PHILADELPHIA – Only hours after pulling off a significant – and drama-filled – victory in New York, Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to the host city of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, where she hopes to return in only a few months to claim the party's blessing as its general election nominee.

Clinton began her tour of Philadelphia Wednesday with a low-profile but highly emotional exchange with former Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the Mothers of the Movement group – women who lost children and loved ones to gun violence or after altercations with police officers.

The women, whose ranks in the past have included the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, rallied around Clinton in New York, South Carolina and Ohio, among other states. On Wednesday, a group of them told their stories at a small baptist church in Philadelphia.

"It's a club that no one wants to be a part of. We don't want any more members. No one else is allowed," says Nicole Paultre Bell, whose fiance, Sean Bell, was killed in 2006 on the morning of their wedding after an encounter with a group of plainclothes New York Police Department officers. "We decided to support Hillary because she supported us. Before we knew what our next steps were going to be, we had a phone call, from Sen. Clinton at the time, expressing her concern for what we had just gone through."

Bell and several other women recounted being contacted by Clinton staffers and eventually meeting with her – a meeting they say helped unify them. Though some had joined her on the campaign trail prior to Wednesday's event, they unanimously endorsed her as the right person to move into the White House next year.

Clinton, in turn, took the opportunity Wednesday to discuss procedural reform for police officers and to denounce what she says are inappropriately lax firearm regulations.

"This weekend in Philadelphia, you had 12 shootings. You had four people murdered, including a 4-year-old girl. You had a policeman shot. That was just one weekend in one American city," Clinton said. "The federal government has a role to play, but we also have to change laws and approaches in the states and cities as well. We need to develop a national consensus."

The church was an interesting choice for Clinton's first public foray into Pennsylvania following Tuesday night's victory in New York. Walking to St. Paul's Baptist Church at the intersection of 10th and Wallace streets, a handful of abandoned and dilapidated storefronts speckle the area. Tall metal gates, bent with age, line the sidewalks. Towering over the neighborhood is a factory now orange with rust and tattooed with graffiti.

The event itself was held in a modestly sized room striped with folding metal chairs, which were filled by Clinton supporters, gun control and police reform advocates and scores of reporters and photographers. At the far end of the room, what appeared to be a partially shattered stained glass window was boarded up. Ceiling fans whirred overhead – some broken or with burned-out lightbulbs, and one that swung about and clanged like church bells.

The neighborhood, the window and the venue seemed to symbolize the Mothers of the Movement group, whose own lives were broken and eroded by the loss of a child.

Clinton has long supported the Mothers of the Movement group, and she has campaigned with them in several other states. Considering Pennsylvania holds the sixth-largest number of prisoners in state or federal correctional facilities in the entire country, according to the Justice Department , it's unsurprising she took the opportunity to focus on police reform and speak with some mothers who lost children during altercations with police officers.

There was also an element of damage control at play, considering former President Bill Clinton's heated exchange with Black Lives Matter protesters at a Philadelphia campaign event on behalf of his wife earlier this month, over the former president's 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, introduced harsher penalties for nonviolent drug-related crimes.

"We obviously have to do a whole lot more to avoid what they call the school-[to]-prison pipeline," Clinton said Wednesday. "We also have to look at the sentencing structures and the mandatory minimums and the whole set of issues that have been raised that we have to address."

Though the act wasn't ever explicitly referenced at Wednesday's event, it seemed that Clinton's supporters who joined her on stage were willing to look past her prior support , as first lady for the laws that they believe have helped America's prison populations boom.

"Anytime you have to go back to 1994 to find something bad on a person, she must be a bad sister, OK?" says Geneva Reed-Beal, whose daugher, Sandra Bland, was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. She noted that Clinton's interest in her cause sealed the deal for her.