ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris is going to church in Georgia on Sunday, where she will speak to the faithful and encourage Black congregants to vote as part of a nationwide campaign push known as “souls to the polls.”
The Democratic nominee for president plans to attend services at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest and Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro, joined by singer Stevie Wonder, before taping an interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is scheduled to go to church in Saginaw, Michigan, and his wife, Gwen, will be at a service in Las Vegas.
The mobilization effort that launched Oct. 20 is led by the National Advisory Board of Black Faith Leaders, which is sending representatives across battleground states as early voting begins in the Nov. 5 election.
“My father used to say, a ‘voteless people is a powerless people’ and one of the most important steps we can take is that short step to the ballot box,” Martin Luther King III said Friday. “When Black voters are organized and engaged, we have the power to shift the trajectory of this nation.”
The schedule for Harris on her 60th birthday reflects her campaign’s push to treat every voting group like a swing state voter, trying to appeal to them all in a tightly contested election with early voting in progress.
On Saturday, the vice president rallied supporters in Detroit with singer Lizzo before traveling to Atlanta to focus on abortion rights, highlighting the death of a Georgia mother amid the state’s restrictive abortion laws that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, with three justices nominated by Donald Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade.
And after her Sunday push, she will campaign with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
“Donald Trump still refuses to take accountability, to take any accountability, for the pain and the suffering he has caused,” Harris said.
Harris is a Baptist whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish. She has said she’s inspired by the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and influenced by the religious traditions of her mother’s native India as well as the Black Church. Harris sang in the choir as a child at Twenty Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
“Faith is a verb. It is something we show in action and in service,” she said on Instagram last week as she attended services at a church in Greenville, North Carolina.
“Souls to the polls” as an idea traces back to the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. George Lee, a Black entrepreneur from Mississippi, was killed by white supremacists in 1955 after he helped nearly 100 Black residents register to vote in the town of Belzoni. The cemetery where Lee is buried has served as a polling place.
Black church congregations across the country have undertaken get-out-the-vote campaigns for years. In part to counteract voter suppression tactics that date back to the Jim Crow era, early voting in the Black community is stressed from pulpits nearly as much as it is by candidates.
In Georgia, early voting began on Tuesday, and more than 310,000 people voted on that day, more than doubling the first-day total in 2020. A record 5 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Colleen Long, The Associated Press