Black women, the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, led every part of the program on Thursday with the exception of Warren herself. Before the senator’s speech, several women spoke and appeared onstage, including Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Angela Peoples of the political group Black Womxn For, which recently endorsed the Massachusetts senator. “She knows we live in nuance and intersectionality,” Pressley said of Warren.

Peoples said to cheers: “I know one thing for sure: There is no political revolution without us. ... Sen. Warren understands this, and she is ready to lead with us.”

The only white woman who took the stage, Warren explicitly addressed her own identity. “As a white woman, I will never fully understand the discrimination, pain and harm that black Americans have experienced just because of the color of their skin,” she said.

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It’s unclear how successful the pitch will be. Biden has steadily led Warren and every other Democratic candidate among black voters, according to polls. That lead has made him the frontrunner for the presidential nomination as black voters are perhaps the most critical constituency in the 2020 primary.

Other campaigns are also trying to crack Biden’s lead with black voters. Warren’s speech came after two of her opponents — Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — visited the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta this week.

Black voters have taken center stage in the days around the fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night in Atlanta, as candidates try to convince members of the key voting bloc that they would best represent them in the White House. The newly ascendant Buttigieg struggled to answer questions about his polling at zero or near zero with black voters. Biden, meanwhile, mentioned again and again the depth of his support in the black community, including the endorsement of Keisha Lance Bottoms, mayor of majority-black Atlanta.

Warren’s team left little ambiguity in its pitch to black women. The music beforehand was performed by Carmen Berkley (aka DJ CarmenSpindiego), a political strategist and disc jockey. The campaign distributed “Black Women for Warren” and “Black Voters with Warren” signs to the crowd.

Warren’s team previewed the speech in a video narrated by the black feminist Roxane Gay. The candidate called for supporting “Sheila Jackson Lee’s reparations plan,” referring to the congresswoman from Texas. And in case people had somehow missed the point, the campaign’s online livestream of the speech included the banner “Elizabeth speaks about valuing the work of black women.”

The campaign estimated the crowd size at about 2,000, however, about a tenth the size at her last big speech, in New York in September.

And Warren was met by dozens of vocal protesters in Atlanta supporting charter schools, which Warren has criticized.

The chants were so loud that Pressley came back out and took the microphone as Warren stood to her side. “No one is here to quiet you,” Pressley said, but appealed to them “not to dishonor” the history of Atlanta’s washerwomen.

“In this moment, there are many people that do not know this story, because we have been rendered a historical footnote in history,” Pressley said.

The Atlanta address is the third speech Warren has given casting her presidential campaign as a successor to women-led movements. In her February announcement speech in Lawrence, Mass., she spoke of the 1912 textile strike there, and her address at Washington Square Park in New York City connected her many plans to the labor reforms passed in the aftermath of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Warren’s campaign brought the same podium from that New York address — crafted from the barn boards of the homestead of labor leader Frances Perkins — to Atlanta for her speech on Thursday.

Addressing the plight of black women in history, Warren spoke of America’s racist past and present in more explicit terms than some of her Democratic rivals. She talked about Jim Crow laws that were propped up to “destroy black wealth, to endanger black health, to pollute black communities and to confine black people.”

But the candidate also spoke to the white people in the room, answering a question “on some white people’s minds” when politicians like her talk about the impact of government on black people.

“The wealthy and well-connected want us to believe that more for your neighbors will always mean less for you,” Warren said. “The lesson is clear: Racism doesn’t just tear apart black and brown communities — it keeps all working people down.”

