CHICAGO — "We are a party of the future, we're not a party of the past," Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison proclaimed during his remarks to the sparse yet lively crowd of the Black Caucus meeting in Chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center Wednesday.
As he mused about a future for the United States led by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Harrison concluded his speech with a forward-looking message that sought to strike a moving contrast with the past-centric lens of Republican nominee Donald Trump's "make America great again" slogan. But the theme of Harrison's morning speech and the undercurrent of the convention's tone suggested the past wasn't so far removed from the future he and others spoke of.
Just moments earlier, Harrison had reached into his own history to hail the nation as one in which a "round-headed kid" from South Carolina, raised by grandparents with elementary school-level education and sharecropping, cleaning and road-paving jobs, could see the success of convening a convention with a Black chairwoman to nominate a Black woman to the presidency.
Before him, Democratic National Committee Black Caucus Vice Chair Charlie Staten introduced the event in opening remarks that called back to Black leaders and thinkers past, quoting Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and dropping subtle nods to the nation's first Black congresswoman, Democratic New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm. Those historical musings followed Harrison and Democratic National Convention chairwoman Minyon Moore opening the convention Monday afternoon by honoring civil rights activist and politician Jesse Jackson for his 1980s presidential bids and evoking the legacies of Chisholm, the first Black woman to seek the Democratic nomination, and Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black civil rights activist whose famous 1964 testimony would see its 60th anniversary on the day of Harris' Thursday nomination.
Singer-songwriter John Legend lauded Chisholm and civil rights leader John Lewis, the late U.S. representative for Georgia, amid discussion of historical discrimination and contemporary rightwing efforts to curtail marginalized people's rights and freedoms during Wednesday's Black Caucus meeting, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in main convention remarks Thursday made reference to Chisholm's "unbought and unbossed" campaign slogan in compliments to the vice president.
What these frequent reach-backs made clear was that the historic nature of Harris' nomination carried more meaning with it than just her being the first Black woman and Asian American to secure a major-party nomination. Speakers, delegates and attendees saw Harris' ascension as not only cementing her place in a legacy of Black leadership but carrying it with her into a much more hopeful future — and that soon seemed to be a refrain they sang throughout the week.
"That's what we're going to get in a President Harris," Meredith M. Turner, a Cuyahoga County, Ohio councilwoman and Ohio delegate, told Salon Wednesday. "She is going to bring all of the experiences of her ancestors to that table when she makes decisions."
Roslin Spigner, a New York delegate, agreed Wednesday, declaring the moment a continuation of those ancestors' efforts to create social change.
"This moment is just a continuation of what Harriet Tubman did. It's a continuation of Isabella Bomfree, which is Sojourner Truth," said Spigner, the founder of A Taste of Soul NY African American Heritage tours. "It's just a continuation of Fannie Lou Hamer. It's a continuation of Barbara Jordan, Marcia Fudge — all of these women who leaped down on faith to say, 'Black women, you need to hear our voices. America, you need to hear our voices. We have something to say, and we're going to say it.'"
In 1972, Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek a major-party nomination when she launched her bid for the top slot on the Democratic ticket. Met with both racist and sexist opposition, political rivals underestimated the daughter of Bajan and Guyanese immigrants' campaign, perceiving it as more of a galvanizing gesture to Black voters and women than the electoral playbook she intended it to be. The famously "unbought and unbossed" candidate boasted an anti-Vietnam war and -weapons development stance and positioned herself as a champion of the working class, ultimately launching her campaign after voters pulled together $10,000 in donations.
When that year's Democratic National Convention began in Miami Beach, Florida, she entered with the 28 delegates she won during the primary races. Though she was far from acquiring enough delegates to win the nomination, which instead went to South Dakota Gov. George McGovern, and later withdrew from the race, she ended the convention having garnered just over 150 delegates after disaffected pledges to other candidates defected and Vice President Hubert Humphrey released his sworn delegates to her.
Duni Hebron, a 20-year DNC attendee and real estate broker, told Salon that Chisholm's career and campaign created a "pathway for us to dare, to dare to become, to break down whatever barriers that's in the way" and shatter the glass ceiling.
Harris' nomination, then, accomplishes the goal that Chisholm set in motion 52 years ago, and has taken it farther. In the weeks after entering the race, Harris racked up enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. She's also shattered presidential fundraising records, signed on thousands of new campaign volunteers and energized voters in ways that hadn't been seen during the 2024 election cycle.
Fundraising web calls with tens of thousands of Americans in the early aughts of her fledgling campaign added to the momentum, which was solidified by her nomination via virtual role call earlier this month and official acceptance on the stage of the United Center Thursday night.
"Kamala Harris being the nominee means, not only for Black people, but for other daughters, for them to see that anything is possible," Hebron said. "She was the first woman vice president, and now we're going to make history with her. She represents all facets, all demographics. She's an immigrant child, and so am I. And so I am so proud to see her where she is, and know where we're going to take her to."
Attendees and speakers also called upon another slice of Black women's history as they traversed the halls of the United Center: that Harris was to officially be declared the Democratic nominee for president 60 years to the day of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer testifying before the DNC credentials committee in a landmark speech. Hamer, a former sharecropper and a leader of the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, objected to the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Taken with the Hamer speech anniversary, the manner in which Vietnam war tensions within the Democratic party erupted during the last Chicago-based Democratic convention in 1968 alongside a battle over seating racially integrated delegations for some states makes Harris' nomination especially poignant for DNC Black Caucus Vice Chair Charlie Staten.
"Here we are, 55 years later, nominating, choosing to nominate a Black female to head this ticket for president of the United States," he told Salon. "And she's ahead in the polls."
How Harris' campaign and presidential bid rests at the feet of those who came before her demonstrates "it's the sum of all parts," argued Spigner.
"You can't have one without the other," she said, adding: "The oratory skills that she [would] have to have Thursday night is important because that's Sojourner. The determination that she's going to have to have is Harriet. The drive to serve in leadership is Shirley."
The "guts to stand up to Donald Trump is all of us together," she continued. It's the Black girls who "weren't afraid to jump double dutch," the Black children who may have been "ridiculed because of the color of their skin" but still went to school, who, like the Little Rock Nine and Ruby Bridges, "had to go through desegregation."
Turner agreed, emphasizing that Harris' historic nomination is also a sign of how far the nation still has to go.
"I mean, we've been fighting this battle for a long time," she said. "Having a first, it shouldn't be that significant in 2024. It just lets us know how far our country still has to go around diversity, equity and inclusion, be it at city, state, county or our federal government."
Still, she said, she was excited to witness Harris accept the nomination at the DNC, acknowledging the progress it represents from previous losses like Chisholm's or former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "win that got away from us."
"Everything we didn't get with Shirley and Hillary, we're going to demand it with Kamala, and I'm going to be on the frontlines trying to make sure that happens," she said.
Spigner and Turner said the moment and understanding its gravity has made them feel the "joy" and "hope" that have come to characterize the energy around Harris and her presidential campaign.
Spigner said it makes her think both of all the young Black women with hopes to achieve "any and everything in life that they choose to" and the young women who count on her as a Democratic district leader to "to help them with their dreams of becoming public servants, helping to shape and mold them and to guide them."
Turner expressed a similar sentiment, saying she hopes Harris' ascension to Democratic nominee, "this culmination of fierce women in leadership," will help forge a society that empowers children of all backgrounds and ensures they know they can achieve and have the confidence and tools they need to do so.
"My hope for the future is that they never are afflicted by racism or sexism or bias and discrimination that those foremothers had to confront and conquer," she said.
Spigner added that she hopes Americans young and old will recognize this moment as "something big," a historical event "just as huge as the Women's Suffrage March" of 1913, the 1963 March on Washington and both of former President Barack Obama's inaugurations in 2008 and 2012.
"This is as big a moment in history as any other moment in American history, but also as it pertains to Black America and the contributions of Black America," she said.
Harrison and Staten each shared an ideal vision for the presidential inauguration, slated for Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, the observed date for Martin Luther King Jr. Day next year: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, cloaked in black on the steps of the Capitol on the cold but clear day, holding the Bible of abolitionist and formerly enslaved man Frederick Douglass. Stepping up to join her, Harrison imagined during the Wednesday meeting, would be a president-elect Harris, perhaps dressed in tan or white, who would place her hand on the Bible and be sworn in as the first Black female and South Asian president on the steps of a building erected by enslaved African Americans.
When recounting his version of their idealistic future to Salon, Staten affectionately dubbed the significance of the imagined moment as "our KKK," referencing the Ks in Jackson, Harris and King's names — a rebuttal he offered to opposing candidate Trump's being "pretty much in support of the [Ku Klux Klan]" by way of his characterization of 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi race rioters as "very fine people."
Though Harris, should she win the presidency, would be sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, the optimistic dream caucus members articulate is a reflection of their hope for a better future for the country they seem to so dearly love, the legacy they wish its Black leaders to leave and how they see Harris — win or lose — fitting into it.
And Harris — in her own right — seemed to lean into it in Chicago Thursday night.
"On behalf of our children, and our grandchildren, and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment," the vice president told the packed arena as she closed out her acceptance speech. "It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on earth — the privilege and pride of being an American."
"Together let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told," she added.
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