement, similar to remarks she made the previous day at her first presidential candidate speech in Milwaukee, elicited loud and sustained cheers. Harris also shared her memories of seeing Zetas – dressed in their characteristic white blazers and blue dresses – on Capitol Hill advocating for specific policies. Her speech seemed to say that much more would be needed from them now.

Harris’s campaign set a fundraising record in its first days, but she will not be immune to the range of challenges that beset any presidential candidate.

Harris will also face the challenge of skillfully combatting the racist and sexist statements employed by some of the opposition. Since Monday, elected Republicans have described Harris as “unintelligent” and “bottom of the barrel” and attempted to advance the idea that she is a “DEI candidate” and therefore underqualified. For some voters, these stereotypes can give false claims about Harris – a lawyer and the first woman of color elected to successive roles including district attorney of San Francisco, California attorney general, US senator and US vice-president – the imprimatur of truth.

Harris decided to keep the commitment she made months ago to address the Zetas in Indianapolis, and a teachers’ union in Houston, on Wednesday, despite a congressional address from Benjamin Netanyahu that same day. That decision had, on Tuesday, prompted Brian Kilmeade, host of a Fox News morning program, to describe Harris as good at reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter but unwilling to sit for an interview and answer questions. In his estimation, she’d elected to skip the Israeli prime minister’s speech and flit off to “address a sorority, a colored sorority, like she can’t get out of that”.

When she took the stage after Harris, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic representative from California, said: “Just yesterday, some crazy man … had the nerve to call us some colored sorority. Now, look, now, don’t wake the dragon!”

Kilmeade has denied that he used the word “colored” and said that he used the word “college” instead.

Either way, the statement would seem to reflect some level of disregard for the reason that Zeta Phi Beta (which boasts a membership of 130,000) and the eight other historically-Black sororities and fraternities, known as the Divine Nine, were formed in the early 20th century: to combat the racism and legal segregation that banned Black Americans from many universities, career networks and connections that can lead to an economically stable life.

What the alleged statement also misses is the political strategy inherent in Harris’s decision to address the Zetas and other Divine Nine sororities earlier this summer: Black women rank among the Democratic party’s most reliable voters. Most Black men also support Democrats, but in recent election cycles Republicans, including Trump in 2020, have made significant gains. However, no Democrat can win the White House without an overwhelming share of Black votes.

The Divine Nine, which also includes Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, have already committed to amplifying its long-running voter-registration and education efforts to an “unprecedented” degree. And on Wednesday, a representative from the NAACP told the audience that the group will also mobilize 14.5 million Black American voters in 26 states.

“There is so much at stake and again in this moment, our nation, as it always has, is counting on you to energize, to organize and to mobilize, to register folks to vote to get them to the polls and to continue to fight for the future our nation and her people deserve,” Harris said to the Zetas. “We know when we organize, mountains move. And when we vote, we make history.”