From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop.

Across the country, they led an outpouring of Democratic elation when the vice president took over the top of the presidential ticket. But underneath their hope and determination was a persistent worry: Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman?

The painful answer arrived this week.

It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.

Many Democrats saw the brutal political environment for the party, peppered with anger about President Biden’s leadership, as more to blame for Ms. Harris’s crushing loss than the double-edged sword of racism and sexism. But others, reflecting on a campaign devoid of controversy or obvious missteps by a qualified candidate who almost never held out her race or gender as reasons to vote for her, found it difficult to ignore suspicions about why Mr. Trump won with such ease.

“This isn’t a loss for Black women, it’s a loss for the country,” said Waikinya Clanton, the founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala. “America has revealed to us her true self,” she added, “and we have to decide what we do with her from here.”

It was the moment that Black female political leaders and organizers had feared most and worked hardest to avoid. Across battleground states, the Democrats organizing fund-raisers, door-knocking and other get-out-the-vote efforts were often Black women, motivated to campaign for a presidential candidate who was not just a member of their party but one of their own.