When New York Attorney General Letitia James found out President Joe Biden would not seek reelection, she was on her way to a 90th birthday party for former Rep. Edolphus Towns at the Berean Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Members of the New York Democratic establishment had gathered at the historic Black church, which was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and found themselves glued to their phones.

Then Biden endorsed Kamala Harris — the vice president, and the first Black and South Asian woman to serve in the role. James said the place erupted.

“We could have had the convention at the church,” James said, “and nominated Kamala from New York.”

Harris’ nascent candidacy is on a meteoric rise, securing enough delegates to lock up the nomination and raising more than $100 million by Monday night. But she also faces an intense and ugly onslaught of racism and misogyny from her Republican opponent and his running mate, who are already attacking her intelligence, the fact she does not have biological children and even how she laughs.

Women of color in New York occupy some of the most important seats in state and local government – and they aren’t naïve about the barriers to their ascents. Gothamist spoke with more than half a dozen women in New York politics about how Harris could overcome the attacks and mount a formidable campaign.

“We are called ‘DEI candidates,’” said New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, referring to the disparaging and racist attacks already emerging against Harris from some members of the Republican party. “The rhetoric is deafening at times.”

But Adams, the first Black speaker of the City Council, said Harris’ candidacy was energizing her family and friends, and especially a younger generation of voters.

“She’s the entire package of what a lot of young folks have been waiting for and wishing for,” Adams said. “Now they’re excited.”

So people are organizing. On Sunday night after the birthday party, James was among the thousands of Black women who joined a Zoom call focused on fundraising and planning public statements of support for Harris and her history-making campaign. Higher Heights for America, an organization dedicated to harnessing Black women’s political power, had a separate organizing call on Monday night to talk fundraising, messaging and polling.

U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn, who spoke on the call, said Harris’ candidacy would excite many immigrant voters. Clarke’s parents are immigrants from Jamaica, as is Harris’ father, and Harris’ mother is from India. While Clarke said she believes Harris’ run will inspire immigrant communities, she also knows it will turn the vice president into a target.

“These folks, there’s a subset that dog whistle to white supremacists,” Clarke told Gothamist. She pointed to Ohio Sen. and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s gripe that Harris does not express “gratitude” when talking about country’s history, comments he made Monday during his first speech alone on the campaign trail. But, she pointed out, Democrats have dealt with this before.

“We’ve had a sort of preview of this with the candidacy of President Barack Obama,” Clarke said. The former president was frequently accused by certain Republicans of not being born in the United States, a false allegation. (Obama released copies of his birth certificate but was still repeatedly dogged by conspiracy theories. He was born in Hawaii.)

As the first Black woman to lead the New York State Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins also knows what it’s like to seize a role traditionally held by white men. For decades, the state’s budget was worked out in a private room by the Assembly speaker, Assembly majority leader and governor in a ritual known as “three men in a room.” Today, that trio no longer involves three white men: Both Stewart Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie are Black; the governor is a woman.

She said it’s important for people like her to break stereotypes about who is capable of leading.

“I may be the first, but I won’t be the last because people will have confidence that women can do these things, people of color can do these things,” Stewart-Cousins said.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a Brooklyn-based political consultant who co-founded Higher Heights and is currently at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said she was excited, but bracing for “the racism, sexism, and misogyny that are going to come.”

Peeler-Allen, whose organization has long supported Harris, said it’s important for her not to overcorrect in response to bad-faith critics, or so-called experts who try to change how she presents herself — “allowing the vice president to be her authentic self, and not tailor herself or her laugh or anything about her to what folks think the electorate will respond to.” Trump has already adopted the moniker “Laughing Kamala” to attack Harris.

In New York, there is scant recent polling that would indicate how local voters feel about Harris now. A Siena College poll of New York state residents from September 2023 found she had a 46% favorable rating, to a 44% unfavorable, with 10% undecided. The numbers suggest Harris has work to do to help New Yorkers get to know her better.

“I have full confidence in the ability of Vice President Harris and her ability to stand up to bullies,” said James, the first Black woman elected to statewide office in New York. She is well acquainted with Trump’s ire after suing him and his administration, prompting the former president to rail against James personally after he was found guilty for fraud.

Now James is at work rallying support for Harris from other state attorneys general across the country. On Sunday night, she issued a statement with the other five Black state attorneys general across the country in support of Harris as the party’s nominee.

James’s support was secure before Harris was headed to the top of the ticket – a solid member of the Democratic establishment, she was already backing Biden’s reelection. But among a younger set of women of color who expressed skepticism about Biden’s candidacy, some have found new reason to engage in the presidential fight.

City Council member Shahana Hanif, the first South Asian woman and Muslim woman elected to the City Council, supported the “uncommitted” movement that sought to pressure the president to pull back his support of Israel over its war in Gaza.

Hanif said she will be “fighting like hell to defeat Trump,” but she is still hoping to see more daylight between Harris and Biden on the war.

“So I hope she is able to do us proud in presenting the path toward peace,” Hanif said.

Harris is reportedly skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, which some on the left have taken as a signal that she may be shifting from Biden’s stance on the conflict.

Queens Rep. Grace Meng, who was the first Asian American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, said she will travel to swing states to support Harris with an eye toward bringing out Asian American voters, the fastest growing demographic in the city, state and nation.

“I think that especially with Kamala being half Asian, this is something that will excite a lot of our community members,” Meng said. “And I’m going to focus on that in the battleground states.”

Dr. Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University, said she is confident in Harris’ abilities and the coalition she’s built around her. But Greer stressed that the campaign needs to be fought and won by more than just Black women.

“It can’t just be Black women saving the democracy, and that goes all the way from Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket to every other Black woman who’s been organizing and fundraising and getting on calls and figuring out how we can push the Democratic Party over the finish line,” Greer said. “My question is: ‘What’s everybody else doing?’”

Jon Campbell contributed reporting.