The Long History of Black Collegiate Sororities Mobilizing Voters
Vice President Kamala Harris’s almost 40-year membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (AKA) has been reported on since she first ran for elected office in 2003. Harris’s campaigns for U.S. Senator and President have found support from members of AKA and the other eight Black Greek Letter organizations known collectively as the Divine 9. While a 501(c)(7) status prohibits the Divine 9 from endorsing any candidate, in 2020 members donned their respective organizational colors to support get-out-the-vote efforts.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Now that Harris has secured enough delegates to become the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, these efforts are reemerging. On July 22, the Divine 9 Council of Presidents announced a coordinated campaign to “activate the thousands of chapters and members in our respective organizations to ensure strong voter turnout in the communities we serve” in the 2024 election. Two of Harris’s first stops on the presidential campaign trail included addresses to Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated’s national meeting on July 24 in Indianapolis and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Incorporated’s national meeting in Houston on July 31.
To some, this seemed like an odd choice by Harris, given, as one Fox News correspondent noted, that just a little over 100 days remained until the election at the time. However, the history of Black collegiate sororities reveals that these organizations have long been key sites of political mobilization. In her effort to hold the highest office in the land, Harris is working to tap into the energy, organizational efficiency, and political savvy of these organizations.
Between 1908 and 1922, four small groups of young Black women at Howard University and Butler University decided to create autonomous spaces for themselves and the small but growing number of young Black women matriculating through college and into the workforce behind them. Only a few decades removed from enslavement and aware of the impact of racial and gendered discrimination on the lives of Black people everywhere, founders, subsequent leaders, and members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., worked to create spaces that emphasized high scholastic achievement, sisterhood, and service towards Black communities and the collective struggle for Black freedom. While each sorority has launched independent projects and programs to forge distinct organizational legacies, the sororities also worked together.
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In 1960, for example, the four organizations came together to mobilize all of their members and communities around the common goal of empowering Black voters.
In the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), and amid the growing student movement, the four Black collegiate sororities teamed up to reorganize the American Council on Human Rights (ACHR) that they originally founded with three Black fraternities in 1948. The ACHR aimed, among other things, to lobby the federal government on behalf of Black citizens. After the fraternities’ departure in the late 1950s, the sorority-led ACHR, comprised, as one member put it, of “teachers, social works, mothers, housewives,” reoriented a significant aspect of its programming around the 1960 election and beyond.
The ACHR launched a non-partisan “Get Out the Vote” drive in September of that year. Although the Fifteenth (1870) and Nineteenth (1920) Amendments to the Constitution enfranchised Americans writ large, access to the ballot box still was not universally available to all Black citizens, especially those living in the south, in 1960. A range of racially discriminatory measures—including poll taxes, literacy tests, and racialized violence—had been deployed to hinder Black voters from exercising their rights since the conclusion of Reconstruction nearly 80 years before.
Amid these realities and a generations-long collective effort to fight against these obstacles, the ACHR’s 1960 drive launched a multi-pronged strategy to see 500,000 Black voters registered and empowered across the country.
Working through their network of 1,000 local chapters of all four sororities, the ACHR hoped to reach Black Americans who were “on the move” or those who had migrated out of the south into northern, midwestern, and western cities where Black citizens exercised these rights more freely in 1960. The ACHR encouraged members to create voting information centers in “churches, homes, schools, colleges, [on] street corners, branches of other organizations, beauty shops, hotels, and large apartment buildings.” There, they could distribute information to voters who might have been unaware of the process to register in their new state. ACHR leaders also advocated for those who would be away from home on election day to vote absentee. They hoped that a strong effort around absentee voting could shift outcomes in key areas where higher concentrations of Black voters resided.
In support of Black mothers and caretakers, ACHR leaders encouraged the organization to provide babysitting and other support services. A national letter-writing campaign, launched just before the 1960 drive, advocated for the creation of a federal civil rights bill that could help clear a path to voting for Black southerners. In the meantime, the ACHR encouraged professionally-employed, middle-class and elite members to raise money to pay the poll taxes for those who did not have the resources to surmount racially discriminatory financial barriers to voting.
ACHR leaders also worked to emphasize the importance of Black constituents to the two major political parties. In October 1960, the ACHR extended invitations to each of the candidates from major party tickets to address an audience of Black voters in Washington, D.C. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy accepted the invitation to address the crowd of 500, including 200 Black college students, some of whom were active in the student movement.
After Kennedy was elected, the ACHR continued its efforts to build political power through “Project Womanpower”— a commissioned study to identify Black women who could be appointed to policymaking positions in the Kennedy Administration. In April 1961, national sorority presidents met with the administration to present a list of Black women ready and qualified to serve in federal policymaking positions and a list of undergraduates and recent graduates interested in the Peace Corps. As ACHR leaders asserted, if Kennedy’s administration truly desired to embrace a “new frontier” in American history, then there was “excellent potential among the 157,000 Negro woman college graduates in the country.”
Though the ACHR shuttered its operations in 1963, the successes of the 1960 campaign illuminate the long-standing and collective efforts of Black sorority women to assert political influence and build community outreach—a tradition Harris is privy to and strategic with. What emerges is a much longer history of Black sorority women working to marshal their people and financial resources to influence U.S. policy and politics. This is an effort the sororities continue to this day, through the support of local and state candidate races, federal nominations, sorority days at the Capitol, and local political action committees.
The opportunity to speak to these sorority national meetings, as Harris did in Indianapolis and Houston, offers entry into a politically diverse network of several million members who can help register voters, fundraise, and hold conversations about the election and candidates at sorority meetings, in group chats, church parking lots, dinners, and other venues. As discussions about voter mobilization continue, and Zoom calls are deployed to bring 40,000+ potential voters together, the organizations that comprise the Divine 9, with a history of this work—and an existing infrastructure to engage voters—must be a part of the conversation.
Brooke Alexis Thomas is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama, and she is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “To Capture a Political Vision Fair:” A History of the Political Mobilization of Black Sorority Women, 1935-1975.
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