Stacey Abrams, a Daughter of the South, Asks Georgia to Change

THOMASVILLE, Ga. — Let’s say you were making a TV movie about Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in the reliably Republican state of Georgia. Where would you begin?

Abrams, 44, has spent much of her life pushing through doors that other people wanted to keep shut, and if she wins in November she will become the first black woman elected governor of any state. So you could begin with her first attempt to gain entry to the Georgia governor’s mansion.

The time is 1991. Stacey has graduated at the top of her high school class in suburban Atlanta, and she and her parents are heading to the state’s annual valedictorians’ reception, at the home of Gov. Zell Miller. Their car has broken down. They take the bus.

“We’re the only people on foot, and we’re walking up the driveway as all these families come in their cars,” Abrams recounted late in the summer. “The guard — to give him the best read — he thought we were just folks coming off the bus to visit the governor’s mansion as tourists.”

He tells them to leave. But trying to outargue Abrams’ parents, steeped in the language of the pulpit and the civil rights struggle — that was unwise. “After a while, he starts to reconsider his decision-making skills,” Abrams said dryly.

He eventually lets them in.

“I don’t remember meeting the governor of Georgia or my fellow valedictorians,” she added. “All I remember that day was a man at a gate, telling me I don’t belong.”

Abrams is an outsider who came to conclude that the system was best challenged from within. Toward the end of her freshman year at Spelman College in Atlanta, she led a protest against the Rodney King verdict, co-founded a group called Students for African American Empowerment, and helped burn the state flag — then dominated by the Confederate battle flag image and hated by Georgia’s black population — on the steps of the state Capitol.

But while some of Abrams’ more revolutionary-minded peers would go on to argue that the only way to upend the status quo was to wipe it away and start over, Abrams would leave the group she helped found and throw herself into the messy deal-making of the democratic process.

Abrams’ personal history and her against-the-odds rise from poverty to power has lent her campaign sizzle and shape. But in her race for governor she must also defend the record she amassed as a workaday politician. In her seven years as Georgia’s House minority leader, Abrams inspired but also occasionally infuriated fellow Democrats with her penchant for bipartisan compromise. At the same time, allies of her Republican opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, have pointed to her progressive stances on issues like health care and immigration to argue that she is “too extreme for Georgia.”

With 11 days left in an election fueled by issues of race, voting rights and the South’s past, present and future, Abrams now finds herself trying to make the case that she deserves to return to the Georgia governor’s mansion — this time, officially.

Raised one of six children on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in a house where reading the encyclopedia was considered a fun activity, Abrams always seemed destined for big things.

“My parents said you could miss school,” Abrams likes to say, “if you had a doctor’s note and a surgical scar.” Their house was full of books and sometimes, when money was scarce, without electricity or running water.

She graduated from Spelman, a historically black women’s college, and got degrees from the University of Texas and Yale Law School. She has written and published eight romance novels, all featuring protagonists who are people of color, under the nom de plume Selena Montgomery. She has been a tax lawyer, a businesswoman, Atlanta’s deputy city attorney, a member of the Georgia state House of Representatives and the first black woman to become the House minority leader. She is a pop culture junkie who is fluent in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” trivia and has watched every iteration of “Star Trek,” including “Discovery,” the latest spinoff, which she consumed in its entirety sometime on the campaign trail.

Her siblings include a federal judge, an evolutionary biologist, an anthropology professor and a social worker. The sixth child, Walter, fell into drug use while attending Morehouse College, has been in and out of prison and suffers from bipolar disorder. All six belong to a siblings-only book club that meets via conference call, though Abrams’ candidacy “has caused a delay in our schedule,” she said.

Though polls show Abrams and Kemp in a very tight race, she has some odds to beat, and not just the odds of being a black female Democrat running for statewide office. In 2016, President Donald Trump won 51 percent of the Georgia vote to Hillary Clinton’s 45.9 percent. Kemp, who has been accused of overseeing voter suppression as secretary of state, is running a Trumpian campaign full of conservative appeals on issues like immigration and tax cuts that animate the president’s base.

In recent weeks, Kemp has worked to soften his image, but one campaign ad this summer depicts him revving up a chain saw, posing with his firearms collection and showing off his pickup truck.

“I got a big truck,” he drawls, slamming the driver’s side door, “just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ‘em home myself.”

Both candidates are running hard on job creation and pro-business policies. This summer Abrams visited every one of Georgia’s 159 counties, many of them in deeply Republican areas, with the same wonkish, detail-obsessed message delivered in the same rapid-fire cadences: Georgia needs more jobs, more public transportation, better infrastructure, better rural health care. It needs gun control. It needs to allow its citizens to vote. It does not need a religious freedom law, championed by Kemp, that Abrams says would protect one group while discriminating against others.

This race is also about race. How could it not be, given who she is, where she is from, and the state she hopes to lead? She has declared that the massive pro-Confederate carving at Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta, should be taken down, just as the Confederate imagery on the old state flag had to go.

But she is much more likely to discuss her desire to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act — a liberal idea, but one she believes will resonate across racial and party lines in a state with an acute rural health care crisis. If Medicaid expansion was embraced by Indiana under then-Gov. Mike Pence, she likes to say, why shouldn’t it be embraced by Georgia?

“We can save rural hospitals, cover more than a half a million Georgians, and invest in all of those communities to the tune of $3 billion, including the creation of 56,000 jobs, 60 percent of which are outside the metro area,” she said Tuesday in a televised debate.

Abrams’ parents — her mother, Carolyn, was a college librarian, and her father, Robert, was a shipyard worker, before both became Methodist ministers — raised their children on a you-can-be-anything mantra.

Both parents came of age in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, amid the boycotts and marches of the civil rights movement. Her father was beaten and jailed. Her mother was kicked off buses when she tried to sit up front.

The family was intensely close and big on of rituals of civic responsibility, including prison outreach visits and trips to the polls on Election Day.

“We would have the whole group with us to emphasize the importance of voting,” Carolyn Abrams said.

While Abrams was still in high school, her parents moved the family to Atlanta while the two of them went to Emory University’s theological school. She remained there to attend college at Spelman, where she was student government president. In 1992, her freshman year, four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the beating of King, a taxi driver whom they had caught speeding. Riots erupted across the country. In Atlanta, Abrams helped lead a silent protest march from campus to downtown, where other angry young African-Americans, as she recalled, “smashed windows, overturned cars and ransacked the city.”

Appearing at a town-hall meeting with Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor, Abrams confronted him with a furious attack over what she saw as his indifference to inner-city African-Americans.

Out of the student upheavals, she and others founded a new group, Students for African-American Empowerment, or SAAE. The Rev. Otis Moss III, an early member, said it represented an array of ideologies, while the Rev. Lukata Mjumbe, another member and now a pastor in New Jersey, said it was part of the continuum of civil rights activism on black college campuses, influenced by groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party.

In June 1992, Abrams and other members held the rally on the steps of the Georgia Capitol in which the flag was burned.

“We’re going to send Georgia’s racist past up in flames,” Mjumbe (who then used the name Lawrence Jeffries) was quoted as saying at the time. “Today we fight fire with fire. Burn, baby, burn!”

In those days, two-thirds of the Georgia state flag was taken up by the so-called Southern Cross of the Confederate battle flag. It was adopted in 1956 to signify white lawmakers’ commitment to preserving segregation in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

By the 1990s, many blacks and whites in the state were clamoring to dump the flag and leave the past behind. Another, predominantly white, group called the “flaggers,” was equally vocal that the flag remain as a symbol of Confederate heritage.

Asked about the flag-burning in Tuesday’s debate, Abrams said she was “proud to be a Georgian,” and noted that many people, including the governor at the time, were “deeply disturbed by the racial divisiveness” it represented.

Flag-burning notwithstanding, it soon became apparent that Abrams was not a good fit for the SAAE, which was heading in an increasingly radical direction, and she left after a few months, Mjumbe said.

“I think that Stacey was very clear that she thought that she could change the world in precisely the way she’s trying to change it now,” Mjumbe said.

After junior year, Abrams won a Harry S. Truman scholarship, awarded to a few dozen public service-oriented students a year. (Previous winners include Justice Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser.) At Yale Law School, her activities included working in a clinic that provided legal help to nonprofit companies and writing her first romance novel — about a sexy intelligence officer who infiltrates a terrorist group and falls in love with a brooding fellow operative.

“A lot of people who can understand complicated things can’t explain it to anyone except other brilliant people,” said Brooks Allen, a fellow law student. “But she had a way of doing it that felt like common sense.”

After a few years working on tax law in a corporate firm, and a stint as deputy city attorney of Atlanta, Abrams was elected to the Georgia Legislature. In 2010, she became minority leader of the state House of Representatives.

She radiated ambition. By her own admission, she was not much of a glad-hander, preferring to read reports and pore over tax bills — she was known for her pointillistic understanding of the tax code — than schmooze with colleagues and lobbyists.

But she built working relationships with Gov. Nathan Deal and the House speaker, David Ralston, both Republicans, delivering Democratic support for government initiatives like a billion-dollar transportation bill and a program to shore up an ailing state college scholarship program.

This strategic cooperation annoyed conservative Republican legislators, who felt (correctly) that her approach had boosted the party’s moderates at their expense. Some fellow Democrats groused that she had sold out their liberal principles.

The vote on the popular program known as Hope Scholarships, one of Georgia Democrats’ proudest achievements, was particularly tough for some in the party. Abrams’ opponent in last spring’s Democratic primary, Stacey Evans, a former House member, made Abrams’ compromise a centerpiece of her campaign, emphasizing the cuts to the program and their impact on black students.

“I’m not against compromise,” Evans said at a candidates’ forum in April. “You’ve got to get compromise to get things done. But you’ve got to be willing to stand on principle.”

Abrams seems unperturbed by the criticism.

“My fundamental philosophy,” she told Governing magazine, which named her a “public official of the year” in 2014, “is that my first job is to cooperate and collaborate with the other side whenever I can.” More recently, Kemp and his allies have painted her as an extremist on issues like immigration. Abrams favors extending the Hope Scholarship program to unauthorized students, and said this month that the coming “blue wave” would include unauthorized immigrants. What she meant, she said later, was that “anyone running for governor should believe in all of Georgia.” But it was a misstep that Kemp pounced on.

“It means she wants illegals to vote in Georgia,” he said on Fox News.

She denies that, but Jonathan S. Tobin, writing in the conservative National Review, called it a gaffe that undermined her criticism of Kemp on voting issues.

Her comment highlighted “the fact that Democrats oppose any regulations that might prevent cheating at the polls, whether by illegal immigrants or anyone else,” he wrote.

Last spring, Abrams published an article in Fortune magazine titled, “My $200,000 Debt Should Not Disqualify Me for Governor of Georgia.”

It is a lot of money, and Abrams owes it despite having been gainfully employed for years; despite having lent $50,000 to her own campaign; and despite earning, according to IRS documents, $427,500 for two years of work, in 2014 and 2015, at two nonprofits in which she was principal officer. (One of them, Third Sector Development, was the umbrella organization for the New Georgia Project, the voter-registration group that she says submitted more than 200,000 registrations for people of color between 2014 and 2016.) The issue of what Abrams owes — closer to $220,000, actually, including $50,000 in back taxes and $70,000-plus from credit card and student loans — has made her vulnerable to criticism from people who wonder, for instance, what it says about how capable she might be of managing Georgia’s $45 billion budget.

Abrams says in response that most Americans are weighed down with what she calls the “millstone” of debt, and that her own troubles help her better understand the struggles of ordinary people. As for the criticism that her nonprofit salaries were excessive — sexism, she says.

“There is this underlying question of how dare I seek or accept a salary of that level,” she told Glamour magazine. “And it’s tied to that sense that women should just do because it must be done — that it’s somehow ignoble to accept compensation.”

She is hardly extravagant, her friends say. But she’s been supporting not just herself, but also her parents, who adopted their son Walter’s daughter, now 12, because of his struggles with drugs. Abrams’ father suffers from cancer, and she pays her parents’ health insurance premiums and helps with their medical bills, the family says.

A TV movie about the life of Stacey Abrams could also start in a crowded room in Dalton, Georgia, where more than 100 people have come to hear her speak.

It is August. An elderly white woman rises, and says she has heard that Abrams wants to remove the “beautiful” Confederate carvings at Stone Mountain. “Can you answer me why?” she says.

“Certainly,” Abrams replies.

She launches into a passionate but lawyerly narrative that touches on the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the ugly history, with its own white supremacist roots, of the Stone Mountain carving. She mentions being taken as a girl to the Mississippi home of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leader, where she was encouraged, she says, to admire a man who kept black people in chains.

But if she is elected, she says, her first order of business won’t be to remove the carving from the mountain. It will be to expand Medicaid for Georgia’s residents.

“But will I ever say that Stone Mountain is a good thing?” she asks, rhetorically. “That celebrating the terrorism that was visited upon not only African-Americans but Jews in the state of Georgia is a good thing?”

She answers quickly: “Absolutely not. And if I was willing to say that, then you should not want me to be the next governor of Georgia.”