Stacy Abrams was the Democratic nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, becoming the first African American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the United States. In February 2019, Abrams became the first African American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address.
In addition to being a groundbreaking politician, Abrams is also a New York Times best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction books, Our Time Is Now and Lead from the Outside, were New York Times best sellers. Abrams wrote eight fiction books under the pen name Selena Montgomery before 2021. While Justice Sleeps was released on May 11, 2021, under her real name. Abrams also wrote a children's book, Stacey's Extraordinary Words, released in December 2021.
Abrams has accomplished more, much more. Starting with her early life, she was born in 1973 in Wisconsin. The second of six siblings, Abrams was born to Robert and Carolyn Abrams in Madison, Wisconsin, but raised in Gulfport, Mississippi where her father was employed in a shipyard and her mother was a librarian. In 1989, the family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where her parents pursued graduate divinity degrees at Emory University. They became Methodist ministers and later returned to Mississippi with their three youngest children while Stacey and two other siblings remained in Atlanta.
In school, Stacey Abrams was a standout. She attended Avondale High School, graduating as valedictorian in 1991. In 1990, she was selected for the Telluride Association Summer Program. At 17, while still in high school, she was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign and then as a speechwriter based on the improvements she made to a campaign speech.
She attended Spelman College where she studied economics, political science and sociology. As a freshman in 1992, Abrams took part in a protest on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, during which she joined in burning the Georgia state flag which, at the time, incorporated the Confederate battle flag. It had been added to the state flag in 1956 as an anti-civil rights movement action.
In 1995 she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude. During her college years, she worked in the youth services department in the office of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. She later interned at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
From Spelman, Abrams went on to study public policy at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she earned a Master of Public Affairs degree in 1998. Afterward, she earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
After graduating from Yale, her political career began to rise swiftly. In 2002, at age 29, Abrams was appointed a deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta. In 2006, Abrams ran for the 84th District of the Georgia House of Representatives and won against two other Democrats in a primary election. She represented Georgia House District 84 from 2007 to 2013. During that tenure, she became the first Black woman to become the Democratic minority leader in the Georgia House.
In 2011 Abrams argued that a Republican proposal to cut income taxes while increasing a tax on cable service would lead to a net increase in taxes paid by most people. She performed an analysis of the bill that showed that 82% of Georgians would see net tax increases and left a copy of the analysis on the desk of every House legislator. The bill subsequently failed.
In 2017, Abrams decided to run for Governor of Georgia, the first Black woman to do so. On May 22, she won the Democratic nomination, making her the first Black woman in the U.S. to be a major party's nominee for governor. After winning the primary, Abrams secured several high-profile endorsements, including one from former president Barack Obama. She then ran against the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp. As Georgia's secretary of state, Kemp oversaw elections and voter registration during the election. Kemp was accused of voter suppression during the election.
Political scientists Michael Bernhard and Daniel O'Neill described Kemp's actions in the 2018 gubernatorial election as the worst case of voter suppression in that election year. Additionally, election law expert Richard Hasen called Kemp "perhaps the most incompetent state chief elections officer" in the 2018 elections, pointing to several actions that jeopardized Georgia's election security and made it harder for eligible voters to vote.
Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp's office canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations, with nearly 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, election-law experts said that this "may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history." Investigative journalist, Greg Palast, found that of the approximately 534,000 Georgians whose voter registrations were purged between 2016 and 2017, more than 334,000 still lived where they were registered, and those voters were given no notice that they had been purged. Kemp's office denied any wrongdoing, saying that by "regularly updating our rolls, we prevent fraud and ensure that all votes are cast by eligible Georgia voters."
On November 6, 2018, Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes. In her campaign-ending speech, Abrams announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights nonprofit organization that sued the secretary of state and state election board in federal court for voter suppression. According to the judge in the case, it "resulted in wins and losses for all parties over the course of the litigation and culminated in what is believed to have been the longest voting rights bench trial in the history of the Northern District of Georgia.”
On August 17, 2019, Abrams announced the founding of Fair Fight 2020, an organization to assist Democrats financially and technically to build voter protection teams in 20 states. Abrams is Fair Fight Action 2020's chair. After Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, both The New York Times and The Washington Post credited Abrams with a large boost in Democratic votes in Georgia and an estimated 800,000 new voter registrations.
Stacey Abrams has proven herself to be a skillful political organizer and motivator to get people registered to vote. Her efforts also contributed to the Democratic Party's successes in the 2022 election. In that year she ran again for governor against the incumbent Brian Kemp but lost by a wide margin. She has a bright future ahead that will benefit all Americans.
She is the recipient of many awards which include:
In 2001, Ebony Magazine named Abrams one of the "30 Leaders of the Future".
The 2012, John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award from the Kennedy Library and Harvard University's Institute of Politics, which honors an elected official under 40.
In 2014 Governing Magazine named her a Public Official of the Year, an award that recognizes state and local officials for outstanding accomplishments.
Abrams was recognized as one of the "12 Rising Legislators to Watch" by the same publication in 2012 and one of the "100 Most Influential Georgians" by Georgia Trend for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
In 2014, Abrams was named 11th most influential African American aged 25 to 45 by The Root, rising to first place in 2019.
In 2019, Abrams received the Distinguished Public Service Award from the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs.
For her nonviolent campaign to get out the vote, Abrams has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Abrams was featured in All In: The Fight For Democracy, a documentary about voter suppression in the United States. In it, she talks about her family's voting struggles in Mississippi and voter suppression during her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial campaign.
Experts predict that Stacey Abrams will be an influence on the American political scene for years to come and she has been mentioned as a future Vice Presidential or even Presidential Candidate. The hard work, passion, and intelligence with which she conducts her work on behalf of those who have been disenfranchised will continue to resonate with Americans.