On the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Kamala Harris announced in a TV appearance that she was running for president in 2020. Her next stop was her alma mater: Howard University.
Harris, the junior U.S. senator from California, showed her love for Howard — arguably the most prestigious of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs — by prioritizing it on the campaign trail. On the day Harris announced, she held a news conference on the DC campus, then surprised students by showing up at a Howard basketball game against Harvard.
“It happened to be halftime when she walked in, and the crowd just went crazy,” says Amos Jackson III, Howard’s student association president and a former Harris intern. “It was like homecoming.”
That appearance was just one of many homecomings for Harris as she set out to convince voters — especially Black voters — that she’s the Democrat who can beat President Donald Trump in 2020.
In public remarks and interviews, Harris frequently cites two key influences in shaping her career as a public servant: her mother and her alma mater. She graduated from Howard in 1986, with an undergraduate degree in political science and economics, before she went on to become a prosecutor, California’s attorney general, and the second African American woman to be elected as a U.S. senator.
But students and political experts agree it would be premature for Harris to take the Howard vote, or the Black vote nationwide, for granted.
Despite the undeniable excitement on campus surrounding her candidacy, some of the same questions Harris faces on the national stage are swirling through Howard’s circles. Alumni scrutinize her platform in chat groups and on social media. And current students are taking a hard look at her record as a prosecutor and her commitment to policies that uplift Black Americans — a central part of Howard’s mission since it opened in 1867 on a 3-acre site that grew into its current campus along Georgia Avenue NW.
Within hours of Harris’ announcement in January, Howard University President Wayne Frederick sent a campuswide email calling her candidacy an important moment in “her-story.” Invoking the university’s own motto, he said Harris’ fight for justice is “Truth and Service personified.”
On Feb. 27, with Black History Month about to conclude, Harris made a second appearance on the Howard campus, speaking at a program highlighting Black female leadership. Students were packed wall to wall, waiting to claim a seat in the room where one of the most famous Bisons would speak.
Leah Scott, a sophomore film major from Florida, says she was filled with pride to see Harris on campus. “Senator Harris truly represents all that is possible for a daughter of this illustrious university, and that inspires me,” she says.
Scott appreciates the senator making it a point early in her campaign to be seen on campus. “Because of this I’ve had the opportunity to engage with her, and she was refreshingly genuine,” she says.
Harris, 54, has roots tracing back to Jamaica on her father’s side and India on her mother’s. If she succeeds in 2020, she would be not only be the first female president, but the first Black woman elected president. This symbolism isn’t lost on the Howard community.
Howard junior Taylor Jones is a member of the same liberal arts student council that Harris served on as a freshman in 1983. Jones describes the senator’s campaign announcement as “audacious” and reminiscent of Black women such as Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to serve in the House of Representatives as well as the first woman or African American to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and Vel Phillips, a trailblazer who held several elected positions in her home state of Wisconsin.
According to Michael Fauntroy, an associate professor of political science at Howard, “many students are taken by the potential of a Black woman being elected.” So much so, he says, that classroom conversations have “energized a number of students to pay closer attention to the developing campaign.”
Even Howard students who aren’t studying political science say it’s hard to miss the buzz around Harris, although some of them are skeptical. For students such as Anexis Ruiz, a sophomore from New Jersey who’s studying management, the senator’s visits to campus have felt a little too convenient.
“I feel like Howard right now is being used as a tool for the election and to push Black politicians,” Ruiz says.
Kevin Glasper, who earned his doctorate in political science from Howard and now runs an unaffiliated DC museum dedicated to the HBCU experience, sees Harris’ flaunting of her Howard ties as a way to build up support for her campaign, something all candidates seek to do.
“You’ll find that most presidential candidates will try to identify with a particular group or a particular entity that they can align with to try to build their political base,” Glasper says. Except she isn’t just any presidential candidate — she’s one of only a few in history to hail from an HBCU and more importantly, Glasper notes, arguably the most viable.
But with the U.S. criminal justice system steeped in debate over issues of racial equality, the Howard community is also especially attuned to Harris’ record as California’s first Black female attorney general. Ruiz, for example, says he’s been racially profiled by police, an experience that makes him concerned about what actions the senator would take as president to improve the criminal justice system and to address police brutality.
“I want to at least give her a chance and see what she is presenting,” Ruiz says. “It’s just going to be hard for me to consciously vote for someone who’s on [the] side [of law enforcement].”
Supporting the senator because of her connection to Howard comes in conflict for some students who believe that Harris didn’t use her power as prosecutor to uplift the Black community. During her tenure, Harris’ office came under fire for issues such as having expressed concern that early release would reduce the prison workforce, not enforcing statewide use of police body cameras, and imposing truancy laws that penalized parents.
Jackson says it’s the work Harris has done since 2017 in the U.S. Senate, such as co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that reauthorizes funding to preserve and restore historic HBCU sites and buildings, that influences his support for her. Asked about Howard students who say they can’t look past her record as a prosecutor, Jackson says he doesn’t think Harris would expect an easy pass from the student body.
“Students hold her to a higher standard because she’s a Howard alum and want her to answer those tough questions,” he says.
It was 1982 when Harris first set foot on Howard University as a freshman, hailing from Montreal, Canada. This was midway through the Reagan presidency and Marion Barry, the legendary DC mayor, was two months away from winning re-election.
For Harris, the first day of freshman orientation was awe-inducing. “I remember standing in the back of the room, looking around Cramton [Auditorium], and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! We’re all in one place under one roof!’” she recalled in her February speech on campus, which was closed to press aside from a few personally invited.
Based on Howard archives, news reports and Harris’ public remarks and recent memoir — The Truths We Hold: An American Journey — a portrait emerges of an ambitious young woman who wasted no time in pursuing leadership roles.
Immediately, she set out for her first political office by running for freshman representative of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences student council. She won. She spent her weekends on the National Mall, protesting U.S. investment in apartheid-era South Africa. She interned for a Democratic senator, Alan Cranston of California. She was a member of the debate team and the California Student Association, and she chaired the Abram Harris Economics Society.
In the spring of 1986, Harris and 37 other women — who called themselves the “38 Jewels of Iridescent Splendor” — pledged themselves to Alpha Kappa Alpha, which was founded at Howard in 1908 and is the nation’s oldest Black sorority. Thirty-three years later, that connection is turning into vocal support — and cash, as The DC Line has learned — as Harris appeals to her sorority’s national network of more than 300,000 Black women, a key voting demographic.
Time and time again, Howard has proved to be a home for Harris. After being elected as California attorney general, she was invited to speak at Howard’s 2017 commencement ceremony — one year after President Barack Obama held that same honor. But for Harris the moment was even more personal.
“Howard taught me, as it has taught you,” Harris told the graduating class, “that you can do anything, and you can do everything.”
Current students on Howard’s campus may still be mulling over whether or not to support Harris, but the senator’s four years as a Howard student resulted in many strong, lifelong friendships. When Harris announced her intention to run for president, many of her classmates — along with her AKA “line sisters,” as pledge sisters are called in historically Black sororities — immediately knew the next step was to financially support her campaign.
The fundraising portion of a March evening event hosted by Harris’ line sisters at Ozio restaurant and lounge in Dupont Circle was closed to press, but one attendee showed The DC Line a four-minute video of Harris surrounded by a crowd of supporters — many dressed in pink, green, floral and lace dresses adorned with pins and pearls, all signifiers of AKA membership. As photographers snapped pictures and waiters dressed in all black passed around trays of hors d’oeuvres, Gayle Dunley, an AKA who pledged alongside Harris, took to the stage in a light pink cocktail dress.
“Knock, knock,” called Dunley to a crowd of men and women in their mid-to-upper-50s.
“Who’s there?” they responded.
“Kamala! Not Camala, not Camila,” Dunley shouted as Harris looked on and laughed. “Stand back and behold our splendid jewel, our beautiful Bison, our joyful warrior, our line sister through the years. Fearless and tough and mecca-made and the next” — here the crowd joined in — “president of the United States!”
As those last words echoed, Harris jumped on stage to wrap her line sister in a warm embrace. Then it was time to dance. Two hundred guests mingled to hits like Prince’s “Kiss” and Beyoncé’s “Deja Vu.” But only those who made a $1,000 donation gained entry to the VIP room for more-intimate time with Harris.
“There was a special energy, a special chemistry and a special connectivity,” Lorri Saddler Rice, a Howard student who pledged AKA alongside Harris in spring of 1986, recalls of that night. “So much so, that we’ve been asked to hold similar fundraisers across the country.”
Rice says more than $75,000 was raised at the DC fundraiser. Though the organizers didn’t meet their $100,000 goal, she sees the event’s success as illustrating the strength of AKA sisterhood nationwide.
On July 5, the “Kamala Harris for the People” campaign announced that she had raised nearly $12 million in the second quarter of fundraising, putting her total contributions at almost $24 million. For the second quarter, Harris trails behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who raised $24.9 million; former Vice President Joe Biden, $22 million; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, $19.2 million; and Sen. Bernie Sanders, $18 million.
A CNN poll conducted after the first Democratic primary debates in June shows the two-night event was pivotal for Harris. Her support among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters rose to 17 percent, just 5 points below current front-runner Biden.
“She demonstrated signs of poise, control and leadership throughout and put former VP Biden on the defense when she challenged his efforts of working with known segregationists in the past,” Glasper says. “Now the question becomes whether she can sustain and build on the momentum.”
Still early in the race, political experts and Howard students aren’t ready to predict where Harris will stand when the primaries start in early 2020. But Rice and the supporters who gathered for the March fundraiser have no doubt that Harris can secure the Democratic nomination.
“She said that night, ‘We’re taking this all the way,’” Rice recalls, “and that’s what we wanted to hear.”
As a fellow Bison, I am proud of Senator Harris and think that she is the most charasmatic candidate on the trail. Her past status as a prosecutor particularly impresses me because black communities are disproportionately burdened by criminal predators that need to be incarcerated. If they be black disproportionately, so be it.