Election 2020 live updates: Biden, Harris to appear together in Delaware

Harris’s leap onto the Democratic ticket Tuesday sparked a surge of emotion across the nation as Americans for the first time witnessed a woman of color ascend to the country’s highest political levels.

Harris’s selection as the potential next vice president was met with excitement and relief that Black women, in many ways the heart of the Democratic Party, finally have one of their own on the national ticket. Harris, 55, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, makes history on two fronts — as the first Black woman and first Asian American to reach this level.

“I’m jumping for joy,” said Johnnetta Cole, who was the first Black female president of Spelman College, a historically Black all-female college in Atlanta. “Today, 401 years after the first enslaved Africans came to what was then British Virginia, look what has happened. Anyone who does not feel the significance of this, I have to ask, ‘Who are they? Where have they been?’ “