53,000 Black men joined a Zoom call and raised more than $1.4 million in 4 hours to support VP Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign. Although it was organized by Khalil Thompson, founder and executive director of non-profit Win With Black Men, he doesn’t take the credit.
“As most great things in our community, this all started with Black women first,” Thompson tells ESSENCE.
He’s referencing the historic call conducted by Win With Black Women (WWBW), the founding organization Thompson took inspiration from.
Launched in 2020 by Jotaka Eaddy, the weekly calls gather, empower energize Black women to better their communities. On July 21, not long after President Biden announced he wouldn’t re-run for the presidency, more than 44,000 women attended the WWBW call and raised $1.6M for the Harris campaign in four hours.
“I wasn’t surprised that that happened,” Thompson says. “Black women just get things done.”
In 2022, Eaddy held a call inviting Black men to join. It was then Thompson says he had an epiphany.
“Why don’t we have our own? Why isn’t there a space like this for Black men to gather, share ideas and affect change.” After getting Eaddy’s blessing to build out his own spinoff, Thompson built a massive list of Black men aiming to engage about community issues.
“It was slow at first—we didn’t get a lot of folks for our first couple of calls, and then it started to be 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, but It’s still relatively, we had 35 followers on Instagram.”
Now, as of the latest meeting, the community ballooned to more than 53,000 with public figures like Don Lemon and Hill Harper showing support.
“It has definitely mushroom clouded, but I think what people enjoyed was that we didn’t just start this because of Kamala Harris. We’ve been here before. We worked with Black women before to talk to them about this process and getting this organization off the ground. But it’s funded out of my pocket. So I believed in it and wanted to keep doing it and brought on a couple of people to help me get it into reality and then take it from there.”
Thompson shares he’s excited to build on the momentum, and has hope-filled plans for the future.
“I’m following Jotaka’s lead in this and running with the baton she gave me,” Thompson says. “Like her, I want to ensure that these these lovely and amazing dollars that we’re giving to the campaign be turned around and funneled into the groups doing the work on the ground—to organizers and Black media that are engaging our communities. We are not mobilization voters. We are persuasion voters that need to be talked to. We need to be listened to. We need to be given information and allow us to think about what you’re saying.”