Page 52 of 107 Days
If there was one event that best captured the diversity of the coalition that had come together to support me, it was the Unite for America town hall hosted by Oprah Winfrey in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Before the town hall, I met with two families who would speak at the event.
Fifteen-year-old Natalie Griffith had been shot twice at Apalachee High School.
She was still wearing bandages on her arm and shoulder.
Amber Thurman, twenty-eight, died of septic shock after doctors delayed her care for twenty hours because of Georgia’s abortion ban.
Her mother and sister had come to tell the story.
I had been scheduled to have fifteen minutes with each family. That may be a lot of time in a presidential candidate’s schedule, but it is far from enough time for the conversations these families deserved.
I needed to hear their stories in their own words, to look at Amber’s funeral service program, absorbing the pain and trauma they had endured.
Was there any way I could help to get them access to the resources they still needed?
I didn’t want them to feel that they were just case studies to be wheeled onstage to make a political point.
They were showing tremendous courage in sharing their stories, selflessly trying to help others.
It was painful and draining to learn what they’d been through, and I was determined to take as much time as I could, even if it messed with the schedule.
Oprah was running this town hall and the mood in the auditorium was high-spirited. As I waited in the wings, listening to the queen of charisma excite the crowd, I took a moment to recenter myself.
There were just four hundred people in the hall, but more than two hundred thousand on the Zoom screens that rose in tiers, like stadium seating, on the walls on either side of us.
There were some famous faces on those screens, supporters such as Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Jennifer Lopez, and Chris Rock, who joked he’d been a longtime fan of mine: “I remember writing her a check when she was like the district attorney for something, maybe it was to get out of a parking ticket.” Now, he said, he wanted to bring his daughters “to the White House to meet this Black woman president.”
But the power of the event wasn’t so much the celebrities as the hundreds of thousands of other faces, not well-known, from every possible demographic that could vote.
In the front row was the driving force behind it: Jotaka Eaddy.
She had been sitting on her parents’ porch in South Carolina when she got a text saying that Joe Biden had dropped out and endorsed me.
Not three hours later, she’d rallied forty-four thousand Black women to support me on a call that “broke” Zoom, which couldn’t handle any more participants. The night raised $1.5 million.
She organized her group, Win with Black Women, in 2020 because of anger over how the Black women candidates in the running to be Biden’s VP were being portrayed in the media.
All the familiar tropes—the Jezebel who’d slept her way to the top, the Sapphire who emasculated and disparaged Black men—had been dusted off to smear us, and Jotaka, an activist and founder of a successful Silicon Valley consultancy, decided to mobilize Black women to fight back and rally behind Black women candidates.
After that first Zoom call, others contacted Jotaka to ask how to do the same thing.
From her mentoring came: Win with Black Men, White Dudes for Harris, White Women: Answer the Call, Comics for Kamala, Deadheads for Kamala, Cat Ladies for Kamala, Cooking for Kamala, Swifties for Kamala, Jewish Women for Kamala Harris, Caregivers for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and dozens more.
“I look around at these screens, I look at who’s in the room, and this is America…,” I said. “This movement is about reminding each other that we have so much more in common than what separates us… Seeing in the face of a stranger, a neighbor.”