Bernice King has been voting in presidential elections since 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale.
She has never publicly endorsed a candidate in the nine elections since — not even Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Until now.
King, the youngest daughter of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr., has joined the chorus of voices throughout the country and of the Civil Rights community backing Kamala Harris to be the first woman president of the United States.
King said the current vice president is poised to be a transformative figure.
“I think this is the beginning of the end of racism and sexism if she wins,” King said. “Most people can’t see it, but this is bigger than her.”
King said she, like her mother, has always been nonpartisan. But she felt the stakes were too high this year to remain on the political sidelines.
“It’s important that we have the right leadership at a time when there is a rise of a lot of things that have exploited, oppressed and destroyed people, from antisemitism to colonialism to nationalism,” she said.
“We need to properly position ourselves to continue to be that beacon on a hill as a nation. With our current choices and our democracy at stake, Vice President Kamala Harris is the best choice to take us there.”
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and handed the reigns of the Democratic Party to Harris, she has been inundated with cash, delegates and endorsements.
Harris has already picked up more than the 1,976 pledged delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot. On Wednesday, her campaign reported that within 48 hours of Biden’s announcement, Harris had raised more than $126 million.
Many top Democrats have also fallen in line behind Harris, including Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock.
The Civil Rights Movement community has followed.
Former Atlanta Mayor and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young said he’s followed Harris’ career since she served as San Francisco’s district attorney. Young has also campaigned for Harris, a fellow graduate of Howard University.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
“I am totally supporting her,” Young said. “I think she is head and shoulders above the other guy running, and she expresses that.”
At 92, Young said he would not travel heavily to campaign for Harris this year but would likely stump in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.
“I know she can win,” Young said. “I think we are going to have a great president. Her gender and race are secondary considerations to the fact that she comes from a global generation that has always seen the world through the eyes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.”
On a Monday night video call in which Black men raised more than $1.3 million for Harris, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said the 2024 election will be crucial if the United States is to remain a democracy.
He particularly worries about the prospect of Project 2025, the ultraconservative blueprint designed to shape a potential second term for Donald Trump, while dismantling aspects of the federal government.
“At the end of the day there is nothing more important than this election,” Johnson said. “Nothing more important than who is at the top of the ticket, and nothing more important than making sure we get control of the Senate and preventing them from implementing Project 2025.”
Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, also endorsed Harris. Both Johnson and Morial said their endorsements were not on behalf of their organizations.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1984 and 1988 but failed to secure the nomination, also endorsed Harris. He was looking forward to seeing her in August at the Democratic National Convention in his hometown of Chicago.
Credit: Contributed by Rev. Amos C. Brown
Credit: Contributed by Rev. Amos C. Brown
“Her track record as a successful attorney general for California, as a United States Senator, and her effective co-leadership with President Biden, makes her an ideal candidate to advance the Democratic agenda,” Jackson said. “Black women have long been key players in American progress and pillars of the Democratic Party.”
On Tuesday in Wisconsin, in her first campaign rally since President Biden announced he would not seek reelection and would instead endorse Harris’ presidential candidacy, Harris said she would continue to fight for the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, a pair of stalled voting rights bills she co-sponsored as a California senator in 2020.
Even before Harris became the presumptive party nominee, the Democrats had been relying on maintaining strong support among Black women. During the 2020 election, more than 91% of Black women who voted supported the Biden-Harris ticket. Those numbers are expected to hold under Harris.
“It’s so apropos interestingly enough because if you look at history, with most major shifts in the world, there has always been a woman behind it,” King said.
Sitting beneath separate portraits of her parents, King points to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which catapulted her father to the national spotlight. But behind that movement were several examples of women leaders.
There was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who was arrested in March of 1955 for violating Montgomery’s ordinance requiring segregation on the city’s buses. There was also Rosa Parks, whose December 1955 arrest for refusing to move to the back of a city bus led to the bus boycott. The list also includes Jo Ann Robinson, who was instrumental in initiating and sustaining the boycott as president of the Women’s Political Council, a Montgomery-based civil rights group that encouraged Black people to “live above mediocrity,” and “elevate their thinking.”
Credit: United States Federal Government
Credit: United States Federal Government
“We need that right now,” King said. “We have to continue to move in the spirit of preserving and protecting democracy in our world. My parents fought for it and now the work they did is being threatened through Project 2025, and the Trump-Vance campaign. I can ill afford to allow what my parents sacrificed their lives for be destroyed.”
King said she has not heard from the Harris campaign, nor has she reached out — yet.
“I believe this is a new day and we have to work very hard to ensure that we don’t go back,” King said. “That is why I felt it necessary to publicly come out and state that I support her as the nominee. I believe she will be the next president of the United States of America.”
