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JONESBORO, Ga. (AP) — Kamala Harris on Sunday summoned Black churchgoers to turn out at the polls and got a big assist from music legend Stevie Wonder, who rallied congregants with a rendition of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

Harris visited two Atlanta area churches as part of a nationwide push known as “souls to the polls.” It’s a mobilization effort led by the National Advisory Board of Black Faith Leaders, which is sending representatives across battleground states to encourage early voting.

After services, buses took congregants straight to early polling places.

At both churches, Harris delivered a message about kindness and lifting people up rather than insulting them, trying to set up an implicit contrast with Republican Donald Trump’s brash style. With just 16 days left until Election Day, Harris is running out of time to get across her message to a public still getting to know her after a truncated campaign.

“There is so much at stake right now,” she said at the Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro. “We understand for us to do good works, it means to do it in the spirit of understanding that our strength is not based on who we beat down, as some would try to suggest. Our strength is based on who we lift up. And that spirit is very much at stake in these next 16 days.”

Wonder led the crowd in singing his version of “Happy Birthday” to the vice president, who turned 60 on Sunday. When he was done, she appeared to choke up, saying, “I love you so much.”

Wonder grinned and said “don’t cry” before telling the crowd how important it was for people to get out and vote.

“We’re going to make the difference between yesterday and tomorrow,” he said.

Harris later said that she “had to check off a whole big one” on her bucket list because of Wonder singing her a birthday song, which prompted the singer to spring up and lead the congregation in a quick verse of ”Higher Ground.”

Pastor Donald Battle said of the election: “Georgia’s gonna be the state that turns it for the vice president.”

“Souls to the Polls” as an idea traces back to the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. George Lee, a Black entrepreneur from Mississippi, was killed by white supremacists in 1955 after he helped nearly 100 Black residents register to vote in the town of Belzoni. The cemetery where Lee is buried has served as a polling place.

Black church congregations across the country have undertaken get-out-the-vote campaigns for years. In part to counteract voter suppression tactics that date back to the Jim Crow era, early voting in the Black community is stressed from pulpits nearly as much as it is by candidates.

In Georgia, early voting began on Tuesday, and more than 310,000 people voted on that day, more than doubling the first-day total in 2020. A record 5 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Earlier Sunday, the Democratic presidential nominee attended New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, where the congregation also sang “Happy Birthday.”

New Birth Pastor Jamal Bryant called the vice president “an American hero, the voice of the future” and “our fearless leader.” He also used his sermon to welcome the idea of America electing its first woman president, saying, “It takes a real man to support a real woman.”

“When Black women roll up their sleeves, then society has got to change,” Bryant said.

Harris referenced scripture as she promoted the importance of loving one’s neighbor, and then drew a contrast to the current political environment.

“In this moment, across our nation, what we do see are some who try to deepen division among us, spread hate, sow fear and cause chaos,” Harris told the congregation. “The true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”

One congregant who got a hug from Harris was 98-year-old Opal Lee, an activist who pushed to make Juneteenth a federally recognized holiday.

Harris is a Baptist. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish. She has said she’s inspired by the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and influenced by the religious traditions of her mother’s native India as well as the Black Church. Harris sang in the choir as a child at Twenty-Third Avenue Church of God in Oakland.

Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attended church in Saginaw, Michigan, and his wife, Gwen, headed to a service in Las Vegas.

Also Sunday, Harris sat for an interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton and was asked about the idea that she might see her support slipping among Black men — some of whom might be reluctant to vote for a woman for president. Former President Barack Obama suggested that might be an issue during a recent campaign stop for Harris in Pittsburgh.

Harris said she had garnered support from many key Black male leaders, adding, “there’s this narrative about what kind of support we are receiving from Black men that is just not panning out in reality.”

On Monday, she will campaign with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

MIAMI (AP) — Hurricane Oscar has made landfall in eastern Cuba, an island beleaguered by a massive power outage, after striking the southeastern Bahamas earlier in the day Sunday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

The hurricane center in Miami said the storm’s center arrived in the Cuban province of Guantanamo, near the city of Baracoa, on Sunday evening. Its maximum sustained winds were near 80 mph (130 kph).

The system is expected to move across eastern Cuba Sunday night and Monday. Forecasters said 6 to 12 inches (15.2 to 30.5 centimeters) of rain are expected across eastern Cuba through early Wednesday, with some isolated locations getting up to 18 inches (45.72 centimeters). A storm surge of up to 3 feet (0.91 meters) in some areas of Cuba’s north shore in the area was possible, the center said.

Oscar was expected to weaken over eastern Cuba before making a turn to the northeast and approaching the central Bahamas on Tuesday, the center said.

The storm’s center was located about 5 miles (10 kilometers) east-southeast of Baracoa, or about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east-northeast of Guantanamo. It was heading west-southwest at 7 mph (11 kph).

Oscar made landfall on Great Inagua island in the Bahamas earlier Sunday. It was expected to produce a dangerous storm surge that could translate into significant coastal flooding there and in other areas of the southeastern Bahamas. Two to four inches (5.1 to 10.2 centimeters) of rainfall were expected, with isolated areas seeing up to 6 inches (15.2 centimeters).

The hurricane’s arrival comes as Cuba tries to recover from its worst blackout in at least two years, which left millions without power for two days last week. Some electrical service was restored Saturday.

Philippe Papin of the National Hurricane Center said it was somewhat unexpected that Oscar became a hurricane Saturday.

“Unfortunately the system kind of snuck up a little bit on us,” Papin said.

Hours earlier Tropical Storm Nadine formed off Mexico’s southern Caribbean coast. It degenerated into a tropical depression as it moved over land.

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HAVANA (AP) — Many Cubans waited in anguish late Sunday as electricity on much of the island had yet to be restored days after an island-wide blackout. Their concerns were raised as Hurricane Oscar first made landfall in the southeastern Bahamas and then slammed into Cuba’s coast.

Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a press conference he hopes the country’s electricity grid will be restored on Monday or Tuesday morning.

But he recognized that Oscar, which hit the island’s eastern coast Sunday evening, will bring “an additional inconvenience” to Cuba’s recovery since it will touch a “region of strong (electricity) generation.” Key Cuban power plants, such as Felton in the city of Holguín, and Renté in Santiago de Cuba, are located in the area.

Some neighborhoods had electricity restored in Cuba’s capital, where 2 million people live, but most of Havana remained dark. The impact of the blackout goes beyond lighting, as services like water supply also depend on electricity to run pumps.

People resorted to cooking with improvised wood stoves on the streets before the food went bad in refrigerators.

In tears, Ylenis de la Caridad Napoles, mother of a 7-year-old girl, says she is reaching a point of “desperation.”

The failure of the Antonio Guiteras plant on Friday, which caused the collapse of the island’s whole system, was just the latest in a series of problems with energy distribution in a country where electricity has been restricted and rotated to different regions at different times of the day.

People lined up for hours on Sunday morning to buy bread in the few bakeries that could reopen.

Some Cubans like Rosa Rodríguez have been without electricity for four days.

“We have millions of problems, and none of them are solved,” said Rodríguez. “We must come to get bread, because the local bakery is closed, and they bring it from somewhere else.”

About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening, followed by the entire island on Friday morning after one of the plants failed.

Besides the Antonio Guiteras plant, whose failure on Friday affected the entire national system, Cuba has several others, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether they remained functional.

The blackout was considered to be Cuba’s worst in two years after Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 3 storm in 2022 and damaged power installations. It took days for the government to fix them. This year, some homes have spent up to eight hours a day without electricity.

Cuba’s government had said on Saturday that some electricity had been restored after one of the country’s major power plants failed. But the 500 megawatts of energy in the island’s electricity grid, far short of the usual 3 gigawatts it needs, had quickly decreased to 370 megawatts.

Even in a country that is used to outages as part of a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s collapse was massive.

The Cuban government has announced emergency measures to slash electricity demand, including suspending school and university classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling nonessential services.

Local authorities said the outage stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized companies and residential air conditioners. Later, the blackout got worse because of breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained, and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities.

Cuba’s energy minister said the country’s grid would be in better shape if there had not been two more partial blackouts as authorities tried to reconnect on Saturday. De la O Levy also said Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, among other nations, had offered to help.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Hurricane Oscar made landfall on Cuba’s eastern coast after striking the southeastern Bahamas earlier in the day.

The hurricane center in Miami said the storm’s center arrived in the Cuban province of Guantanamo on Sunday evening with maximum sustained winds near 80 mph (130 kph).

The system is expected to move across eastern Cuba Sunday night and Monday. Forecasters said 6 to 12 inches (15.2 to 30.5 centimeters) of rain are expected across eastern Cuba through early Wednesday, with some isolated locations getting up to 18 inches (45.72 centimeters). A storm surge of up to 3 feet (0.91 meters) in some areas of Cuba’s north shore in the area was possible, the center said.

Oscar was expected to weaken over eastern Cuba before making a turn to the northeast and approaching the central Bahamas on Tuesday, the center said.

The storm’s center was located about 5 miles (10 kilometers) east-southeast of Baracoa, or about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east-northeast of Guantanamo. It was heading west-southwest at 7 mph (11 kph).

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