Thousands of women – Black and White – poured out across the country to support Kamala Harris in a few hours after she said she was running for President on July 21, 2024.
In less than 24 hours more than $81 million flowed into her campaign. It was ”the largest sum reported in a single day for either Democrats or Republicans.”
Thousands of Black men are fund raising for the Harris campaign and “White Dudes for Harris” are organizing to support her bid for the presidency.
It will be a tremendous first given women’s suppression in the United States.
• No woman has been president since we became a nation in 1776, 248 years ago.
• No woman had the right to vote until 1920, 144 years after we became a nation.
• No woman had the right to a credit card until 1974, 198 years after we became a nation.
It’s past time for a woman president. Current research comparing men to women found women have “significantly greater empathy “ - a biological trait - than men. With a woman in the White House, all Americans can expect the prevention of major woes that complicate life for them and families with children.
Women rarely settle disputes and problems with guns and violence. Israel’s war in Gaza has slaughtered 15,000 children since October 2023.
Nearly 2,000 children have been murdered or injured in Ukraine.
America has an undisputed history of brutalizing children and their families too. An estimated 6,000 Cherokee men, women and children died on the Trail of Tears, forced by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s to walk 1,200 miles from the East Coast to Indian Territory in Oklahoma during the winter with no shelter and little to eat. In the Civil War when recruiters often ignored the age of recruits …“as many as 20% of Civil War soldiers were younger than 18.
“These kid soldiers “charged through hailstorms of bullets while the bodies of the friends fell all around them. They listened as wounded men pleaded for their mothers, for a drink of water or for death to come. They assisted surgeons who cut off arms and legs of the wounded with little or no anesthesia… They were killed in battle or suffered physical and mental wounds they would carry for the rest of their lives.” Modern America didn’t escape violence tolerated by men. In 2017, the Equal Justice Initiative found that “4,084 Black men, women and children” had fallen victim to “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950.”
In 1955, Emmett Till was only 14 years old when he was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
A woman president will not separate children from their mothers at the border or stand for a police officer shooting a mentally ill Black woman in the face.
The 2024 election isn’t a contest between a man and a woman. It’s a challenge to equality, equal opportunity, the right to seek public office and the right for Americans to live in comfort and peace.
Jodie Sinclair is an award-winning writer who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and resides in Bandera, Texas.
