PHILADELPHIA — White House candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris touched all the expected notes Tuesday with a predominantly Black audience of about 200 here, expressing alarm about the Black maternal health crisis, promising support for small businesses, and expressing empathy for caregivers — who face stress that impacts Black families more heavily than other groups. 

Perhaps most pointed was Harris’ response to a question about the crisis in Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian-American immigrants have received threats and harassment after Republican candidate Donald Trump claimed they were capturing and eating people’s household pets. 

“It’s a crying shame, I mean, my heart breaks for this community,” said Harris, clothed in a beige suit and facing three journalists on stage. “You know that there were elementary school children, — it was school photo day. You remember what that’s like going to school on picture day?  Who dressed up in their best, got all ready …. and had to be evacuated? Children. Children. A whole community put in fear.”

Harris then indirectly addressed Trump’s claim about cats and dogs, a claim he and running mate J.D. Vance continue to support.

“I learned a long time ago in my career, having the background as prosecutor, when you have these positions, when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand on a deep level how much your words have meaning,” she said.

But audience members at the hour-long session at WHYY, the public radio station in Philadelphia, said they felt Harris could have taken her statements a bit further with more concrete ideas. The audience was made of members of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), HBCU students and members of the public.

Harris’ visit came about after she declined an invitation by NABJ to address their annual convention in Chicago last month. Every four years, the organization invites the two major presidential candidates to speak, but only Republican candidate Donald Trump accepted. The situation prompted critics across the country to accuse NABJ of catering to Trump, who has an 18-percent support rating among Black voters compared to 78 percent for Harris, according to a Morning Consult survey published on Tuesday.

Harris had only been 10 days into her presidential campaign when the NABJ convention started at the end of July. She declined the speaking invitation, saying she had a tight schedule and was set to speak at the funeral of U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a Democratic stalwart who died of cancer earlier this year.

NABJ President Ken Lemon said he was glad Harris was able to make good on a promise to meet with NABJ later in the year.

“It gave us that opportunity to hear her and that’s what they [the campaign] promised us,” Lemon, a reporter at WSOC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina, said after the Philadelphia talk. 

“During the convention they said, ‘We’re coming back to you in September,’ and they came back,” Lemon continued. “We would love to have been with as many members as we could at the convention. That did not happen. But the most important thing did happen — we had an opportunity to have her answer some of the questions of great importance, just as we did with the other candidate at the convention. We had an opportunity to broadcast her answers to those questions and we had an opportunity to in-person allow some of our journalists to … prepare for their efforts to cover these stories.”

When asked about Black men, Harris’ response wove from a statement into how Black men must be viewed by candidates like any other voting bloc who must be wooed, to her thoughts on economic support and small businesses which, she said, are the “backbone of the economy.”

“Right now, small businesses only get a tax deduction of $5,000. Nobody can start a business with $5,000 so I’m expanding that to $50,000, understanding … that when people have the opportunity to have the resources to get started, they’re going to put in the good ideas, they’re going to put the hard work into it,” Harris said. 

Harris also noted that more Black families are likely to carry medical debt, a burden that has frequently been cited as one of the major reasons people fall into financial trouble.

“We’re going to eliminate medical debt from being on your credit score,” she said of her office. “Until now, medical debt worked against your credit score … and the difference between what that number is and what it needs to be is the difference between being able to get a car loan, a small business loan, or even a lease to a new apartment.”

Harris tied many issues together, saying that many play into the others, in one thread talking about the student loan crisis, economic inequalities, and disparities in the health system.

“Black women are three, four times more likely to die in childbirth than other women and we know that the reasons for that include disparities that preexist her pregnancy, including disparities that exist in the system during her pregnancy,” she said.

At the end of the session, a panelist asked Harris about why she is bringing joy into this election and about Republicans trying to recast that as her being silly and not focused on issues.

“There are some times when your adversaries will try and turn your strength into a weakness — don’t you let them; don’t you let them,” she said. “I find joy in the American people. I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it. I find joy in ambition. I find joy in the dreams of people. I find joy in building community. I find joy in building coalitions. I find joy in believing that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on not who you beat down but who you lift up.”

Jailam Hutton, a student at Temple University, said he wanted to hear more concrete ideas. 

“I did watch the presidential debate and I’ve been closely following her campaign so I think … something that … could have had more clarification is when the moderators asked what Kamala Harris would do in regards to pistols and other handguns and I think her answer wasn’t very succinct on that,” said Hutton, 18, of Maplewood, New Jersey. “I think that could be applied to a lot of her answers actually where she maybe could have answered much more precisely instead of kind of dancing around the whole issue.”

Linda Bradley, 61, of Philadelphia, said she was motivated by Harris’ expressed commitment to reproductive freedom and her ode to joy, so to speak, at the conclusion of the talk.

Dr. Norma George of Cheyney State University, an HBCU in Pennsylvania, said Harris’ talk provided an opportunity for the 13 journalism students she brought with her to cover the talk as an assignment.

“I just appreciated the opportunity for our students to see how, as aspiring journalists they, the media, could engage with a candidate … to envision themselves as professional journalists, to envision themselves in a position where they can ask questions and they can probe,” said George\, chairperson of Cheyney’s Humanities Department.