The historically Black sororities and fraternities known as the Divine 9 have a long legacy of political activism, though it’s traditionally been nonpartisan. Now that Vice President Kamala Harris — a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest Black sorority — is at the top of the Democratic ticket, the organizations are mobilizing in a whole new way. And nowhere is that more evident or more consequential than in Georgia. Audie Cornish travels to Atlanta to sit down with two other AKA members: Democratic Congresswoman Nikema Williams and Maisha Land, creator of the viral Stroll to the Polls campaign.
But I think you’re missing what I’m saying when I’m talking about the communities that we serve. It’s not our membership. There’s a chapter that service right here in the West End where we have children who might not even know that college is within their reach, even though the Atlanta University Center is in walking distance from here. And so those are the communities that we serve every day to make sure that every child growing up here in the West End understands that whether they are looking for an apprenticeship or a college education, that there is a pathway to success in this country. So we serve communities. We don’t serve ourselves as a membership. And so those are the people that we are working with every day to make sure that we are going back and doing the voter registration and the civic engagement about and talking about the importance of this election cycle and why they should turn out to vote. So it’s not about our membership is doing that work. We’re not encouraging our members to go and vote because we are the we’re going to show up. We’re going to show up in force in numbers. But it takes us going back to the communities that we serve every day to encourage them to show up and to give them their reasons on why it matters that they show up in the ballot.
Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast’ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died. It’s this thing we carry? Like a cross. Like close cross. And sometimes the heaviness of it. Causes an anxiety that prevents people from wanting to participate. Stroll to the polls. Change that. I remember breaking down, crying in my car as I was at a voting the first day of early voting. And someone sent me a message with women from Florida walking through a part. And of course, you know, these are older members. And so they were just doing the chant, step clap. You know, if if you’re a Baptist, you know what I’m talking about. But, you know, the choir comes here is the I call the every praise class, Right. But there were hundreds of women walking to a party to go vote. But there are blue and gold and red and white and pink and gray shows that they had made themselves. And they hit the dance and they were trying to reproduce what we were doing. And people were reproducing it all over the place, and they were singing and chanting and going. And I really, for the first time, it hit me. We’re about to change the world sister.
‘A member of Sigma Gamma Rho, in a meeting that I was in, said something so profound that it has rested in my spirit. This young sister said. We are not apathetic about voting. We are ambivalent about it. Because I’ve watched you. We’ve watched you. We’ve watched you go and vote. We’ve watched you. And everything that you make happen for us in a 3 to 4 period of time, they make a rule and they reverse everything you do. And we don’t want to be a part of that. Why fight for something that’s not going to be there? How? How do we how do we make this so that what we do matters and it sticks? Because everything you all fight for, for us, we fight and we fight and we fight and we’re tired. They are emotionally tired from watching us fight and not just experiencing their own pain, but watching their mothers and grandmothers fight and lose and having that sense of mourning. Knowing that the women that that that fight for us can’t really change it in their opinion. So does the fight really matter? And I say to them, it matters because, baby, if you can’t move the line, hold the line. Hold the line. We need you. Hold the line. We need you. Because it’s just like car maintenance. You can drive your car, but if you don’t put oil in it, you don’t put gas in it. You don’t maintain it. Eventually, the car stop working. That is what voting is. It is a maintenance of the vehicle that you have to make differences in your community. Hold the line, maintain it. We need to. Young people, men. We need you. Women. We need you. And we can’t do this alone as a people, as the VI nine sororities, as a VI, nine fraternities. They’re not enough of us. But as you joined us in our fight, you have to understand that you have to stay in the fight was not just when it feels good for you to look good and say, look, I’m I’m aligned with the African-American community or the woman community. You have to stay in the trenches. And that’s that’s what I say. Stay in the trenches. We need you.…Read more by
