The Divine Leadership Of Black Women: This Is Why We Win

My 14-year journey, six-school journey through academia, began at Howard University, in Baldwin Hall, and surrounded by the Divine 9. I was just 15 years old and felt out of place—every place. Even when women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., approached me about their organizations, I pulled back. I didn’t say, but I was sure I wouldn’t really fit in once they got to know me. I rejected them before they could reject me, I suppose.

Howard was the only HBCU I attended over that decade-and-a-half, and of the few things I was absolutely certain of when I finally crossed those stages, was that I made the right decision not to join a Black Greek Letter Organization (BGLO). 

Had I been pushed to explain why, I couldn’t have offered a reason, only a stubborn position, one I held until my daughter began her far more illustrious academic voyage at Columbia University in 2018. She was initiated into Lambda Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., in the fall of 2019. 

Silent strategy

Our children come to teach us as much as we are responsible for teaching them. I love the sisters and brothers who comprise the D9, now that I have actually paid attention to how they love one another and Black people, including my daughter.

I spoke with more than a dozen members of BGLOs on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 1 and 2 (not including my daughter). I wanted to gauge how they were feeling on the last weekend before Election Day. The people I spoke to were GenXers, Millennials and GenZers who knew me and trusted me. 

I prepared to hear the kind of loud and proud repping that Black people have raised to an art. And they were proud, to be sure. But they weren’t loud. Not one was willing to go on record. 

One of my most beloveds, an AKA from the Sip—which is still intent on proving that every day is the day to be Mississippi Goddam—explained the very clear mandate they had to be nonpartisan. 

It wasn’t true, of course, for public figures whose work it was to be partisan, but for those who weren’t, cross-organizationally, she’d spoken with members who reinforced the need to go to extraordinary lengths to be both cautious and deliberate. It wasn’t a silencing. It was a strategy. 

Ending a long national nightmare

After the briefest exchange about the limitations imposed on tax-exempt organizations like Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., the heart of the matter couldn’t be avoided.

There was no way to discuss the elections without discussing not only the stunning threats of political violence, the occurrences of them, the burning of mail-in ballots–or the complicity of MAGA-supporting state officials who were as committed to undermining democracy as their leader. 

Nearly 100 laws over the last 10 years have passed laws restricting voting rights since the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the ahistorical, unhinged lies about Black professionals gave firms across the nation the freedom to return to white mediocrity without having to be humiliated by the Black excellence of their colleagues, who could now be kicked to the curb without fear of reprisal.

One young Black student whose background was complex–but whose academic work had ensured them scholarships at both their Ivy League undergraduate and their law school–applied for a diversity internship at a top five East Coast-based, white-shoe firm. The student was selected. It’s a competitive process. The student was prepared for that, but who could prepare for the hiring committee’s final decision?

They chose a white, blond, blue-eyed, straight man who came from wealth. But he was Mormon. That qualified him for the diversity position carved from Black bones. Only Black bones. Black men’s, Black women’s, Black LGBTQIA+ people. Non-Black people worked alongside us faithfully. But almost as a condition, Black people knew they’d signed up to work and possibly die in the fight to end Jim Crow and the other members of its nasty, inbred family up North.

They signed up at least 10 years before Mormons decided that at least some Black people could go to heaven.

The vulgar violence of the failed and floundering

I couldn’t deny the risk to livelihood and life itself. It has hallmarked Black people’s experience in this far-from-realized democratic project of America, now under threat before it’s even a real trial period.

In the most recent available data, published by Statisca earlier this year, Black people were the targets of hate crimes at more than three times the rate of the next closest demographic of people.

By Sunday evening, Nov. 3, at 8:30 ET, I was desperate for the wisdom, faith, and strength provided by the sisters who led and participated in #WinWithBlackWomen every Sunday since July 21. This would be our last Zoom call before Election Day.

In calling us together within hours of the vice president—a proud Howard University graduate and AKA member—announcing her intention to run, they called together as a nation: Black men for Kamala, Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala, White Dudes for Kamala–and the list seems gorgeously endless.

The core team who undertook that mighty work called themselves the Colored Girls. 

Who kept the fire lit

At least four of the five of them were among the most venerated members of the Divine 9, including Minyon Moore of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and Donna Brazile of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. 

With them and tens of thousands of Black women, including the presidents of all four national Black sororities, we were moved to our virtual feet when Kamala Harris’ seemingly inexhaustible hopefulness surprised us on the call, thanking everyone for their work.

In my own home, I was also moved to tears thinking about my mother, gone three-and-a-half years now.

I felt her presence and absence in equal measure on Sunday night as I do this Election Day, writing these words. And I most assuredly feel the determination and grace of a woman who was orphaned by four, alone and pregnant by 16, and who figured a way out of no way from the South Side of Chicago to Ohio to Harlem, New York, where she met my father, her husband of 66 peaceful years. 

At separate community colleges that were part of the City University of New York–and which came to truest fruition because of the Black Power Movement’s and Young Lord’s work in the late 1960s—my parents built out financial and other human support programs and infrastructures that remain today.

There’s no hyperbole in saying likely hundreds of thousands of young Black people and people of color, mostly the victims of legislated impoverishment, were and continue to be members of the medical and dental fields. They walked that path my parents helped lay. 

They were uppermost in my mind when I heard the calm, resolute words of Minyon Moore, followed by those of Donna Brazile. Through what appeared to be her own gathered tears, she reminded us that we are living in a moment our foreparents could only have imagined.

She thanked Fannie Lou Hamer for knocking on the door of a party that didn’t have a seat for her–and yet never giving up. And it was then that I knew the bright side of the triumphant mountain was ours. From Mississippi to Massachusetts, from New York to California, we’d just witnessed and been part of the most inspired, brilliant, disciplined, and Divine leadership guiding us across the hard, rapid waters. It was the same guide that ensured our lives across the big waters meant to be our graveyards. It was the guide of loving, determined, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, wisdom and labor of Black women, which has always secured us.

And it’s why I say with hours to go before the polls close, our victory has always been assured.

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