Noted several times in news articles, social posts and live during Inauguration Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman, Black person and South Asian-American to hold that title. On the day she and President Joe Biden were inaugurated, a moment shared between her and former first lady Michelle Obama has been the dubbed “the moment” of the day’s ceremony.
Harris, as she did with the president and others in the scaled-back audience at the Capitol, shared a fist bump with Obama before taking a seat. The moment, though brief, seemed to speak to the history both women had made in their different-yet-kindred roles in American politics.
The vice president was photographed pausing, pressing her hands to her chest, a gesture of likely gratitude and humility, as she greeted Obama. The two women also fist-bumped with both hands as they bid each other salutations. The moment, among others Wednesday, embodied the force that is Black women, several social media users said Wednesday afternoon.
Harris and Obama’s arrival turned heads and brought home for many the historic significance of the day. The former California senator, escorted by Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who thwarted the efforts of an insurgent pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, broke a major barrier as she entered the ceremony that would turn a page in history and change course for the country. Harris, wearing the designs of two young Black designers, represented perhaps the change that was hoped for when previously courageous Black women including Fannie Lou Hamer fought for the basic right for Black women to vote.
“In many folks’ lifetimes, we experienced a segregated United States,” Lateefah Simon, a civil rights advocate and longtime Harris friend and mentee, told The Associated Press. “You will now have a Black woman who will walk into the White House not as a guest but as a second in command of the free world.”
As she was sworn in, the vice president marked her momentous inauguration with two Bibles of significance. Harris used two Bibles to take the oath, one that belonged to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the late civil rights icon whom Harris often cites as inspiration, and Regina Shelton, who helped raise Harris during her childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The president further noted the history Harris made for women Wednesday.
“Today, we mark the swearing in of the first woman in American history elected to national office, Vice President Kamala Harris. Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Biden said.
The term “black women” continued to trend well after the inauguration as many pointed to Black women organizing and voting in November to make the Biden-Harris leadership team possible. About 90% of Black women voted for Biden over Donald Trump, making them Democrats’ most devoted bloc, Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science and director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University, told NBC News last year. For the past five presidential cycles, that demographic also showed up to the polls at higher rates than any other group.
Those statistics were not lost on hundreds of Twitter users, with some giving ode to Black women in Georgia.
The inaugural poem from 22-year-old Amanda Gorman also marked a celebration of Black women. Gorman, the first national youth poet laureate, read her poem “The Hill We Climb.”
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