THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 31
looked like an attorney about to make
an opening argument. She began by
thanking the volunteers, the Georgia
Democratic Party, and its L.G.B.T.Q.
caucus; her campaign actively courted
gay and lesbian voters—a month before
the election, she became the first nom-
inee of a major party to march in the
Atlanta Pride Parade. Then she repeated
a line that she uses often, to the irrita-
tion of Georgia’s Republican leadership.
She said, “I’m gonna tell you what I’ve
told folks across this state, and this is
not a partisan statement, it’s a true state-
ment: We won.”
She added, “In this election, we tri-
pled Latino turnout, we tripled the
Asian-Pacific Islander turnout.” Be-
tween 2014 and 2018, according to Fair
Fight Action, African-American par-
ticipation also rose, by forty per cent.
(The organization says that its voter
figures are more accurate than census
data, which show smaller, though still
significant, increases.) For Abrams, the
point of continuing to try to organize
in places like Whitfield County is to
create a cross-racial coalition that can
make the state more competitive for
Democrats. In that sense, her efforts
look less like a Hail Mary than like a
pass hurled downfield toward a specific
receiver whom no one else has noticed.
A
brams may be a symbol of the new
Georgia, but she was born in 1973
in Madison, Wisconsin—where her
mother, Carolyn, was earning a master’s
degree in library science at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin—and she grew up in
Gulfport, Mississippi. Carolyn met
Abrams’s father, Robert, in their home
town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when
they were in high school, and in the late
sixties they enrolled in Tougaloo Col-
lege, which had been a center of the stu-
dent civil-rights movement. Politics has
always been a part of the family’s life. In
the eighties, Carolyn told me, when she
worked as a librarian and Robert had a
job as a dockworker, the family picketed
a Shell Oil gas station for the compa-
ny’s refusal to divest from South Africa.
Stacey is the second of six children.
Each of the three oldest children was
assigned responsibility for one of the
three youngest. She was paired with her
brother Richard, who is now a social
worker in Atlanta. Her older sister, An-
drea, has a doctorate in anthropology;
Jeanine has a doctorate in biology. Les-
lie is a federal judge for the Middle Dis-
trict of Georgia. Walter, who attended
Morehouse College, has struggled with
bipolar disorder and addiction, and has
served time in jail. Earlier this year, at
the 92nd Street Y, Abrams spoke about
his difficulties, as she has done in the
past, with his permission, to raise aware-
ness about addiction and mental-health
issues. “If our leaders are ashamed to
tell real stories, how can we trust them
to have real answers?” she said.
In her junior year of high school, the
family moved to Atlanta, where both of
her parents enrolled in the master-of-di-
vinity program at Emory University’s
Candler School of Theology. (They are
now retired elders of the Mississippi
Conference of the United Methodist
Church.) In 1991, Abrams began attend-
ing Spelman College, a historically black
women’s institution, founded in Atlanta
in 1881. (I taught history there from 2001
to 2011.) Johnnetta Cole, an anthropol-
ogist who was the first black female
president of the college (and later be-
came the director of the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of African Art), met
Abrams and her parents at the start of
her freshman year. Cole remembers that
Robert told her, “I want you to know
that I am leaving my baby girl Stacey
here, but, if anything happens, I’m com-
ing to find you.” She said, “I took a deepbreath, and told the Right Reverend
that it was my responsibility to make
sure that Stacey and all her sisters in
that class were as safe as possible, and
that we stretched them, so they learned
how to fly.”
Abrams had grown up with college-
educated parents, but she had never
known kids whose families socialized
with Presidential Cabinet members or
flew on their own jets. Cole encouraged
her to run for campus office—by her
senior year, she’d been elected stu-
dent-government president—and al-
lowed her to sit in on meetings of the
board of trustees. The idea was to give
Abrams, who frequently told Cole how
she thought Spelman should be run, in-
sight into the workings of a university.
Abrams says that the experience pro-
vided her with her first lessons in rais-
ing and allocating funds.
A turning point in her understand-
ing of politics came in the spring of 1992,
when four Los Angeles police officers
were acquitted in the beating of Rod-
ney King, an African-American con-
struction worker. Los Angeles exploded
into riots, and there was unrest on cam-
puses across the country. Students from
several schools gathered at the Atlanta
University Center to protest the verdict.
Atlanta’s civic leadership, unlike that of
Los Angeles, was largely black—a legacy
of the civil-rights movement—and in-
cluded Mayor Maynard Jackson and