(ThySistas.com) Something has been sitting with me lately, Sistas, a question about how we decide whose name gets remembered. We live in a culture obsessed with the scoreboard. Trophies, titles, the corner office, that shiny win column. Worth gets measured by what sits on the plaque, and if your name is missing, the world decides you fell short. Stacey Abrams has spent the better part of twenty years poking holes in that tired math.
Two times the former minority leader of the Georgia House reached for the governor’s mansion. Both campaigns ended in defeat, first in 2018, then again in 2022, with Republican Brian Kemp winning each contest. By the arithmetic most people carry around, that looks like a closed case. Two campaigns, nothing to show for it. Pack it up.
Only that arithmetic lies.
Here comes the part nobody engraves on a trophy. Earlier this month, Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia’s governor’s race, becoming the first Black woman elected governor of any U.S. state. Her victory ended more than two decades of Republican control and broke a barrier that had stood since the nation’s founding. Senator Jon Ossoff held his seat the same night. The whole map down here shifted, and the organizing networks that helped make the shift possible did not fall out of the sky.
So who built the thing? Years of unglamorous labor that never once got a ribbon pinned to it. Through the New Georgia Project, which Abrams founded, organizers and volunteers registered voters in communities that career politicians had written off. Fair Fight later carried that work into battles over ballot access and voting rights. Other grassroots organizations, community leaders, and countless volunteers contributed to the effort. People who had been told their voice did not matter found themselves registered and ready. Nobody writes songs about that kind of work. The work is slow, often boring, and rarely celebrated. Yet those efforts laid the foundation for a victory party in Atlanta while one of the women who built that movement watched from the wings.
This is where I want us to sit for a minute.
Holding power is one thing. Changing what that power can do, and who gets to use it after you are gone, is a whole different animal. Harder, too. One job puts your backside in the big chair for four years. The other rewires the room so the chair itself works differently. Plenty of governors have come and gone without leaving a mark on anything but their own pension. The candidate never sat in that chair, yet helped change what it meant. Ask yourself which of those outlives a single term.
Now, I am not here to canonize anybody. The organizations that did so much of that groundwork hit real trouble. The New Georgia Project shut down in 2025 after financial struggles, internal turmoil, and a $300,000 campaign finance fine. Abrams had stepped away from its operations years earlier. Fair Fight also faced serious money problems and staff cuts, though it continued operating. Grown folks can hold two truths at once. The infrastructure mattered enormously, and the stewardship of parts of it got messy. Both things live in the same sentence without canceling each other out.
What gets under my skin is how differently we grade our own. A Black woman is allowed to be remembered only if she sweeps the whole table. One loss, and suddenly the commentators start drafting obituaries for a career. Think about how many mediocre men keep failing upward with half the résumé and twice the second chances. Black women get held to a standard no human alive could clear: flawless, victorious, and gracious about the whole ordeal, or the record gets wiped. Sistas out here know exactly what I mean.
Abrams decided not to play that game in 2026. Back in January, the two-time nominee ruled out another run for the governor’s mansion. She pointed instead to a more urgent fight against what many saw as creeping authoritarianism. That choice got mocked in certain corners as quitting. Read it another way and it looks like discipline, a refusal to chase the title just to satisfy people who only respect titles.
So what is the former lawmaker actually doing right now? Plenty. The 10 Steps campaign, launched to counter the slide toward autocracy, has grown into a coalition with dozens of partners whose combined reach extends to millions of Americans. On the airwaves, the podcast Assembly Required keeps breaking down the machinery of politics for regular people. There are novels too, legal thrillers that climb bestseller lists, because a brilliant mind refuses to stay boxed into one lane. This past fall, the Yale-trained lawyer hit the trail again, not as the headliner but as the closer. She stumped for candidates across Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas while raising money for Bottoms along the way.
Peep the shift in that role. The strategist used to share stages with Barack Obama in front of roaring crowds. Now the labor happens in smaller rooms, intimate conversations, turnout videos, the unglamorous follow through. When the results rolled in after the November 3 election, the reflection offered to NPR was not a victory lap. The wins, Abrams said, hand the state a chance to start correcting and restoring rights that had been stripped away. Notice the framing. Not “look what I did,” but “look what we can do now.”
That, right there, is what separates a politician from somebody who actually builds. Builders care about what is still standing after they pack up and go home.
Here is my worry, and it runs deep for Black women watching all this. If we let the culture convince us that only a trophy counts, we will keep overlooking the sisters doing the heaviest lifting in every field. These are the women mentoring, organizing, documenting, and holding the line, often with no plaque to show for a lifetime of moving the needle. Think of the teacher who shaped three decades of students. The auntie who kept a whole family afloat. Some quiet soul who registered an entire county. None of them get a statue, yet pull any one of them out of the story and the whole thing collapses.
Stacey Abrams handed us a living case study in a different kind of scorecard. Lose the race, win the long argument. Georgia did not flip because one person finally grabbed a trophy. It flipped because years of organizing brought together Black women, grassroots leaders, volunteers, and voters who refused to give up. Abrams helped lay that foundation through fifteen hard years of political work. Alongside her stood people who kept showing up despite repeated defeats at the ballot box, including the ones she endured herself.
So let me leave you with this, Sistas. Stop waiting for permission to honor the ones who never made the podium. We do not owe remembrance only to the undefeated, and honestly, those folks usually needed it least. Most of what holds our communities together has rested on the backs of Black women nobody ever bothered to crown. Past time we fixed that ledger our own selves.
Staff Writer; Jada Williams
This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…
Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.