STACEY ABRAMS

Governor // Georgia // TK in 2018

MY PARENTS RAISED MY FIVE siblings and me with three tenets: Go to school, go to church, and take care of one another.

Service was a way of life for us. My mother and father instilled in us the idea that no matter how little we had, someone else had less — and it was our job to help care for those people. I did not even realize, as a child, that Saturday was a day off for most children. We spent ours in soup kitchens and juvenile justice centers. When we had a neighbor in need, we would lend a hand. But I could never understand why it was not someone else's job to help and to make bigger changes in people's lives.

Back then, just as is true too often now, our elected leaders were not always responsive to the needs of the people they were meant to serve. They did not always invest in making sure that every family has opportunity, no matter who they are or where they live. And so it fell to others, like my parents, to fill the gap and support those who needed it.

My family's dedication to helping people led me to think about the ways that our government could better help people. It opened my eyes to the impact public servants can and should make — and to how our leaders often failed to fulfill their promises. I saw the power that elected leaders could wield. I saw the power that a governor could wield.

The first time I visited the governor's mansion in Georgia, they almost didn't let me in.

I was seventeen years old and valedictorian of the Avondale High School Class of 1991. Like every valedictorian in the state, I was invited to meet the governor. I woke up on the day of the event and put on my best dress. I put on heels, as well, at my mother's request — even though I hated wearing them. And I got on the bus with my mom and my dad. Our car had broken down when we moved to Georgia, so, like a lot of other families, we used public transportation to get around.

We got off the bus on West Paces Ferry Road, where the governor's mansion is, and started walking up this long driveway as we watched the other valedictorians and their families drive up. Before we got to the house, we approached a big pair of gates and a security guard.

My dad introduced me as one of the valedictorians, but the guard looked at my family and said, "No. This is a private event. You're not allowed. You don't belong."

He did not want to let us in. But that guard had never met Robert or Carolyn Abrams. After a vigorous discussion, he checked his list and let us enter through the gates.

I don't remember meeting the governor or even my fellow valedictorians. But what I do remember was the feeling of being told that I could not have something I had earned. The feeling that, because of where I came from, I would be left out, unable to walk through those gates.

I decided to run for governor because I want to swing those gates wide open for every Georgian.

* * *

After my visit to the governor's mansion, I attended Spelman College, followed by the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Policy and Yale Law School.

At every step, I found ways to step up and serve.

During high school, for instance, I was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign. One day, I took it upon myself to tweak one speech as I typed it up. The campaign manager liked what I wrote and promoted me to speechwriter.

During college, I got involved with the activism that was happening on campus, helping organize protests around the police treatment of Rodney King. When local police teargassed my campus, I decided to take action. I told the mayor of Atlanta at the time, Maynard Jackson, that he was not listening to the voices of young people. Six months later, he offered me a job in the city's department of youth services, where I focused on gang prevention and youth civic engagement efforts.

In law school, I offered to help the friend of a friend set up his nonprofit helping formerly incarcerated individuals — many who were HIV positive — get jobs converting hotels into apartments. I had taken exactly one tax law class, but my friend promised that was more than he knew. Every week, I would trek from New Haven to New York to fill out his paperwork. I found that tax law allowed me to use both the left and right sides of my brain, and so it became my specialty.

After law school, I worked at a white-shoe law firm. I exceeded my pro-bono hours every month. Still, I kept thinking about my parents, about that drive to serve. So I left the private sector to become deputy city attorney of Atlanta. At age twenty-nine, I was the youngest person ever to hold that role.

But what I really wanted to do, more than anything, was to end poverty in Georgia. I came to realize that a job with the City of Atlanta was just not going to foster that change.

When State Representative JoAnn McClinton announced that she would not run for reelection in 2006, I decided to run for her seat. I faced two opponents, but I reached out to as many voters as I could. And because people respond when you work hard, listen to their concerns, and offer solutions to their challenges, I earned their votes, and I won.

Just four years later, I was elected to lead the Democratic caucus in the statehouse. I was the first woman to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly and the first African American to lead the House of Representatives.

I believe that to get ahead in politics, you can't just talk. You need to listen to everyone, and you need to have a record that you can be proud of. I worked to include voices that were too often left out, and I was able to accomplish more than many legislators serving in the minority. The local paper even called me "strangely relevant." But, really, my work wasn't so strange. It was rooted in what I'd learned from my mom and dad.

My parents were activists in the civil rights movement. Like so many, they fought tirelessly to secure the right to vote. My father even registered voters before he was old enough to vote himself, because he knew being able to exercise your voice at the ballot box was vital. That is why, when I found out that more than 800,000...