Andrea J. Loney - Stacey Abrams: Voting Visionary

The door swung open with a whoosh. Giddy with excitement, ten-year-old Stacey Abrams followed her parents and her big sister into the school building. She made sure to keep her younger sisters and brothers close behind her.

As the Abrams family passed the offices, lockers, and classrooms, Stacey could not stop smiling. Shed waited the whole school day for this moment.

Finally, they reached the gymnasium. The room was all set up, but not for the cheers and roars of a basketball game, the toots and squeaks of a band concert, or the polite applause of a school assembly.

This time, there was the gentle swish, swish, swish of curtains opening and closing on the many rows of voting booths filling the gym.

It was Election Day, 1984, in Gulfport, Mississippi.

For the grown-ups, of course. Stacey and the other kids were all too young to vote.

Stacey watched as her parents signed the big book at the front table and received their ballots. All around that gymnasium, folks made their selections and cast their votes for political leaders. Stacey liked how the whole community came together to choose the right people to serve their town, their state, and even the whole country. She knew that her community needed the help.

The people of her Black working-class neighborhood worked very hard, but many of them still struggled to get by. Even though her parents both had college degrees, her mother was an underpaid librarian and her father worked at a shipyard.

From an early age, Stacey saw how unfair the world could be. She wanted to help her community. But would her community ever choose her? Would a whole gymnasium of people ever vote for Stacey Abrams? The thought thrilled her, but it also frightened her.

Back at home, the Abrams family watched the election coverage. The political candidates wore tailored suits and gave big, inspiring speeches to hundredseven thousandsof people.

Quiet, shy Stacey could not even imagine herself speaking to all those strangers at once. She didnt like being in the spotlight. And those expensive clothes? Her family could never afford that.

But most of all, as she watched the images of politicians flickering on the screen, Stacey noticed that none of them looked anything like her. Most of them were men. Almost all of them were white.

On Election Day 1984, Stacey Abrams was just a young Black girl living in small-town Mississippi with big dreams and a tiny voice.

How could she ever inspire anyone to vote?

Voting was a big deal to Staceys family. Her parents didnt just wait for the presidential race every four years. They also voted for their governors, mayors, judges, and other local officials. If there was an election, the Abrams family showed up to be counted.

It was important to Carolyn and Robert Abrams that their children saw every aspect of the voting process. Staceys family could not participate in local elections until the late 1960s. Stacey and her siblings were the first generation of Southern Black people all born with the right to just walk into a school gym, cast a vote, and walk back out unharmed.

But why?

In 1865, immediately after the end of the Civil War, the United States entered a brief era called Reconstruction. It was supposed to unite the country. The federal government passed laws to protect formerly enslaved Black people and even sent troops to enforce those laws. Black men gained the right to vote, run for public office, own property, and more. They set up communities with flourishing businesses. Some two thousand African Americans held office as elected officials, including sixteen members of the US Congress.

However, many white Southerners despised these changes. After a controversial presidential election in 1876, some Southern lawmakers met with the new presidents representatives to strike a deal. In the Compromise of 1877, Southern states agreed to accept the election results, if the federal government agreed to stop protecting Black people in their states. This was the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era.

In the 1870s in Mississippi, where Stacey Abramss ancestors lived, the Jim Crow era led to new local laws created to erase the legal, economic, and social gains that Black people had made during Reconstruction. If folks in their neighborhoods even talked about voting, they could be attacked by police dogs, arrested, or killed by angry white mobs. Without Black voters input, politicians continued to pass laws that kept the Black people of the South poor and oppressed for nearly a hundred years.

Both of Stacey Abramss parents protested and marched for their rights in the 1960s. As a young teen, Robert Abrams was thrown in jail for trying to register Black voters. It took the combined effort, hard work, and sacrifice of many people, including civil rights leaders like future congressman John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, and even President Lyndon Johnson to convince the white people of the United States that Black citizens deserved the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 meant that the states could not stop Black voters with literacy tests, poll taxes, the threat of arrest, or any other forms of voter suppression. But even after that law passed, not everyone trusted those newfound rights.