In the days after early voting started in Georgia last month, sorority parties broke out around Atlanta.
In suburban Mableton, Ga., dozens of women wearing the pink and green colors of their sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, danced the “Cha-Cha Slide” on a grassy patch next to a strip mall. Two counties over, other members held a gathering, anchored by Beyoncé songs and free deli food, in a park. South of downtown, another get-together’s music was so loud that it turned the heads of people driving by.
Polls show a close presidential race, and these sorority-hosted events were aimed at persuading people to vote. Ms. Harris, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha since her days at Howard University, has remained a loyal member of the first Black sorority, and plenty of her sisters are thrilled to see one of their own running for president.
The polls show that Black voters are overwhelmingly backing Harris, but some — especially men — are not matching the level of support that they had for Joe Biden four years ago. The most recent polls in Georgia show Mr. Trump with a slight edge in the state. Nationwide, Black, male voters increasingly are backing Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month.
In their appeal to get the state’s Black, male voters to the ballot box, the sorority is facing a challenge. And time is running out.
For that reason, Alpha Kappa Alpha is hosting a rush of voter festivities in Georgia and other swing-state communities: “Pretty Party at the Polls” in Pittsburgh; “Pink Party at the Polls” in Durham, N.C.; and parties in Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Detroit, where one particularly energetic chapter is hosting back-to-back-to-back events.
“We haven’t seen the level of activism from these groups since the 1960s,” during the civil rights movement, said Walter M. Kimbrough, the interim president of Talladega College in Alabama and the author of the book “Black Greek 101.”
A ‘Secret Weapon’
Ms. Harris has called Alpha Kappa Alpha, formed at Howard in 1908, her “secret weapon” because the sorority, with more than 360,000 well-connected members, has a long history of civic involvement, including during the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements.
The sorority also is known for getting out the vote in elections, though it is not permitted to endorse any particular candidate — including Ms. Harris — because of its nonprofit status, said Danette Anthony Reed, Alpha Kappa Alpha’s international president and chief executive, in a telephone interview.
But Ms. Anthony Reed did say that Ms. Harris’s candidacy was “revolutionary” because she is on the brink of becoming the first woman president. She added, “I think that her pioneering spirit, the way she works with service, is aligned with our mission.”
At their voter parties, you won’t find Harris buttons or Harris signs. At the event near downtown, the only written mention of Ms. Harris was inside pink gift bags neatly lined up on a table. Inside each was candy and a single-page “2024 Nonpartisan Presidential Guide,” from the N.A.A.C.P., poking from the top. The page had been folded so that Ms. Harris’s side was facing forward. Mr. Trump’s photo was out of sight on the back.
“We’re not telling you who to vote for,” said Maxie Kirk Williams, an Alpha Kappa Alpha member who volunteered with the League of Women Voters in Mableton. “We just want you to vote.”
Yet it’s hard to ignore how the sorority jumped into action when Ms. Harris declared her candidacy in late July. A few weeks later, it formed a political action committee so members and their families could raise money to support federal campaigns. Through mid-October, nearly $1 million has poured in.
In Georgia, Andrea Foard, the co-chair of the Alpha Kappa Alpha’s voter party in Mableton, said her chapter’s members had written hundreds of letters, worked phone banks and helped seniors in nursing homes register to vote. They’ve checked people’s registration statuses in case they had been dropped from the voter rolls, and offered ways for voters to have rides to the polls.
“Even if we get one more person to vote, or five more people, it could make a difference,” Foard said.
‘Find Four People’
Many of the sorority’s 1,000-plus chapters have been functioning as influencers, posting hundreds of messages on social media about voting. The sorority’s leadership has asked members to bring at least four people with them to vote — a friend or a neighbor or a complete stranger.
“Because our democracy is on the line here,” said Chandra Brewton, who works in health care and attended the Mableton event.
An organization called the Divine Nine — consisting of Alpha Kappa Alpha and eight other prominent Black sororities and fraternities, with a total of more than 2.5 million members — has joined the sorority’s effort. Just days after Ms. Harris announced her campaign, it declared a big push among its member groups to get people to the polls.
Early in October, it held an online viewing party for the vice-presidential debate, and beforehand had a public town hall to inform voters of issues most important to the Black community. Each Divine Nine member’s president brought lawmakers or experts to discuss those issues, including the conservative policy plan Project 2025 and how voter suppression remains a problem.
After the debate, Ms. Anthony Reed, Alpha Kappa Alpha’s president, said on the call: “We better go to the polls because if we sit back, we’re not going to make a difference, and it’s on us.”
But the education divide that has shown up in the electorate is also present for these activists.
Mr. Kimbrough, the expert on Black sororities and fraternities, said that the Divine Nine could face a challenge trying to engage Black voters who don’t have college educations. Those voters might see the Divine Nine as elitist, he said, and therefore unable to understand the “everyday life of Black people.”
“That is still something the groups have to look at,” he said. “And I think they’ve been making more of an outreach to try to do some of that work.”
Leon Rogers, a member of Phi Beta Sigma, said that his fraternity and other Black fraternities had been targeting Black men, especially Black men who were in college. They have visited the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities in Georgia — including Clayton State and Morehouse — to register young voters or help them vote absentee.
He said Black women had been “the easiest voters to reach” and that he sensed a lot of apathy among male students as to whether their votes would make a difference.
“Some are telling us that they won’t vote because it doesn’t really change their lives if they do or don’t,” said Mr. Rogers, who works in I.T. “And we’re telling them, ‘No, that’s not right at all.’”
‘If You Care, Then Go Vote’
Catrice Windley, a second-generation Alpha Kappa Alpha member who was volunteering at the party south of Atlanta, said that young people need to learn about reproductive rights. Or if “your aging grandma’s diabetes medications are not $4, but $40; or if marijuana is, or is not, legalized.
“If you care about those issues, then go vote!” said Ms. Windley, who is 50 and works in child welfare.
Her Alpha Kappa Alpha regional chapter called on members to work at the polls on Election Day. Ms. Windley was already signed up.
Asked why the Divine Nine was so involved in the election, Aaron Johnson, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and a chief of staff for Atlanta’s City Council, told a story about his grandmother.
She couldn’t vote when she was a young woman because of poll taxes and literacy tests and “just being Black in Georgia,” he said. And then in 1965, during the civil rights era, he said his mother was arrested when she tried to vote during her senior year of high school.
“It wasn’t that long ago that some people died trying to vote,” Mr. Johnson, who is 50, said. “But you know what? My 99-year-old grandmother voted a few days ago. She needed help, but there wasn’t anything that could stop her from doing it.”
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