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    • Harris scrapped plans to speak at Howard, but her team promises she will return
    New Jersey

    Harris scrapped plans to speak at Howard, but her team promises she will return

    Seren Anwen Posted on

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    WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will come home to Howard University on Wednesday to speak about the election results that are increasingly escaping her.

    The historically black institution was the site of her first political campaign – a campaign to represent the freshman class, which she won – and played a prominent role in her bids for higher office.

    Harris held a news conference at the private university a few hours into her 2019 presidential campaign. She returned to the school in northwest Washington, D.C., for a rally on the day President Joe Biden announced he would run with her for re-election as his vice president.

    And on the night of the presidential election, when Harris was set to make history as either the first woman to win the White House or the second woman to lose to former President Donald Trump in a general election, she invited her oldest friends, current and former students as well as long-time supporters of Howard University to track the return.

    Harris declined to perform at Tuesday night’s watch party, which began with hip-hop and gospel music and a choir performing “Oh Happy Day.” The mood soured throughout the evening as the results came in, spelling trouble for Harris in key battleground states. North Carolina was called for Trump.

    Instead, a Harris campaign co-chair addressed the gathering shortly before 1 a.m. Wednesday morning.

    “We still have to count votes. We still have states that haven’t been called yet. We will continue overnight and try to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken,” said Cedric Richmond, campaign co-chair. “So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight. But you will hear from her tomorrow because tomorrow she will come back here to speak not only to the HU family, not only to her supporters, but also to the nation.”

    Current and former students, Democratic activists, Biden administration officials and Harris supporters crowded the schoolyard, where inspirational figures such as the late South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Barack Obama and talk show host Oprah Winfrey gave speeches years, hoping to see Harris speak on Tuesday night.

    Me’kayla Rothmiller, a student from Miami, Florida, 21, said it was invigorating to see a graduate of her university land a presidential candidacy. But she said: “I’m just so nervous, I’m so excited to see what happens.”

    Harris gave Howard’s commencement speech there in 2017 and wore a Howard sweatshirt in July while speaking by phone following Biden’s abrupt exit from the 2024 race.

    When it was time for her debate with Trump later that summer, she returned to campus for her first preparation.

    Howard is one of the nation’s most historically significant black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Its alumni include Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the Supreme Court, and writers Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, pioneering authors of Afro-African American literature.

    Students and alumni refer to the prestigious university as “The Mecca” for its leadership in Black higher education.

    “This is a belief system that we have had at Howard for a very long time,” said Jill Louis, a Dallas-based attorney who was concurrently committed to Harris Alpha Kappa Alpha, in an interview before the event. “And as a line sister to Kamala Harris, I also believed in her greatness from the beginning when I met her, throughout her growth and all the different positions she held.”

    Harris received her bachelor’s degree from Howard in 1986. She attended law school in California and served as the state’s attorney general and U.S. senator before being elected vice president.

    If elected, she would be the first HBCU graduate to become President of the United States. Harris is the first vice president in U.S. history to attend an HBCU.

    At the event, Trinity Garrison, a junior from Miami, said Harris’ campaign brought the HBCU community together. “All HBCU communities, not just Howard,” she said. “It was a little scary at first to put one of our own players out there for the world to make up their minds about, but the more we got into the race, I think we found our fire again and that it was.” It’s very inspiring to watch us all come together to stand behind Kamala and cheer each other on.

    The university moved classes to online courses during election week to make room for its most famous contemporary.

    “Tonight, as our nation votes and we observe a time-honored ritual of our democracy that includes the right to have our voices heard, the right to speak across the aisles, tonight as we carry out the hard and necessary work of Continuing Democracy, “We at Howard are proud and honored to vote for our graduate and welcome her home,” said Ben Vinson III, President of Howard University, in his speech at the start of the program.

    Harris prepared for a long night and partial results

    Harris spent part of her day listening to radio broadcasts on the battlefields. That afternoon, she stopped by a phone bank at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC.

    The vice president, who said she ate “a family-sized bag of Nacho Doritos” in 2016 after she won her Senate race and former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, brought a box of chips.

    Harris said in an August fundraising email that she had “torn up” her notes and promised to fight Trump in her victory speech that night.

    And she did so for the next eight years. First as a senator on the Judiciary Committee, where she challenged his nominees, and later, as Biden’s running mate, defeating Trump and making him a one-term president.

    The results of the 2024 election campaign, in which she replaced Biden in the sudden swing of the Democratic vote, were not expected to arrive as quickly as they did.

    Her campaign warned before the event that only partial results from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona – three swing states that could decide the outcome – might be available by the end of Tuesday evening. But the fact that Harris’s campaign said she planned to address the nation the next morning suggested her staff had no hope.

    Whether Harris wins or loses, Rothmiller said she is happy to be part of history. “The fact that she’s even up there or even this close is like damn, maybe I’ll make it up there one day. Or maybe, if not me, my sisters can get there too one day,” she said. “Just knowing that we’ve finally come this far in history is like wow, what a time to be alive.”

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    Seren Anwen
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