stacey abrams books while justice sleeps

We’d met to talk about an Abrams many don’t know: Stacey Abrams the novelist. After her loss, she doubled down on her long-game strategy of registering and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters-an effort that is now credited with helping flip the state blue, sealing victories there for Joe Biden and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.įrom the March 2021 issue: The Voting Rights Act hangs by a threadīut threats to our democracy weren’t the focus of our chat. In 2018, she became the first Black woman to run for governor in any state as a major party’s nominee, but she narrowly lost the general election to then–Secretary of State Brian Kemp, whose office had purged nearly 700,000 voters from the rolls in the preceding two years. It was early March, and Georgia lawmakers had recently proposed a raft of new voting restrictions that Abrams would later describe in a tweet as “ Jim Crow in a suit + tie.” Abrams is, of course, best known as the standard-bearer in the battle against disenfranchisement in her home state of Georgia and around the nation, and the founder of two voting-rights advocacy organizations: Fair Fight Action and the New Georgia Project. I wouldn’t have guessed that Abrams had bee colonies on her mind. Much like bees, when we had the bee-colony collapse.” Washington and James Madison and, she said, “a book about butterflies.” Why butterflies? “Well, it’s about how butterflies are part of the ecosystem that we rarely think about. In the stack sat biographies of Booker T. We were talking over Zoom, and the little square of our interaction was spare and tidy-that is, until she turned her camera around to show me a long, rectangular table crowded with things that hadn’t yet found a home: an open box, an orphaned white vase, a pile of books. She sat in front of a bay window, sunlight pouring in around the sides of drawn blinds. O n the afternoon of my first conversation with Stacey Abrams, she had just moved house. This article was published online on May 11, 2021.

Stacey abrams books while justice sleeps