Stacey Abrams is incredible and is one of the great reasons that the Democrats were able to win Georgia and take leadership of the Senate in 2021. She has led the fight against voter suppression in Georgia, and throughout the South and the United States. I have so much respect for her and her ideas and ideology-she truly has been a leader for civil rights today in America, building upon the movements of Martin Luther King and so many others in our civil history.

As the 2018 gubernatorial candidate for Georgia, who wrongly lost the election due to voter suppression and negation, instead of conceding, she took all her strength, energy, and knowhow to combat the voter suppression that threatened to suppress her and civil rights. Listening to the audiobook of her most recent treatise, Our Fight is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, I was so moved, impressed, and educated. She systematically goes through in the text the history of voter suppression against African Americans, and other peoples of color, the poor, and the subjugated since the Civil War to now, focusing on how the election of Barack Obama set off an attack on voting rights. His election was proof of the success of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, embodiments of the protection for minority rights in America. With the Republicans’ Shelby v. Holder decision, which gutted most of the Voting Rights Act, they hoped then to re-disenfranchise so many POC and other Americans, with their fear of the dynamic demographic change in our country, and of these groups attaining power in our Democracy. The rollback of voting rights is obviously so wrong, and Abrams, in her book, but so importantly in her practice and actions, lays out the strategies it takes for us to have all the people in the U.S. to have the power of the vote.

The get-out-the-vote efforts of Abrams, her national campaign Fair Fight 2020, and the work of so many others was able to help elect Biden and Harris, and democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof to represent Georgia in the senate. This is historical, as Warnock, will be the first Black senator from Georgia, and only the second Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Ossof is Jewish, also an amazing feat for him to be elected in the South, given their history. Warnock grew up in public housing in Savannah, graduated from Morehouse college and with a Ph.D., was ordained in the ministry, and fifteen years ago was chosen to serve as s enior Pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was the youngest pastor selected to serve in that leadership role at the historic church. Ossof was previously an investigative journalist, and a committed-to-the-cause documentary film producer, so prudent given the “fake news” propaganda of our time that denies truth, the first amendment, and freedom of the press. Without Stacey Abrams, who knows what might havehappened for our country—now Georgia amazingly is a purple state in the South, with more to follow-with the wake of this historic election, hopefully all America will progress into the 21 Century truly representing all its people and their fights for justice.