“We must cease being participants
in our own oppression.”
- Stacey Abrams -
America was never the same after December 9, 1973, when Stacey Abrams was born. The second oldest of six children, Abrams was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Robert and Carolyn Abrams, a couple who first met at the height of the civil rights movement while working as lifeguards in the heavily segregated town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The couple moved to Madison, Wisconsin, so Carolyn could attend the University of Wisconsin and earn a master’s degree in library science. Once she had earned the degree, they moved their expanding family to Atlanta, Georgia, where they both studied graduate programs in divinity and became United Methodist Ministers (1).
Abrams’s parents taught her and her siblings three main principles to live life by: “Go to school, go to church, and take care of others” (2). She lived her life by these three principles far into the future and was often able to practice as she was growing up; she practiced these three principles while in the Girl Scouts and was even selected to represent the Mississippi Girl Scouts at the Girl Scouts National Convention, as a result. Her selection was met with divisiveness, as many thought that having a Black girl represent Mississippi was the wrong move. “They thought if they left me behind, I’d stay gone,” Abrams would later recount. Some people were even so displeased with her selection that they went as far as changing her flight registration to a different date. “There are gonna be a lot of people who try to stop you from getting on the plane,” she said, “but there’s no wrong time for a Black woman to be in charge,” Abrams explained along with how she flew herself to the convention (2).
Abrams was very passionate about her education from that point on. She attended Avondale High School in DeKalb County, Georgia, where she got her start in politics as a speechwriter for a Congressional Campaign Committee when she was just seventeen years old. She graduated high school as the first Black valedictorian in the school’s history and enrolled in Spelman College to pursue undergraduate degrees in political science, economics, and sociology. Spelman College, a Historically Black College (HBCU), was undoubtedly a great source of inspiration for Abrams as many impactful Black figures attended that school such as Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, and Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and an activist herself. Abrams then pursued a master’s degree in public affairs in 1988 from the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs (1,2).
Stacey Abrams has become very well known for fighting against racial injustice in her career. This passion began in the early 1990s with Abrams standing out from the crowd during a televised town hall as she debated with Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor, on the topic of racial justice. Jackson was so impressed with her passion that he hired her to be a research assistant with the Atlanta Office of Youth Services while still in college (10). Abrams also interned with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and pursued a law degree from Yale in 1999.
With a long list of accolades that included three prestigious college degrees and the three principles instilled by her parents, Abrams began working for the people. From 1999 to 2003, she spent her time working as a tax attorney at Atlanta’s Sutherland Asbill & Brennan Law Firm, where she worked with tax exemptions, public finance, and healthcare. In 2002, she was appointed as Atlanta’s Deputy City Attorney. Abrams already had a great career under her belt, including co-owning a business called Nourish that made sippy cups for toddlers and bottled water for babies. Unfortunately, this business was forced to close during the 2008 recession, which led her to start a loan company that helped small businesses. In the rare occurrence of free time, Abrams also wrote eight rather spicy romance novels under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery; her most recent book released in 2009 follows the story of a young criminal on the run and an FBI agent in the fictional city of Hallden, Georgia (9).
In 2006, Abrams, as a Democrat, expanded her career by running for the 89th District for the Georgia House of Representatives (HOR) and won the election with 51% of the vote. She stayed in this role for a decade, and in 2010, she was elected to be the minority leader. Her time in the Georgia HOR brought her many significant accomplishments. For example, she helped preserve the Georgia HOPE scholarship that helps low-income students but was once in grave danger of being terminated. She also helped prevent Georgia’s largest tax increase and worked on public transportation funding and criminal justice reform. Many of the accomplishments wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Abrams’s efforts to reach across the aisle. She explained, “Republicans would bring me their bills and ask me to look at them. They didn’t always agree with me, but they knew they could trust me, and not every disagreement has to become a battle” (2).
She then resigned from her seat to run for governor of Georgia in 2017 but lost to Brian Kemp by less than 55,000 votes. As explained in the essay “Voter Suppression: America’s True Form of Voter Fraud”, many Republican leaders and political appointees have been known to push methods such as requiring IDs to vote, restricting voter registration, and gerrymandering to disenfranchise current and possible voters, mostly from areas where the Democratic candidates would be favored, and limit or completely block their votes. Consequently, ten days after the Georgia gubernatorial election, Abrams decided not to concede to Kemp, stating that “concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that” (4). Abrams’s words could be seen as those of a sore loser, but many prominent sources believed it was her right, and even her duty, not to concede based on the evidence of voter suppression. Studies by The Washington Post showed that many methods of voter suppression were used in this election. Not only was Kemp’s office taking care of the election procedures, but evidence also showed that over 200 polling places were closed in diverse neighborhoods, among other things (5).
To combat this ongoing issue present in Georgia and many other states, Abrams founded Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to fighting voter suppression. Fair Fight is a proud organization that “promote[s] fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage[s] voter participation in elections, educate[s] voters about elections, voting rights, ...bring[s] awareness on election reform, advocates for election reform at all levels, and engages in other voter education programs and communications” (6). Through Fair Fight, Abrams and her team helped 800,000 people register to vote before the 2020 election.
It remains to be seen whether or not Georgia will remain a blue state after the 2020 election in which Joe Biden was able to flip the state for the first time since the election of 1992 when Bill Clinton won the state. However, the Senate election wins of both John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator may be excellent signs for Democrats as both Ossoff and Warnock were able to beat their Republican challengers. At the same time, voters had full knowledge that their wins would lead to Democratic control in the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, by larger margins than Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia (7).
Stacey Abrams has worked her whole life serving other people. And while many people still strive to combat her efforts. One of the most recent examples is the newest Georgia election bill, a bill that only furthers voter suppression in the state of Georgia and a bill that saw Kemp sign it behind closed doors--the other side of those doors seeing Representative Park Cannon was arrested for knocking on the door Kemp was behind (8). Abrams still fights for what’s right, as she is now at the front of a lawsuit suing the state of Georgia for the barbaric legislation (9). And while many feel like Joe Biden snubbed her while choosing his Vice President, it is essential to note that she has a much better chance of winning the next Georgia gubernatorial election in 2022, not only giving Georgia a great leader as governor but giving Georgia its first female and Black governor.
Reflection
Growing up, I lived in a heavily religious town… I mean, heavily religious. I just had a dream the other night in which I was in my second-grade classroom with my tenth-grade English teacher (you know how dreams go), and we were having a pretty loud discussion in one of the corners of the room about the book Heaven is for Real. While discussing, I explained that due to the fact that I had never been to church before, I had also never read past the first two pages of the Bible. I mean, I still know the basics, yet if you were to quiz me on the Bible, I would probably give up after the first three questions. So in my dream, the whole class heard this and instantly got mad. My former fellow classmates, all with anger in their eyes and voices, began telling me that I was so wrong for showing no real interest in the Bible.
Of course, in this dream, how could I? Nobody was giving me any reason to look to the Bible or go to church other than the fact that it was the cultural norm in the area. While I wouldn’t mind reading the book in real life if I ever had the time, I bet if any of the hardcore churchgoers from my high school days were reading the past two paragraphs, they’d be instantly horrified. In my old school, with few exceptions, if you were a Republican, you were a Christian, and if you were a Christian, you were, in the nicest way possible, racist and/or discriminatory in some kind of way. I remember always seeing students from the “holiest of church societies” falling into this category.
And that’s a good majority not all.
I remember talking with one of my closest friends during my senior year about the lack of African Americans at my school--there was only one Black student as far as I can recall--just for her to tell me “Well yeah, this is America!” as if white people were the only people in America. Overall, many in the Christian community heavily supported the former president--someone who began a movement that supported the conspiracy that a former President wasn’t even born in America due to him being of Kenyan nationality and someone who has referred to various foreign countries as “s**thole countries”--as well. There was also hate for the LGBTQ+ community and many other diverse populations. These factors and the overall attitude towards my lack of presence at any church in the community really were the reasons why I never put any interest in it for so long. I would’ve even gone as far as to say that I was never interested in having Christian friends or learning anything more about the religion, and I even called myself an atheist for a while.
But while I have encountered many prejudicial perspectives, I ultimately blame my ignorance towards religion, Black history, women’s history, and really anything else on both myself and the attributes of a rebellious teenager. I never wanted to learn nor did I put forth the effort towards learning about these things to the fullest extent I could. However, I am glad I am doing so now, especially as I wait for the chance to get a Covid-19 vaccine; after I do, I hope to reenter society with open arms towards all people, open to learning and new experiences.
People like Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jolene Loetscher, some of my closest friends, and, of course, Stacey Abrams make me both recognize the harm that ignorance and prejudice can cause and appreciate the change that knowledge and openness can create. There are those who still push the policies and ideas that suppress voters and bar individuals like Stacey Abrams from gaining power, but there are also still those like Stacey Abrams who create voting organizations and live life by following their ideals while welcoming other people and experiences, leveraging their beliefs to benefit as many people as they can.
I, for one, am looking forward to what Abrams will do next even while I strive to find ways to support her and help those around me.
Written by Demme/Shade
Sources & Links
Stacey Abrams bows out of gubernatorial race with fiery speech | AJC. Atlanta. News. Now.
Did racially motivated voter suppression thwart Stacey Abrams? | The Washington Post
Georgia lawmaker ‘shaken but resolved’ following arrest at election bill signing | ABC News
Stacey Abrams-Founded Group Sues Georgia Over Over ‘Voter Suppression Bill’ | Forbes
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