There are elections that change the political map. And then there are elections that make you wonder if the country itself remembers them.
Georgia remembers.
Auction blocks. Cotton fields. Lynched trees. Black women who cleaned governors’ houses but couldn’t dream of becoming governor themselves.
And now, Keisha Lance Bottoms has been elected Georgia’s first black female governor. The first black woman elected governor of an American state.
Bottoms traced his ancestry back five generations to a slave on a plantation near Crawfordville, Georgia.
An ancestor held in slavery on Georgian soil. A descendant elected to govern it.
The same land. A completely different claim to power. How many women have had to believe in a future they would never live to see?
Bottoms’ victory represents the paradox of black political advancement amid racial violence and the often unsung work of women building a future they may never inhabit. Ultimately, Bottoms’ victory reflects both extraordinary progress and the unfinished work of American democracy.
Children who deserved a future
I keep thinking about the little children.
Between 1979 and 1981, Atlanta was terrorized by the disappearances and murders of black children and young adults. Mothers begged for answers. Families lived in a city where childhood itself had become dangerous.
The murders took place just years after the historic 1973 election of Maynard Jackson as Atlanta’s first black mayor. His victory heralded a new era of black political power. Yet this power could not protect the city’s most vulnerable children. Suspicions of Ku Klux Klan involvement circulated, although Klan responsibility was never established.
This distinction is important. Fear too.
Bottoms was born in 1970. She was 9 years old when the killings began. She grew up in the same Atlanta city where black parents desperately searched for their missing children. She belonged to the generation whose future was stolen. And now she is preparing to rule the entire state.
What a terrible, beautiful, complicated thing.
These murdered children were not symbols waiting to be useful to the story. They were sons and daughters who deserved the ordinary miracle of growing old. They deserved a future.
Bottoms later occupied the mayor’s office which Jackson first opened to black leaders. She is now preparing to occupy the governor’s mansion. History has not erased his cruelty. But he came up with a surprising answer.
And this victory doesn’t belong to Bottoms alone.
The woman who sowed the seeds
This victory belongs, in large part, to democracy advocate, legislator and lawyer Stacey Abrams. Perhaps those who recognize what Abrams made possible have sent him flowers.
Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022. She lost both races. But through the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, organizations focused on voter engagement and protecting voting rights, she helped build an electorate capable of imagining Georgia differently. She registered voters, challenged barriers to participation, and refused to accept that the South’s political future was set in stone.
Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
And now, another Black woman has won the office Abrams ran for twice, in the third consecutive gubernatorial race led by a Black Democratic woman. There is something biblical in the path that Abrams has resolutely charted. I think of Moses, leading his people to the Promised Land but never entering it himself.
Abrams’ journey is not over. Nor should her achievements be measured by another woman’s victory. But I believe there is sacred work to be done to prepare for a future that you may never personally enjoy. Some plant trees. Some people sit in their shade. Stacey Abrams crashed. The funds are located under the branches.
And as a scholar of black media history, I can go back even further, to another woman who understood the audacity of claiming political power: Charlotta Bass.
In 1952, Bass became the first black woman nominated for vice president of the United States, running on the Progressive Party ticket.
The future that Charlotte dared to imagine
Before the Voting Rights Act in 1965, before the March on Washington in 1963, before Jackson was elected mayor in 1973 and before Abrams or Bottoms took their first breath, there was Bass.
A black newspaper publisher who faced segregation, police brutality and white supremacist violence during her four decades of ownership of the California Eagle, Bass understood that there was more to political power than winning office. It was about who had the right to imagine themselves in one of them.
Bass ran as a black woman entering the White House seemed almost unimaginable. Almost. But not for her. I imagine she would have loved this election. And I suspect she would have asked some pointed questions of Governor-elect Bottoms.
What will you do for the poor? The excluded? How will you protect the vote that brought you here?
Making history is not the same as doing justice, and representation matters. The true measure of Bottoms’ victory will be whether Georgians benefit from the fairer state she promised to create.
Work beyond victory
For generations, black women have been asked to save a democracy that would not save them. We have carried clipboards, protest signs, and entire movements on our backs. We were told to wait. Be patient. Be grateful.
And now a black woman has been elected to govern Georgia.
The children did not return. The past has not been undone. But something has changed. Charlotte dreamed of it. Stacey helped build it. Keisha won it. And somewhere, another little black girl is watching. Maybe she doesn’t understand the story. Maybe she just knows that the governor-elect looks like her. For now, that’s enough to start a dream.
And history has taught us what can happen when a black girl starts to dream.
Gn usa
