Stacey Abrams

(born 1973)

“Practice boldness, and the world adapts.”

Years in political office: 2007–2017

Position: minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, 2011–2017; member of the Georgia House of Representatives, 2007–2017

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Madison, Wisconsin

Top causes: voting rights, health care, and reproductive rights

Life Story

Stacey Abrams is the second of six kids born to Robert and Carolyn Abrams, who lived in Mississippi and then Georgia so that they could study to become Methodist ministers. Following their faith was not a financially lucrative path, and the family sometimes fell back on government aid, which taught Stacey early on about the value of the social safety net.

While her mom and dad hit the books, so did Abrams. In high school, she got a job on a congressional representative’s campaign—and she was so good they later hired her as a speechwriter. Abrams earned the highest grades in her high school class, becoming the school’s first Black valedictorian. In honor of her academic feat, she was invited to a reception at the governor’s mansion in wealthy Atlanta neighborhood Buckhead. But when her family got off the bus and tried to walk up to the governor’s front door, a security guard looked them up and down and told them they did not belong at the private event.

That show of racism and classism lit a fire under Abrams. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically Black school, where she became a campus leader during intense student protests over the not-guilty verdict in the Rodney King trial, in which LA cops were charged with excessive force for savagely beating a Black man. Abrams even debated Atlanta’s mayor on television, taking him to task over not supporting young people. A few months later, his office gave her a job on the city’s youth services.

After attending the University of Texas and Yale University for graduate degrees, Abrams headed back to Atlanta and became an attorney. She initially worked at a private firm, but soon she was appointed deputy city attorney—reportedly, the youngest in Atlanta history. She went on to win her first election to the Georgia House of Representatives, where she worked on education and tax issues. After four years, she became the House minority leader, leading her Democratic peers in policy work. Yet again, she was the first Black person and the first woman to be appointed to the position.

What’s on Her Agenda

Black people have long had to fight for their right to vote in the United States. Some early voting rights activists were murdered, including Lamar Smith, the Reverend George Lee, and Herbert Lee—all from Mississippi, one of Abrams’s home states. So it’s no surprise that she has long been concerned about voter suppression. An organization she founded while serving in the House of Representatives, the New Georgia Project, registered two hundred thousand voters of color in two years.

When she decided to run for governor in the 2018 election, she was right to be worried about getting a fair election. Abrams’s opponent Brian Kemp was Georgia’s secretary of state, in charge of overseeing the gubernatorial election! He had been criticized for failing to properly secure 6 million Georgia voters’ personal information and faced a lawsuit for incorrectly nullifying some 340,000 voter registrations. Former president Jimmy Carter said that if Kemp kept his seat even while running for governor, then this was a clear conflict of interest. He called for Kemp’s resignation before the election, but Kemp ignored Carter’s advice, citing other elected officials who had not resigned while running for higher office.

On Election Day, many were horrified at what they saw as widespread voter suppression. Over two hundred polling places were closed. Many majority-Black and low-income precincts—the exact areas with the highest concentration of Abrams supporters—found themselves without the proper number of voting machines. Thousands more voters arrived to find that their names had been wrongly flagged as inconsistent or incorrect.

Abrams wound up losing by only 54,000 votes. Given the large numbers of those who had been unable to cast their vote, she questioned the legitimacy of the election results. She had won 1.9 million votes—surpassing any other Democratic candidate in the state’s history. After her call for a runoff was rejected, she gave a speech to end her campaign. In it, she made it clear that she was not in agreement with the election results. “Democracy failed Georgians,” she said. In 2019 her organization Fair Fight Action sued the Georgia Board of Elections over the voter suppression tactics employed in her election. Abrams was still intent on righting the system’s wrongs.

It’s not every day that you see a politician launched into the national spotlight by a high-profile election loss, but Abrams’s resolve led to just that. There has been much speculation about whether she would run for a US Senate seat, make another go at the Georgia governorship, or even launch a presidential campaign. This last possibility got more media attention when Abrams dismissed the notion that she would run as Joe Biden’s vice president by saying, “You don’t run for second place.” After months of teasing supporters, Abrams officially stated she would not run for president in the 2020 elections but changed her mind on serving as VP. “I would be honored to be considered by any nominee,” she said.

If anyone doubted that Abrams is a force to be reckoned with, it was dispelled when she was picked to give the Democrats’ official rebuttal to US president Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech. Traditionally, the speech is given after the president addresses the country on legislative priorities and gives an assessment of where the nation stands economically and socially. The rebuttal gave Abrams a chance to tell the nation what she stands for: respecting immigrants’ contributions to society, prioritizing affordable health care and other economic measures that help working families, and challenging all politicians to fully respect the rights of all US residents.

Awesome Achievements

• Abrams was the first Black woman nominated for governor in any state by a major US party.
• She was the first in her family to buy a house.
• Abrams was the first Black woman to give an official response to the president’s State of the Union—and she didn’t even hold an elected position at the time.
• She has written eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery, which have sold over one hundred thousand copies.

Quotables

“If you don’t bother asking for permission, then anyone else’s denial of your agency is irrelevant.”

“Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.”

“We are a mighty nation because we embedded in our national experiment the chance to fix what is broken. To call out what has faltered. To demand fairness wherever it can be found.”

“I always say that if you’re not at the leadership table, then expect to be on the menu.”