Women of Color Roar Very Early in the Morning
by Alastair Running Bear Mulholland
On the first day of Black History Month 2025, the seventh annual Women of Color Roar Breakfast began at 7am at San Diego City College. The breakfast honored the strength, resilience, and remarkable contributions of Black women who continue to help shape our communities and country. The event hosted several hundred people, many of whom were women, students, and elected officials. The sponsors were too numerous to count; however, there were local community colleges, the ACLU, IBEW 569, SEIU Local 221, Grid Alternatives, Pillars of the Community, and the North County African American Women’s Association. Vice President Kamala Harris received a special tribute, and California State Senator Dr. Akilah Weber received the Woman of Distinction Award.
The event began with people being guided to the event hall by the bumping music of Buki Domingos and DSOUL, several kind volunteers, and the smell of some deliciously catered breakfast. Several tables selling stuff and promoting causes were chilling at the perimeter. At one of these tables was Stacey L. Johnson-Batiste, author of Friends from the Beginning: The Berkeley Village That Raised Kamala and Me. Batiste kindly greeted me and explained that she wrote the book quickly, in only six months. It was easy for her to simply recall her lifetime friendship with Vice President Kamala Harris. Batiste said that, despite Vice President Harris’s great accomplishments, she has remained a kind and compassionate friend to her over the years.
Women of Color Roar founder Angela de Joseph welcomed everyone in attendance and asked to begin the morning with a prayer from Queen Mother Kathleen Harmon. The Queen Mother’s dress was truly wonderful with bright and varied colors and unique patterns of traditional African wear. Shortly after the prayer, Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber spoke. Weber emphasized that the day was to honor the accomplishments of those that were acknowledged but also the many, many of those that remain unacknowledged. Women who have, for her, been as inspiring and as important as those that are much more written about in history. Weber blasted the new administration’s outright racist overuse of blaming anything and everything on DEI and declared that “this is war.”
One of the attendees was Woi Hiopsi, a board member of the Racial Justice Coalition of San Diego. He lamented, “If we’re gonna move forward together in this difficult time, everyone for justice for Natives and African Americans, we need to start in the right way by acknowledging the land where we are.” Steff Saavedra, was asked to do a land. Saavedra is a descendant of n̈han̈ho, Pueblo and Tsalagi tribes. She is also a board member of the American Indian Recruitment programs and a client relations manager for Colusa Indian Energy. Incredibly, at the beginning of the land acknowledgement by Saavedra, there was an electrical power outage that lasted the exact duration of her speaking. Despite the outage, it went down in a good way. During the land acknowledgement, she thanked the Kumeyaay Nation and acknowledged other original peoples of San Diego County (Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla Nations) for all their efforts and asked for “guidance and clarity about how we can all work together to continue to build a legacy for seven generations to come.”
