The Strategist Behind the Viral #WinWithBlackWomen Movement

When Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race in July and endorsed Kamala Harris for President, Jotaka Eaddy was at her childhood home down a dirt road in Johnsonville, S.C., getting ready to host her regular online gathering of Black women leaders. The weekly Sunday video conference quickly ballooned from its usual several hundred attendees to more than 90,000, and the network’s hashtag #WinWithBlackWomen radiated across the Internet, sparking nearly 200 more groups to form under monikers like Cat Ladies for Kamala, Train Lovers for Harris, and Swifties for Kamala. The call raised $1.6 million in 100 minutes for Harris’ campaign. Two months later, as Eaddy sat in the front row at a campaign event hosted by Oprah Winfrey and featuring appearances by celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, and Chris Rock, Harris turned to her and said, “Jotaka started it.”

Eaddy launched Win With Black Women in 2020 to counter racist and sexist attacks against Black women being considered to join Biden’s ticket as Vice President. The group mobilized a get-out-the-vote effort for Biden and Harris, and when they won, the group pushed for Black women to be named to senior positions. They demanded the Senate hold a swift vote to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. And they pressured the Biden Administration to bring home WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner from captivity in Russia. “When we as Black women show our economic power, our political power, it sends a message to the country about our rightful place in this country, but also about the investments in Black women,” says Eaddy. “How do we close these gaps? How do we harness the collective power of Black women so that we collectively rise?”

As a strategy consultant and former tech executive, Eaddy has worked with Silicon Valley companies to measure the social impact of technology and close racial gaps in access to online lending and startup financing. Black women, she says, receive less than 1% of venture-capital tech funding. She previously worked as senior director for voting rights at the NAACP and also advocated around the U.S. in the early 2000s to end the juvenile death penalty, helping to lay the groundwork for the Supreme Court in 2005 to ban the practice that disproportionately ended the lives of Black and Latino youth.

Eaddy’s social-justice work started early. She caught the attention of her community in rural South Carolina with her Easter speeches in church. In high school, she was invited to Washington, D.C., to attend a law conference, and friends held bake sales and community dinners to raise $3,000 for her to go. She went on to become the first Black woman elected student-body president in the history of the University of South Carolina. Harris’ loss to Trump initially left her feeling defeated until a longtime mentor told her, “No one’s dropped the baton. We simply had the honor of carrying it further.” While Harris didn’t win the election, Eaddy says, “we did not lose the collective forward movement of Black women.”

She now lives in the nation’s capital, but she has been spending time in Johnsonville recently to help her father after her mother died in December. On the wall of her childhood bedroom, her mom had put up a painted sign reading “All you need is love.” Eaddy says her parents taught her to have love for herself, love for people, “but most importantly love for our collective freedom.”

Styling by Jasmine Pittman; hair by Maureen Rumble; make-up by Lola Okanlawon