RALEIGH, N.C. – Sitting in chairs separated by six feet, marked by white circles on the asphalt, Black community leaders met with the Democratic nominee for vice president. It was Sen. Kamala Harris’ second stop in Raleigh Monday.
In the parking lot outside White’s Barbershop in East Raleigh, Harris took questions from the small audience. She talked about racial justice, helping small businesses, homeownership and education.
Asked about representing Black communities, Harris said, “You have to earn the vote.”
“If you define the win of simply beating Donald Trump, then the job is over the day we get sworn in,” she said. Instead, she said the job would begin the day she and presidential nominee Joe Biden take office.
“North Carolina is a bellwether,” she said, because of the state’s strengths and its “historical challenges.”
North Carolina has become a battleground in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump has made regular campaign visits to the state since the Republican National Convention in August, and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a campaign stop in Charlotte last week.
Polls show the candidates in a tight race for North Carolina’s 15 Electoral College votes.
Harris also visited Shaw University and Trophy Brewing on her tour around Raleigh Monday.
She said she does not know a single Black man who has not been discriminated against.
Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general for California, said she and Biden would move to ban choke holds by police.
She said it’s time for the United States to look closely at how police use force.
Many prosecutors, she said, say “There needs to be accountability and consequences.” But that phrase is used on people arrested for crimes, “not on the system itself and on the actors and players in that system,” Harris said.
Harris called for decriminalizing marijuana and abolishing private prisons. “Certain human beings are making money off the incarceration of other human beings.”
She tied the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to racial justice. People of color have been disproportionately hit by sickness and death from the virus.
She called the virus a “predator.”
“It preys on people with preexisting conditions,” she said, and kills African Americans at a much higher rate than whites.
She said the country needs to “acknowledge those racial inequities and address them."
Harris paid a visit to Shaw University earlier in the day. She made a speech to a live-streaming audience, with only press, her staff and Secret Service in the room, focusing on the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The president and Republicans in the Senate want to dismantle Ginsburg’s legacy as the senior liberal on the court, Harris said.
“We’re not in the middle of an election year. We are in the middle of an election,” she said. “President Trump and his party don’t care. They just want to jam this nomination through as quickly as they can.”
The president has said he wants a new justice on the Supreme Court before the election on Nov. 3. If the vote is close in some swing states, potential legal disputes could go to the Supreme Court.
The president has worked to sow doubt in the election as record numbers of voters cast ballots by mail during the coronavirus pandemic.
In North Carolina, more than 1 million people have requested absentee ballots for the General Election.
“Donald Trump is weak, so he is throwing up every roadblock he can so people can’t vote,” Harris said.
“This election is about more than the presidency, or the Senate, or the Supreme Court. It’s about our democracy,” she said.
“They may think that it is they who have the power in this country. But they don’t,” Harris said. “The American people are the ones who have the power. You have the power.”
She said Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court could dismantle Ginsburg’s legacy. The new justice would be in a position to rule on abortion, voting rights and Obamacare.
“Getting rid of the Affordable Care Act will take us backward to a time when pregnancy could be considered a pre-existing condition,” Harris said.
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one-of-a-kind,” she said. “This president and his party are not interested in hearing the lessons of Justice Ginsburg.”
Instead, she said, “These are the decisions to upend Justice Ginsburg’s life’s work.”
Harris visited Shaw University Monday, one of the nation’s oldest historically Black colleges and universities, to talk about the seat on the Supreme Court left open after Ginsburg’s death.
Shaw is the oldest historically Black college or university in the South. Black civil rights activists established the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee on the campus in downtown Raleigh in 1960.
Harris herself is a graduate of Howard University, an HBCU in Washington D.C.