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“Win With Black Women” founder Jotaka Eaddy on how the group is embracing its role in a historic election
The founder of the viral “Win With Black Women” livestream that had 90,000 participants nationwide as Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race for the White House in July said as a child, she “always was that kid that just wanted to fight for anybody who I felt was being mistreated.”
Jotaka Eaddy said she felt that way after hearing negative comments made about Black women named as possible vice presidential candidates in 2020, when President Biden was on the campaign trail.
“Every last one of those women were receiving racist, sexist attacks,” Eaddy told CBS News. “No one was challenging their policies, their agendas. It was, ‘she was too ambitious.'”
Eaddy’s mentor, former White House political director Minyon Moore, encouraged Eaddy to do something. And in 2020, Eaddy created “Win With Black Women,” a virtual network that started meeting every Sunday during the pandemic via zoom with the goal of supporting and advancing the policy agenda of Black women. Since July, it’s raised more than $2.6 million for the Harris campaign.
When Mr. Biden opted to leave the race in July, endorsing Harris as his successor, the group’s routine call went viral, as around 90,000 Black women and allies came together to strategize — and to embrace the history that could be made.
“Remember this moment, remember where you were, remember how you felt,” Eaddy said at the time.
Eaddy said when the call came to a close at 1 a.m., around 20,000 women remained, in what she said “felt like a hug that you just did not want to let go.”
The group’s work inspired others to form virtual groups, while raising millions of dollars for the shared cause. And it inspired a “Unite for America” livestream in September with Oprah Winfrey, featuring Harris herself, who thanked Eaddy for her work.
“She started it, Jotaka started it,” Harris said.
According to CBS News polling, more than nine in 10 Black women voters are backing Harris in the 2024 presidential election. The support comes as Black women helped propel Mr. Biden to victory in 2020, like in Georgia, with 92% supporting him and helping a Democrat to win the state for the first time in 28 years.
The effort comes after a long history of Black women organizing, according to historian and professor Martha S. Jones.
“When we look back across not just decades, but more than a century, what we recognize is that Black women have always been knocking on the door, rattling the gates, insisting on a place at the table in American politics,” Jones said.
Jones, the author of “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All,” was part of the zoom call in July, and noted the importance of getting out the vote — which she called “the heart of democracy.”
For Eaddy, she recognizes the new standard that “Win With Black Women” has set on voter outreach, which she hopes will make an impact in decades to come.
“What we are seeing is a level of energy united around our collective, our collective absolute need to ensure that this country is a place where we can all thrive and live and be free,” Eaddy said.
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The discovery of a 4,000-year-old fortified town hidden in an oasis in modern-day Saudi Arabia reveals how life at the time was slowly changing from a nomadic to an urban existence, archaeologists said on Wednesday.
The remains of the town, dubbed al-Natah, were long concealed by the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Then an ancient 14.5 kilometer-long wall was discovered at the site, according to research led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charloux published earlier this year.
For a new study published in the journal PLOS One, a French-Saudi team of researchers have provided “proof that these ramparts are organized around a habitat,” Charloux told AFP.
The large town, which was home to up to 500 residents, was built around 2,400 BC during the early Bronze Age, the researchers said.
Charloux et al., 2024, PLOS One
It was abandoned around a thousand years later. “No one knows why,” Charloux said.
When al-Natah was built, cities were flourishing in the Levant region along the Mediterranean Sea from present-day Syria to Jordan.
Northwest Arabia at the time was thought to have been barren desert, crossed by pastoral nomads and dotted with burial sites.
That was until 15 years ago, when archaeologists discovered ramparts dating back to the Bronze Age in the oasis of Tayma, to Khaybar’s north.
This “first essential discovery” led scientists to look closer at these oases, Charloux said.
“Slow urbanism”
Black volcanic rocks called basalt concealed the walls of al-Natah so well that it “protected the site from illegal excavations,” Charloux said.
But observing the site from above revealed potential paths and the foundations of houses, suggesting where the archaeologists needed to dig.
They discovered foundations “strong enough to easily support at least one- or two-story” homes, Charloux said, emphasizing that there was much more work to be done to understand the site.
But their preliminary findings paint a picture of a 2.6-hectare town with around 50 houses perched on a hill, equipped with a wall of its own.
Tombs inside a necropolis there contained metal weapons like axes and daggers as well as stones such as agate, indicating a relatively advanced society for so long ago.
Pieces of pottery “suggest a relatively egalitarian society,” the study said. They are “very pretty but very simple ceramics,” added Charloux.
The size of the ramparts — which could reach around five meters (16 feet) high — suggests that al-Natah was the seat of some kind of powerful local authority.
These discoveries reveal a process of “slow urbanism” during the transition between nomadic and more settled village life, the study said.
For example, fortified oases could have been in contact with each other in an area still largely populated by pastoral nomadic groups. Such exchanges could have even laid the foundations for the “incense route” which saw spices, frankincense and myrrh traded from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean.
Al-Natah was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt during the period.
But in these vast expanses of desert, it appears there was “another path towards urbanization” than such city-states, one “more modest, much slower, and quite specific to the northwest of Arabia,” Charloux said.
