The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s College Sorority

The advice flying around the last night of the Democratic National Convention this past August, at Chicago’s United Center, was to not leave your seat after 9 P.M. All day, social media and the convention hall had been abuzz with rumors that the night would end with a performance by Beyoncé. Or maybe Taylor Swift. Or maybe, in a show of interracial solidarity the world had never seen before, they would perform together. Although the superstars never materialized, the crowd was still electric as it waited for the true headliner of the night: Vice-President Kamala Harris, who would be accepting the Democratic Presidential nomination. An hour before Harris appeared, the comedian D. L. Hughley took the stage and addressed what was perhaps the most enthusiastic demographic in the arena: members of Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. “Where those A.K.A.s at?” he said, and nodded as the room filled with cheers. “In three months, ain’t gon’ be no living with y’all.”

If Harris wins the election, she will not only be the first female President; she’ll also be the first member of A.K.A. to reach the Oval Office. Since its inception, in 1908, A.K.A., a historically Black sorority, has never endorsed a political party or a candidate—as a nonprofit organization, it isn’t allowed to. The sorority’s leadership had strongly discouraged the display of A.K.A. insignia at the D.N.C. There would be no pearl-encrusted ivy-leaf pins, no pavé brooches spelling out the organization’s founding year.

And yet floating among the Convention’s fifty thousand attendees, like lily pads across a pond, were hundreds of Black women dressed in the sorority’s colors: vibrant greens and various shades of pink—hot, rose, pastel. (The organization’s official hue is “salmon pink,” but it doesn’t specify the temperature of the fish.) I spotted someone in a pink-and-green patterned dress descending the grand staircase of the United Center, as if for a prom picture. Several women wearing fuchsia flats and dyed-green denim stood in line for chicken tenders. One woman toted a pink bag with green letters that spelled out “Thank You for Shopping Here.”

Thirty of the Jewels of Iridescent Splendor—as the A.K.A.s who were initiated with Harris at Howard University are called—had travelled to Chicago from places like California, Texas, and Tennessee, taking time off from their jobs as lawyers, nurses, accountants, and teachers. They wore white, in honor of the suffragettes, with nods to their group: a magenta blouse, a string of pearls. The corporate securities lawyer Jill Louis watched her line sister’s speech—“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination to be the President of the United States of America,” Harris beamed to the crowd from the Convention stage—and told me later that she recognized Harris’s discipline, fortitude, and resilience from their time in Alpha Kappa Alpha. “That strength doesn’t have to be iron,” Louis said. “It is an elegant strength.” She pointed to the symbols of the sorority: the hardy ivy plant that can survive in many climates, the beautiful pearl that is wrought through agitation. “Being able to move forward through adversity is built into the fabric of Alpha Kappa Alpha,” she told me.

That training has been remarkably effective. A.K.A. members are a Who’s Who of political, cultural, and business luminaries. Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, and Bernice King, a daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., both pledged A.K.A. Toni Morrison was an A.K.A., as is the poet Sonia Sanchez. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, before she became the first female President elected in Africa, joined A.K.A. It is the most represented sorority in Congress today. The first Black woman to go to space, the first W.N.B.A. player to score more than a thousand points, the first Black female mayor of a major American city, the first Black women to lead the Treasury and Energy Departments, the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam—and now the first Black woman to become a major party’s Presidential candidate—are all A.K.A.s. “The first Black woman to fill-in-the-blank is almost always a sorority woman,” Dana A. Williams, an A.K.A. and a dean at Howard, told me. “It’s incredibly hard to achieve the first without the sorority backing, because of the networking and bravado.”

At the D.N.C., I met Jolanda Jones, an A.K.A. who is a Texas state representative, a former “Survivor” contestant, and a onetime star of “Sisters in Law,” a reality show about Black female lawyers. She was holding court near a concession stand, hugging people and saving their numbers in her phone. When I asked her why she had joined A.K.A., she looked at me as if I had asked her whether to season meat before cooking it. “Because it’s the best,” she said. “I mean, is there even a question?” She’d already booked her flight and hotel for the Inauguration. (“I’m wearing pink and green. I’m having custom shit made. I ain’t gonna be dressed like nobody else.”) Jones told me that she was at the Convention to witness a Black woman on the path to achieving what white women before her never had. “Black women have been saving America forever,” she said. “There was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to be a part of history for a sorority sister.”

Alpha Kappa Alpha originated at Howard, the nation’s premier historically Black university, and was the first Black Greek-letter organization (B.G.L.O.) for women. (Alpha Phi Alpha, the first B.G.L.O. for men, was founded two years before, in 1906.) Today, A.K.A. has about three hundred and sixty thousand members, who belong to more than a thousand chapters across the world. This summer, the nonprofit organization formed a PAC for the first time to allow political donations and later issued a challenge for members to raise $1,908,000 for Harris. (When asked in late September if they’d met that goal, Danette Anthony Reed, the C.E.O. and international president of A.K.A., told me, “We haven’t given out any of those numbers at this particular time.”)

A.K.A. is part of the Divine Nine, an informal name for the council of the largest Black fraternities and sororities. These organizations, which are all full of movers and machers, have become a formidable bloc of support for the Harris-Walz campaign. As the former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a member of Delta Sigma Theta, said, “This is a very powerful coalition, and it’s a lane that the Vice-President uniquely owns.”

As I wandered around the Convention, I spotted Christina Henderson, an A.K.A. and a Washington, D.C., council member, near a step-and-repeat, where reporters and TikTok influencers were trying to get a sound bite from Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate. Henderson told me that on July 21st she had been at Target buying school supplies when news broke that Joe Biden had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Harris: “A girlfriend of mine FaceTimed me and she was, like, ‘Girl.’ And I said, ‘Girl?’ And that was all.” Henderson rushed home to attend a Zoom meeting organized by the group Win with Black Women, during which forty-four thousand people—among them politicians, church leaders, celebrities, and civilians—gathered to strategize about the campaign. Henderson had started attending the group’s weekly meetings just before the 2020 election, when the Biden-Harris ticket won ninety per cent of Black female voters.

“Our organization has already had voter-engagement, civic-engagement efforts, so there’s no need to build infrastructure or anything different,” Henderson said. Even before Biden left the race, the sorority had launched Take 4 or More, a campaign to encourage each member to get at least four additional people to vote. The Divine Nine have a history of voter mobilization; Henderson called them “the original phone tree.” Like many of the women I spoke to, she was both proud of and protective of Harris, steeling herself for the inevitable vitriol that would greet a Black female candidate. Kyandra Darling, another A.K.A. and a first-time delegate from Florida, told me that the entire campaign felt personal. “Her being a Black woman and understanding that of course she was expected to face some challenges that we didn’t see when Hillary ran,” she said. “She’s been the first in many of these spaces.”

In the following weeks, Donald Trump was dismissive of Harris’s sororal affiliations. He complained in September that Harris had missed Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional address for a “sorority party.” In fact, she had spoken at the biennial conference of Zeta Phi Beta, another historically Black sorority. More than six thousand people attended the conference, in Indianapolis, and Harris was reportedly interrupted by applause thirty-two times in less than twenty minutes.

Harris was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. After her parents separated, she and her sister, Maya, were raised by their mother, a biomedical researcher. “She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women,” Harris writes in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold.”

Yet this racial pride has rarely found its way into Harris’s campaign. In her Convention speech, Harris instead emphasized her upbringing as a middle-class American. It has been her opponent who has been much more likely to discuss her race. Right before the D.N.C., Trump, in an interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, insinuated that Harris had changed her racial identification for political gain, saying that she “happened to turn Black.” (In her first major television interview as a candidate, on CNN, Harris batted away a question about his comment: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”)

Afterward, many of her supporters held up her time at Howard and her long and active affiliation with Alpha Kappa Alpha as proof that she’d always identified as Black. Many people see in her A.K.A. membership not just a signal of Black identity but a familiar kind of Blackness: a down-home, American-grown world of spades, stepping, homecoming games, and cookouts. As the literary historian Deborah Elizabeth Whaley told me, Harris has a “commitment to Black cultural experience that the larger populace doesn’t get. They don’t know what it looks like.”

But her sorority sisters do. “I love President Obama, and I love Michelle, but neither of them were Greek,” Jolanda Jones said during our conversation. (Michelle Obama was invited to become an honorary A.K.A., in 2008, and she accepted, on a nonexclusive basis.) “Black folks about to do more for Kamala than we did for President Obama.”

Among other edicts issued by A.K.A. headquarters in recent weeks was one urging members to be cautious when speaking to the press. The day after Harris became the nominee, sorors received an e-mail that read, “This message serves as a gentle reminder to be vigilant, careful and mindful of how you are involved in the political process.” Many A.K.A.s at the D.N.C. declined to say anything political beyond emphasizing the importance of voting, or referred me to their press office. Similarly, A.K.A.’s customs and rituals are fiercely guarded by its members. When I called my auntie, who pledged A.K.A. in 1994, to tell her that I was working on a story about her sorority, she told me how proud she was of me. “But you know I can’t tell you anything!” she said.

Harris, too, has upheld the secrecy surrounding the organization. She declined to be interviewed for this story, and she mentions the sorority only once in her memoir: “I pledged a sorority, my beloved Alpha Kappa Alpha, founded by nine women at Howard over a century ago.” In a 2020 interview, she refused to do the sorority greeting, known as “skee wee,” for a Black female journalist who was not an A.K.A. “When you go through the process of becoming one, we can have that conversation,” Harris said. Skee wee is a high-pitched sound—imagine Mariah Carey after sucking down some helium—and a literal trademark of the sorority: registration No. 5116853 in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

A few weeks after the D.N.C., two professors at Howard, Jennifer Thomas and Sheryl Johnson, who both attended the university at the same time as Harris, gave me a tour of the campus, in Washington, D.C. (Johnson is a member of Delta Sigma Theta; Thomas pledged A.K.A. the year after Harris and thus felt compelled to refer to her famous soror as “Most Gracious Lady Kamala Harris,” as per sorority code.) Before we began, Johnson pulled up an e-mail on her phone and rattled off a disclaimer worthy of a commercial for blood-pressure medication: “We’re speaking in an individual capacity, not as Howard employees.” Johnson wasn’t “speaking for Delta Sigma Theta, and I’m not speaking for Alpha Kappa Alpha,” Thomas said. “And H.U. is nonpartisan, thus no stance on the election.” Then we set off for the science buildings.

Harris matriculated at Howard in 1982. As a high schooler, she already knew that she wanted to be a lawyer, like her hero Thurgood Marshall, a Howard Law alum. Since then, she has essentially said that every positive character trait of hers that was not shaped by her mother was formed at Howard. In the nineteen-eighties, D.C. was peak Chocolate City: Black people made up sixty to seventy per cent of the population. It was also a golden era for historically Black colleges and universities across the country. Children of the civil-rights movement were entering higher education with strong racial pride and expectations of solidarity. In 1987, Bill Cosby created the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World,” which followed a Huxtable daughter at a fictional historically Black college. It quickly became one of the top-rated shows on TV, and H.B.C.U. enrollment rates notably increased during its six-year run. In 1988, Spike Lee released “School Daze,” a film partly based on his experiences at Morehouse College, another H.B.C.U. But Howard has long been referred to as the Mecca, a place where Black achievement, community, and culture converge. The historian Natalie Hopkinson told me that attending Howard was tantamount to four years of living as a white man: “Everything is in your image. Your history, your perspective, your lens on the world is all centered.”