ATLANTA– ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris will attend church in Georgia on Sunday, where she will speak to worshipers and encourage black congregants to vote as part of a nationwide campaign known as “souls to the polls.”
The Democratic candidate for president plans to attend services at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest and Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro, accompanied by singer Stevie Wonder, before taping an interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton. Her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will attend church in Saginaw, Michigan, and his wife, Gwen, will attend a service in Las Vegas.
The mobilization effort, which launched on October 20, is led by the National Advisory Council of Black Faith Leaders, which is sending representatives to battleground states as the November 5 early elections begin.
“My father always said, ‘a voiceless people is a powerless people’ and one of the most important steps we can take is that short step to the polls,” Martin Luther King III said Friday. If we commit, we have the power to change the trajectory of this nation.”
Harris’ schedule reflects her campaign’s push to treat each voting group as a swing state voter, trying to appeal to them all in a tightly contested early voting election.
On Saturday in Detroit, the vice president rallied his supporters alongside 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 US Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Donald Trump, has overturned Roe v. Wade.
And after her Sunday push, she will campaign with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“Donald Trump still refuses to take responsibility, to take any responsibility, for the pain and suffering he has caused,” Harris said.
Harris is a Baptist whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish. She has said she was inspired by the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and influenced by the religious traditions of her mother’s native India and by the Black Church. Harris sang in the choir at Twenty Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland as a child.
“Faith is a verb. It is something we show in action and in service,” she said on Instagram last week while attending services at a church in Greenville, North Carolina.
“Souls to the polls” is an idea that dates back to the Civil Rights Movement. Rev. George Leea black entrepreneur from Mississippi, was murdered by white supremacists in 1955 after helping nearly 100 black residents register to vote in the town of Belzoni. The cemetery where Lee is buried served as a polling station.
Black church congregations get-out-the-vote campaigns have been going on across the country for years. In part to counter Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics, early voting in the Black community is emphasized almost as much from the pulpits as it is by candidates.
In Georgia, early voting began Tuesday and there were more than 310,000 votes 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.