Venesse Williams was hopeful and excited when she saw Vice President Kamala Harris in Dallas at the national boule — Greek sorority parlance for convention — of her Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. in June.
“There’s a lot of hope in hearing that she’s running. We certainly need someone who is going to be able to unify the United States,” said Williams, a 53-year-old Summerhill resident who shares sorority membership with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
A lot sooner than Williams could imagine, Harris would indeed be a unifier — of members of Black sororities and fraternities interested in her campaign for president, especially back home in Atlanta.
In June, Harris was campaigning for a ticket that had President Joe Biden at the top. By the time she addressed the boule of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. in Indianapolis last week, Harris had become the first Black woman and the first member of a Black Greek letter organization to be a major party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States.
Almost as quickly, members of those organizations — nine individual fraternities and sororities — congealed into potentially one of this election cycle’s most formidable voting, fundraising and organizing blocs. Harris, a Howard University alumnae and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black Greek-letter sorority, will now run a campaign with the potential backing of a large voting community with historic ties to social action and grassroots organizing around elections: the “Divine Nine” sororities and fraternities. The November election will test just how far their influence goes.
“What you’re seeing now with [Harris] running on the presidential level, [is the] same thing you actually saw happen with Barack Obama when he was running; you saw how those networks were effectively used to turn out the vote,” said Roland Martin, an independent journalist and media entrepreneur who, two days after Biden endorsed Harris, hosted a call joined by a reported 53,000 Black men, many of whom were members of Divine Nine fraternities. Martin is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the country’s original Black Greek fraternity.
“And so I think that what’s most important is that this isn’t our first rodeo; we’ve done this before,” he said.
If there’s a city where the mobilization of Black fraternities and sororities might show up in November’s election results, it’s Atlanta.
The city is a mecca for Black Greek activity, said Lawrence Ross, the author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities and also an Alpha Phi Alpha member. Although none of the nine organizations was founded here, Atlanta is home to tens of thousands of their members and dozens of graduate and undergraduate chapters.
Since Maynard Jackson became the city’s first Black mayor in 1974, every successive Atlanta mayor has been a member of a Black fraternity or sorority.
It’s impossible to know how much of the vote in those mayoral campaigns — or in campaigns for office like the U.S. Senate, where Raphael Warnock, another “Alpha Man,” became the first Black person to represent Georgia in that capacity in 2020 — have come from Divine Nine members over the years. But interviews Capital B conducted with local members and leaders of the national organizations in the weeks since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris show how these networks exercise their political influence in Atlanta and beyond.
Independent but linked
Divine Nine refers to Black Greek letter organizations — five fraternities and four sororities — that are members of the National Pan-Hellenic Council. In addition to Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Zeta Phi Beta, the members are Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc., Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc., Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc., Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Inc. and Iota Phi Theta Fraternity Inc.
Each of those organizations must remain officially apolitical due to their nonprofit statuses. The presidents of all nine organizations issued a joint statement stating that they’d agreed to work jointly on an “unprecedented voter registration, education and mobilization coordinated campaign,” noting that the effort would be nonpartisan. Still, individual members and informal networks created by members of the organizations can freely support candidates.
In Atlanta, which houses an expansive and established network of Divine Nine members who are well-versed in political organizing, those networks were almost immediately deployed to amplify Black engagement in the upcoming election now that Harris is in the race.
“We have this thing around Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi of saving America and this democracy — it is nothing new,” said Rhonda Briggins, a member of Delta Sigma Theta who lives in Atlanta. “It’s something that Black people in the South have been doing for years, and we will continue to do that as we move through this election cycle.”
Briggins is the president of the Atlanta-based organization Delta for Women in Action, which on its website calls itself a “Delta-affiliated, nonprofit social welfare and advocacy organization.” Since it has its own 501(c)(4) charter, Delta for Women in Action can do some things the sorority can’t, like endorse candidates; Harris isn’t on its website as an endorsee. Briggins said her group plans to mobilize local residents for the upcoming election by focusing on education around new voting laws, election misinformation, and voter registration.
Asia Hicks, a 26-year-old member of Sigma Gamma Rho who lives in south Atlanta, said she believes the members of all nine organizations can play a role in creating social change, including supporting a candidate that they believe in.
“Each individual Greek organization needs to do their part as a sister or brother of the Divine Nine,” Hicks said. “It’s about putting our foot forward and not having any fear of repercussions. … We need to communicate as one and be on the same accord with how we can assist here.”
That Harris would find lots of support among members of Black sororities was never in doubt. Jason Hudgins, a member of Phi Beta Sigma, said there’s a sense of collective duty to Harris among men in fraternities as well.
“We want to make sure she is protected and gets a fair chance as we go forward,” the 42-year-old Westview resident said. “For a large part of our community, being connected to a Greek organization or being connected to an HBCU is something they’re familiar with. … Even if they don’t have that personal experience, the familiarity opens a door for other conversations.”
But William Boone, a political science professor at Clark Atlanta University, questioned whether Black fraternities and sororities could flex their political clout beyond their own ranks. The organizations don’t publish their membership rolls, but some estimates put their total memberships at as many as 4 million.
That’s enough to show political strength, but it’s just a fraction of the estimated 47.9 million Black people in the United States. It’s an even smaller percentage of the country’s roughly 160 million registered voters.
“The influence is certainly within a circle of a certain demographic of African Americans, both male and female,” Boone said.
“What they’ll have to do to extend that, they have to get into the streets and really be of that kind of service. They will have to decide that they’re going to have to organize in a way that pushes the message beyond the D9, so to speak, right into the broader community.”
Danielle Maner, a member of Delta Sigma Theta who lives in Midtown, said Harris’ campaign tapping into the organizing prowess of Black fraternity and sorority members speaks for itself. The Republican ticket, she pointed out, has its own network of groups to help it raise money and get people to the polls — why shouldn’t Harris?
“If the other side is using the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, Christian Fundamentalist and white nationalist groups to organize for Trump … why can’t she use us,” Maner said. “Why can’t she use her resources?”
