Vice President Kamala Harris urged Black Americans to vote and cast Republicans as extremists on everything from abortion, voting rights and gun reform.
(Bloomberg) — Vice President Kamala Harris urged Black Americans to vote and cast Republicans as extremists on everything from abortion, voting rights and gun reform.
“Here’s what we need to do. Vote. It gets back to the voting,” Harris said Saturday at a gathering of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, in Boston. Noting that Black voters had record turnout in 2020, Harris said that “it scared some people.”
“It is by no coincidence that immediately there after you started seeing extremist so-called leaders passing laws restricting voting days, making it more difficult to vote,” she added.
Since Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, supporters of the former president have stepped up efforts to reform the US election system, with several states introducing new rules restricting voting and redrawing electoral maps. Still, the Supreme Court this year gave an unexpected boost to the Voting Rights Act — enacted in 1965 to protect minority rights at the polls — by upholding a decision that requires a second majority Black District in Alabama.
Harris, 58, has addressed the NAACP’s national convention for two straight years. With the president ramping up his re-election campaign, Harris — the first woman, Black and Asian vice president — has become a key envoy in the outreach to Black voters, who Biden credits for his 2020 victory.
Read more: Harris Seizes Needed Role as Team Biden’s Voice to Black Voters
Harris also hit out at the new Florida curriculum that contends that enslaved people incurred some “personal benefit” from slavery through “developed skills,” adding to denunciations she made earlier this month during a trip to Jacksonville, Florida.
“They actually thought they were going to get away with that,” Harris said.
The curriculum follows a series of legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, a frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary, regulating teachings on racism and prejudice in Florida’s public schools, and has drawn a chorus of criticism, including from a handful of Republican politicians.
Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and a presidential contender, called on DeSantis to denounce the curriculum’s statement and take accountability for the changes made under his watch. Former Congressman William Hurd, also running in the primary, echoed those sentiments in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
The NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida in May, a mostly symbolic move to draw attention to “regressive policies” by the governor to ban university diversity and inclusion programs and dilute education on Black history.
The Boston visit is one of many stops in a summer travel blitz for the vice president. Before the convention, Harris made an unannounced stop at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall, encouraging the room of mostly Black residents to continue to convince others to vote and participate in the political process.
“We had one of the most record turnouts of voters and Black voters America has ever seen in 2020,” she told the audience of about 50 people. “Because that happened, Joe Biden was elected and I was elected the first Black woman to become vice president.”
The stretch of summer travel has positioned Harris to speak to abortion rights, racial inequity and other top domestic policy issues that the White House is spotlighting ahead of next year’s presidential election.
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