Kamala Harris (left); Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters File Photos
By Charles M. Blow
A few weeks ago during the presidential debate, Donald Trump chided Kamala Harris for not attending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of Congress in July because, Trump said, “She was at a sorority party of hers. She wanted to go to the sorority party.”
In fact, on the day of Netanyahu’s speech, Harris was in Indianapolis to address the Grand Boulé, or national convention, of Zeta Phi Beta, a historically Black sorority.
However: Harris met with Netanyahu in Washington the next day. Also: Contrary to how Trump put it, Zeta Phi Beta isn’t “her” sorority — she’s a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. And Trump’s “sorority party” riff was more than just a tossed-off line. He was insinuating that Harris had heedlessly abandoned a significant occasion for something frivolous.
Harris’ sisterhood and its peer organizations are anything but frivolous. Trump’s flip remark illustrated just how little he seems to understand the centers of power within the Black community and how valuable they may be in this election.
Informally known as the Divine Nine, there are five historically Black fraternities and four historically Black sororities that are officially organized as the National Pan-Hellenic Council. All but one were formed over a century ago, in the years following the Supreme Court’s heinous (and ultimately defunct) Plessy v. Ferguson decision that helped both to enshrine the “separate but equal” principle and to legitimize Jim Crow.
With that as a historical backdrop, Black fraternities and sororities served as both bulwarks and battalions of Black self-reliance. They have social justice and social service coded into their DNA.
These organizations count among their members some of the greatest intellectuals, elected leaders and champions for social justice that America has produced: W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Shirley Chisholm and Edward Brooke — to name just a few.
Pedigree isn’t determinative. Members include strivers as well as scions.
Harris and I both pledged in the 1980s, and we both did so at HBCUs — historically Black colleges and universities; she at Howard and I at Grambling State. Her sorority, my fraternity and the seven others in the Divine Nine have separate identities and separate traditions, but the organizations are related, like cousins. When Harris addresses the convention of a fellow Black sorority she is, in a way, speaking to the broader kinship.
One thing that my fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, impressed upon me from the very beginning was that Black Greek-letter organizations are supposed to stand apart; they are supposed to be socially conscious and achievement oriented.
To be sure, Black Greek-letter organizations are also part of campus social life, including parties. Certainly, they aren’t the only fraternities and sororities that engage in community service. But the Divine Nine place a particular emphasis on service and lifelong commitment not confined to college years.
Trump repeatedly refers to Harris as a “Marxist,” calling her, for example, “Comrade Kamala,” in part because it has essentially become Republican orthodoxy that any Democrat is a radical leftist. And it’s probably harder for him to resist this since she’s a woman of color from a deep blue part of the country. Like most Democrats, she does favor some progressive policies. But overall, she is an institutionalist politician, and her sorority background is core to that identity.
The last several years have underscored the currents in the Black political sphere that share influence with the more traditional Black fraternities and sororities. Indeed, there has been talk of Divine Nine organizations needing to rebrand because of a perception that they were losing some of their political prominence.
A decade ago, Rasheed Ali Cromwell, the president of the Harbor Institute, an educational consulting firm, made this observation: “You have one African American governor, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. You have, from New Jersey, an African American senator. You have the first African American president,” referencing respectively Deval Patrick, Cory Booker and Barack Obama, “none of which are from Black Greek fraternities.”
The implication: For organizations that pride themselves on being at the nexus of Black power, this was a diminution.
On the other hand, today, Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland are members of Alpha Phi Alpha. The House minority leader, Hakeem Jefferies, is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.
Broadly speaking, one way to think about the different paths for Black leaders is in terms of two arms of organizational strength in the Black community. One is what I’ll call the revolutionary arm, the thinkers and activists pushing for swift structural change and challenging existing power structures, including structures within the Black community. Historically, this has sometimes been expressed as Black radicalism or even Black nationalism. At other times, it takes the form of forward-looking political and policy initiatives.
The other arm is what I’ll call the traditionalist arm, those who came up through — and draw from — the three main pillars of institutional power in the Black community: the church, legacy civil rights organizations, and HBCUs and Black fraternities and sororities.
Naturally, these aren’t fixed categories — something that was revolutionary 50 years ago can be institutional today. Different individuals, and goals, can in different ways be represented by both. And each camp can, and has at times, leavened the goals of the other.
Black fraternities and sororities, which have initiated millions of members since they were founded, enjoy good-natured intramural rivalries, but since Harris became the Democratic nominee, they’ve come together to apply their resources and generations of built-in organizational experience.
Her sorority has created a political action committee. The presidents of all nine organizations announced a national voter turnout effort, calling on thousands of members and chapters.
Divine Nine culture is strongest in the South, where most Black Americans live and where most HBCUs are. Right now, Black fraternities and sororities have an opportunity to show their organizational strength in North Carolina and Georgia, two Southern states that will very likely be pivotal to the election’s outcome. The Harris campaign sees these schools and their influence as so crucial that it has started a swing-state HBCU homecoming tour, enlisting campaign surrogates and other leaders in these final weeks of the campaign.
But ultimately, organizational strength may not be the true measure of the Divine Nine’s influence. It is, in a way, more subtle. It is the power, for Harris in this case, of their imprimatur. For her truncated campaign, among some of the voters whom she needs to turn out between now and Election Day, it is another way that she passes the vibe test.
Harris is only the second woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee. The first was Hillary Clinton. Both are Democrats, and both have faced off against Trump. Clinton’s candidacy failed — and was felled — in myriad ways as the Obama coalition frayed.
Among the reasons was flagging enthusiasm, which Harris, with her joyful campaign, appears to be remedying.
Clinton was also dragged down by an undercurrent of misogyny in the broader electorate — sexism that came not just from men but from women, too. As Clinton told my New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof in 2017: “Certainly, misogyny played a role. And that just has to be admitted, and why and what the underlying reasons for that, is what I’m trying to figure out myself.”
For Harris, I believe some voters will temper their sexism because they consider her to be part of their extended family.
When Harris spoke before Zeta Phi Beta she wasn’t just heading off to a “sorority party”; she was strategically engaging with what could prove to be a crucial part of the electorate, particularly in a tight race; she was reminding Americans — not just Black voters — of her connection to something larger than herself.
My colleague Jessica Grose noted last week that there’s an “opportunity for Harris to reclaim faith for Democrats.” My colleague Katherine Miller has pointed to the way Harris has framed her agenda — including some of her progressive stances — around the American conception of freedom. In a similar vein, in this election, Harris’ traditionalist heritage has helped her to recenter her party as the party of core American values.
When we spoke last week, Lawrence Ross Jr., the author of “The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities,” told me that, in a sense, the election of Harris would be “the culmination of why all nine organizations were formed in the first place.”
We don’t know if Harris will win, but if she does, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the first woman elected president is a member of a Black sorority.