'This moment belongs to all of us:' Black women exult as Kamala Harris walks into history

She pulled on a sweater representing the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority that she and Harris share, ate a special lunch of her mother's gumbo and joined her fellow "Mamas" for a Facebook watch party.

All around the country this week, Black women followed suit -- dressing up, toasting and exulting at home and online as the former US senator and California attorney general walked into history.

"I'm not going to allow the plans and the plots of these White supremacist terrorists to interfere with the joy that I have," the 39-year-old Murray said from her home in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington.

And in Georgia, a state that went blue in the presidential contest for the first time since 1992, Black women supported Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff by even wider margins -- elevating them to the Senate in this month's runoffs and giving their party control of the chamber.

Black women "show up consistently for this country," said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, which mobilized voters in Georgia and in key battlegrounds to help secure Joe Biden's victory.

She also helped lead a high-profile campaign last summer by Black female activists to push Biden to add an African American woman to the ticket.

In lobbying then-candidate Biden, "I made a promise that, literally, if you select a Black woman vice president, Black women are going to deliver it to you," Brown recounted Wednesday.

"And we delivered."

But Brown's work in the 2020 election came at an enormous price.

"At the end of the day, what Black women have become masters at is not allowing the world to steal our joy," Brown said.

Around the country, women of all ages and races pulled out their glue guns to pay joyful tribute to Harris by decorating their Chuck Taylors, the brand she sported so often on the campaign trail.

Chucks and Pearls Day, a Facebook group started by Harris supporter Jeanette DeVaughn a little more than a month ago, had grown to more than 89,000 members by Wednesday morning.

Lace and satin ribbons often replaced shoestrings.

DeVaughn, an Austin, Texas, grandmother who works part-time at an Amazon distribution center, said women identify with Harris' high-low style: "classy and sophisticated" pearls paired with ''really, really comfortable" shoes.

This month's violent siege at the US Capitol saddened DeVaughn because, she said, it was "so disrespectful" of the history-making nature of Harris' win.

That includes building support for Biden's Covid-19 recovery relief package, boosting the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and helping elevate another Black woman to the US Senate to fill the void now that Harris has ascended to higher office.

A similar path

Murray canvassed for President Barack Obama's barrier-breaking campaign more than a dozen years ago, but she felt compelled to do even more for the Biden-Harris ticket -- given the parallels between her life and Harris' story.

She, too, was raised in California by a single mom and traveled across the country to attend Howard University, one of the nation's pre-eminent HBCUs.