This column is part of HuffPost’s “She the People” series: stories by Black women exploring Kamala Harris’ historic candidacy. To read more, visit our hub.
My late mother’s eyes were almost always hidden behind dark glasses.
When she was only 20 years old and a college student at Florida A&M University, a police officer threw a canister of tear gas in Mom’s face during a peaceful march. And marked her for life.
It was 1960, and the officer recognized my mother as a student sit-in leader with Florida A&M’s chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. She’d helped stage sit-ins that resulted in the arrests of Black students and allies sitting down for service at Walgreens and McCrory’s lunch counter.
A thousand students marched to downtown Tallahassee in a nonviolent protest over the arrests. “I want you!” the officer said, and lobbed a live teargas canister into Mom’s face. Mom was barely 5-foot-3. Like most protesters (and HBCU students) in the 1960s, she was wearing prim clothing: dresses for women, jackets and ties for men. Her femininity, stature and attire did not protect her from racism and state violence. Mom choked on the thick gas. She couldn’t see, stumbling through the crowd as she heard screams and shouts.
No wonder Mom always loved horror movies. They helped Mom soothe her emotional wounds, creating imaginary monsters and heroes who could validate and ease her true-life fears.
What she was really afraid of was rooted in reality and the idea of “the clock turning back.” And with the rise of MAGA and the scourge of Donald Trump, I have witnessed my mother’s greatest fears coming to life.
I recently published a horror novel, “The Reformatory,” inspired by Mom’s true-life uncle, Robert Stephens, who died at the notorious Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. In my novel, the reformatory is haunted ― but the most frightening scenes were those revealing Florida’s violent racial history. (It was even harder to write than the civil rights memoir we co-wrote, “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.”)
Even fictionalized, the ghost of Jim Crow was terrifying to visit day after day.
And Mom was right. The clock has turned back. The MAGA slogan “Make America Great Again” makes me think of the treacherous world of “The Reformatory” and the reign of racist lawlessness under Jim Crow.
Inspired by my parents, I’m rallying the horror community to stand and fight to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in a historic online event called Scare Up the Vote starting at 8pm ET on Oct. 15.
I’m working with a tiny committee composed of New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden, Bram Stoker Award recipients Linda D. Addison and Cynthia Pelayo, award-nominated poet Maxwell Ian Gold, and horror podcaster Robb Olson to bring this event to life.
Authors Stephen King, Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Rachel Harrison, Erin E. Adams, and so many others have signed on ― as well as Hollywood horror icons Kevin Williamson (“Scream”), Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleep,” “The Haunting of Hill House”), Don Mancini (creator of “Chucky”) and Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”).
We’re galvanizing to remind Americans that nothing we’ve imagined as horror creators can compare to our fears of what will happen in the United States if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do not win the White House. Or what will happen in a world already reeling in chaos, as dictators and war criminals (leaders Trump most publicly admires) salivate over the prospect of a Trump victory.
So much of this fear is rooted in being a Black woman, especially when I remember how much my mother’s civil rights activism cost her. I truly believe that her lingering trauma ― only partially marked by her dark glasses ― cut years off of her life. She died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 72.
My family and I recently celebrated the 90th birthday of our father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Dorsey Due Jr., and Mom’s dark glasses appeared in photo after family photo. She wore those glasses even indoors because she experienced a sensitivity to light.
As a college student at Northwestern University, when I left an anti-apartheid protest before police moved in for arrests, I called Mom feeling ashamed of myself. I told her I wished I had stayed and gone to jail too.
“Tananarive,” Mom said. “I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.”
That was what we both wanted to believe. But if Kamala Harris can’t stop this country’s plummet into fascism, many more of us will be painted as criminals as we take up the urgent work of trying to protect ourselves from the hate-driven agenda of Donald Trump, Project 2025, and the oligarchs who believe this nation is only here for their plunder.
Recently, Trump said in a speech that police should have a “day of violence” to keep order in this country, a notion comparable to a nightmare from the horror movie, “The Purge.”
Of course he does. He says he wants to purge the country of immigrants, promising mass deportations. He and the GOP have been unapologetic about racist and reckless statements about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, triggering bomb threats with their orchestrated lies about Haitians eating household pets.
Trump’s history of corruption, criminality and insurrection makes him a monstrous threat to our democracy. And we don’t just have to imagine how horrific a Trump presidency would be; we’ve witnessed it before.
Only this time, his rogue administration will have the power of his Supreme Court enablers behind him. The same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. The same Supreme Court that could be tasked with deciding this election after MAGA’s relentless assault on truth and voting rights.
The lies about soaring crime rates and “voting irregularities” always point solidly back to Black and brown communities, because, after all, MAGA does not consider us to be “real” Americans.
And under MAGA, women will be robbed of reproductive choices that affect their own bodies and futures. Women such as Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman in Georgia already have died because they couldn’t access legal abortions under Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.
Kamala Harris represents a new direction forward. Instead of trying to limit and privatize Medicare benefits under Trump’s Project 2025, this week Vice President Harris announced her intention to expand Medicare benefits to include home health care for the elderly — a policy that would relieve untold numbers of voters from the crushing financial impact of nursing our aging parents.
Parents like my 90-year-old father. Parents and grandparents like yours.
Horror fans know there are two types of protagonists in typical horror movies: those who freeze and trip and fall, and those who fight back. In some ways, that’s the whole point of a horror story to me — that moment when a group of campers or a family on vacation finally realizes they’re up against something dangerous, and they come up with a plan to fight.
That’s why the horror community is standing up with Scare Up the Vote. We’re going to talk about why we love horror ― and why we support Kamala Harris in this election. We won’t go back.
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