HOW A WEEKLY ZOOM CALL OF POWERFUL BLACK WOMEN CREATED THE MOST POTENT CAMPAIGN TOOL OF 2024

THE GLITZY OPRAH WINFREY-HOSTED "Unite for America" Zoom event Sept. 19 featured the corps d'elite of entertainment, government, and business, as well as the woman being feted herself: Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

- RUTH UMOH

The event brought together the 140 "unity groups" that have held Zoom calls to fundraise for Harris, including White Women: Answer the Call, White Dudes for Harris, Cat Ladies for Harris, and Tech4Kamala.

"The grassroots people-powered movement behind Kamala Harris has unleashed a unifying force unlike anything we've seen in politics in a very long time," Winfrey almost sang to the crowd. Then the media mogul pivoted to face a woman wearing a deep-violet dress in the front row: Jotaka Eaddy, who started this movement with her weekly Zoom call for powerful Black women.

"I know y'all been doing this a long time," Winfrey told Eaddy. "I was on a lot of calls with y'all in 2020. But we ain't never seen nothing like this before!"

That's no understatement. Featuring stars from Tracee Ellis Ross to Chris Rock to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the YouTube livestreams of Winfrey's event had more than 2 million views by the following afternoon. The event was also aired in part on CNN and MSNBC.

All this was more than Eaddy, a 45-year-old social impact consultant in politics and tech, could have dreamed of four years ago when she started her group, Win With Black Women (WWBW), while quarantining in her family home at the end of a dirt road in South Carolina.

The Sunday evening Zoom call has evolved into a potent under-the-radar network of influential Black female leaders pulling strings in American public life and business. Most weeks, the call draws a couple hundred attendees. But in the heady first few hours of Harris's campaign on July 21, some 44,000 participants swamped Eaddy's Zoom, with another 50,000 tuning in on other platforms. That call raised $1.6 million for the Harris campaign in one evening, and it set off a wave of Zoom gatherings that have raised many millions more, and made the teleconference platform such a valuable fundraising tool that some have dubbed 2024 the year of the "Zoom election."