Nearly 90% of Black women in America voted for Vice President Kamala Harris to be the first among them to ascend to the highest office in the nation. And while her loss is hard for her supporters to accept, many of them say the patchwork collection of laws that is emerging after this month’s election is even more alarming.
Women in some states have the right to abortion access, while women in other states do not. Some states allow people to vote without identification, while others now require it. America is becoming more divided, with each state defining individual rights differently. Black women are contemplating how to organize and move forward under these difficult conditions, which force activists to be more nimble and fight on many different fronts at once.
“We have to organize locally, just as much as we are nationally,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, a co-founder of Campaign Zero, the nonprofit organization behind the Mapping Police Violence database.
Voters in 10 states had the opportunity to vote on including abortion and reproductive rights in their state’s constitution. In seven of those states — Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New York, and Nevada — voters approved the amendment. An example of a state’s change to its constitution includes updating its Equal Rights Amendment to include additional protected classes, such as “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Ballot measures in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota failed. Nebraska had an additional abortion-related question that limits the timeframe for when an abortion can be performed, was approved.
Acknowledging the disparate approaches to reproductive rights across the country, Cunningham said: “There’s a lack of trust now when it comes to doctors and health care for people of African descent; can we trust them to save our lives?”
Cunningham spoke to some of the vice president’s most ardent supporters during a Nov. 10 Zoom call with the organization Win With Black Women. Cunningham told the group that despite Harris’ defeat, it is essential for Black women voters to continue taking such steps as educating communities about Black history and organizing communities at the grassroots level around political action and self-empowerment.
She said they could even nudge the reproductive rights movement forward by studying to become doulas and midwives “to ensure that we birth these families, knowing that reproductive freedom is not something that we were able to access at the ballot box.”
“The next step is all about remaining in community with one another, staying rooted in those values that have gotten us this far,” Cunningham told attendees on the call. “Covering one another in a word of prayer and in the sacred sisterhood of Black womanhood.”
She urged Black women to reject individualism, and to instead “center ourselves in a shared power and shared community.”
“Being there for each other in this most essential and historical way is necessary if you’ve got the resources,” Cunningham added. “Put a little free library in your front yard, and put all those books that those school boards have been banning in it. And just tell somebody that when they’re done, to bring it back or to replace the book with another banned book.”
Less than 24 hours after Harris conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump, Black people in 30 states received racist text messages. In another incident, two men held signs on Texas State University’s campus that read: “Women are Property.”
For Gloria Browne-Marshall, a constitutional law professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, those incidents underscore how dangerous these times could become.
“Historically, once given the signal that they can act with impunity, people who have a hatred and a jealousy of Black progress begin to act out,” said Browne-Marshall, whose book A Protest History of the United States will be released in 2025.
“And now the question becomes, what are our protections, and what can we do? It’s not enough to complain — complain and do,” she said.
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said that organizations in some states are bolstering their efforts to protect women seeking reproductive care.
Her group sponsors the Abortion Access Legal Defense Fund, a collection of organizations that offers free legal work around reproductive issues. Graves said during an online media briefing on Nov. 7 that the fund provides support for patients, providers, and those who help them secure abortion access, and that “this resource [is needed] now more than ever.”
“Our task in this moment is to show up for anyone who is in harm’s way and to contend for the future that we deserve — the future that the majority of people in this country, by the way, have said they have supported,” Graves said. “That’s especially true around abortion and reproductive freedom.”
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, singled out Georgia as an especially problematic state for abortion access. Two Black women from the state who needed emergency pregnancy care died in high-profile cases in recent months. Simpson said that Georgia is a “state that has yet to expand Medicaid” and it is “in a maternal health crisis, with over half of our counties not even having access to OB-GYN care.”
“And on top of that, we have been fighting a six-week abortion ban for multiple years now,” Simpson said. “It is a bleak picture for so many people across this country, and in particular in the South.”
No matter where Black people choose to live, members of organizations like Movement for Black Lives said they will continue to build “people power.” The group said on a press call on Nov. 12 that they plan to challenge what they see as regressive policies and advocate for better ones.
“We must begin to build coalitions and communities with the understanding and the commitment that we do not fall into the trappings of punishment as a way to solve our economic crisis,” said M. Adams, a community organizer and co-executive director of Movement for Black Lives.
“So where communities will face extreme austerity, whether that be the reduction of food stamps, the limiting of people’s access to land where they once gardened … we are going to organize inside of those communities,” she said, adding that she wants people to “understand what the root cause of that desperation is so that we do not turn on each other — instead we choose one another as a way of solving our problem.”
Adams said while building community during the second Trump administration, Black people must fight for issues such as reproductive care and ensure that “everyone has the access to important medical services like abortion.” At the same time, she said people must also make sure that “transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex folks have access to gender-affirming care.”
She added: “It also means being conscious of all of our identities and other types of fights like housing, the environment, climate, and many other areas of work. This is a moment where we get to redefine what safety looks like, what community looks like.”
While this moment feels like a state of urgency, Marcia Dinkins, founder and executive director of the Black Appalachian Coalition, said, “We don’t have to move from a place of anxiety.” She encouraged others to break down this urgency in order to build small, powerful steps.
“Yes, it feels like a threat. Yes, it feels like a shot to the gut, but just remember that you are who you need to be for this moment,” Dinkins said. “We’re all here for a purpose, and we need to build in that collective purpose to have collective solutions.”
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