US Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the world and her supporters on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, confirming that she had lost the 2024 Election to Donald Trump, conceding to the Republican President-elect after a hard fought campaign. Her speech came a few hours after officially conceding in a phone call to President-elect Trump.
The Vice President urged her supporters to accept her loss and focus instead on the future. “While I concede this election,” she said, “I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
“The light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up, and as long as we keep fighting,” Harris said during her concession speech at Howard University in Washington D.C., a historically Black college where she was an undergraduate.
For her concession speech at her alma mater, Harris dressed symbolically wearing a dark purple suit with a matching dark purple satin top underneath. Here’s an explanation of why wearing the colour purple is so significant.
Bipartisanship
The colour purple has long represented bipartisanship: the literal mix of red, for the Republican party, and blue, for the Democratic party. Swing states are also sometimes referred to as purple states because their electoral status comprises near-equal numbers of red and blue voters.
Suffragette movement
Second, purple is a colour of the suffragette movement, the decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. The organization described the meaning of the colour purple in a newsletter published December 6, 1913: “Purple is the colour of loyalty, constancy to purpose, unswerving steadfastness to a cause.” White is another colour of the suffragette movement. In the same newsletter it was described as “the emblem of purity, symbolizes the quality of our purpose.”
Harris previously chose to wear white back in November 2020 to deliver her victory speech after the election was officially called for Biden-Harris, and wore a double-breasted royal purple coat created by Brooklyn-based designer Christopher John Rogers over a matching dress for the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, so it feels apt that she wore another suffragette colour on this occasion.
Hillary Clinton also wore the colour purple when she delivered her memorable concession speech after losing the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump on November 9, 2016. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, even wore a purple tie that morning.
Shirley Chisholm
The colour purple may have also had an extra meaning for Harris, who may have used it as a nod to Shirley Chisholm, who became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress in 1968 and later ran for president in 1972 under the Democratic party. Chisholm’s boundary-breaking trajectory in politics “inspired” Harris’ career and Harris has often used the colour purple as a tribute in her in campaign materials throughout her career.
