@THSEA @staceyabrams is inspiring a full crowd in Seattle. Thanks for your words and sharing your challenges! Looking forward to reading your book. pic.twitter.com/uzwQ38RGuJ
— Kelly Dunford (@Kellylyndunford) April 26, 2019
Stacey Abrams first set the goal of running for the presidency 25 years ago.
After breaking up with a boyfriend, Abrams, who acknowledges she is “bad at dating,” says she created a spreadsheet laying out her goals, including being Atlanta mayor — the ceiling for black people, she thought at the time — a millionaire, and an author.
In about 1994, one of her friends, a white Republican man from South Carolina who she worked in the Clinton White House through a fellowship asked her the shocking question: “Stacey, when are you running for president?”
“President of what?” she recounted asking in response.
He reassured her that she could do it.
“What shames me to this day is that I did not believe him,” Abrams said at a sold-out Town Hall Seattle event Thursday night at Capitol Hill’s Temple De Hirsch Sinai.
“This moment where this person who was becoming my friend saw possibility in me, I immediately rejected it because there had never been a black man, a black woman, a woman ever to be a viable candidate.”
After that conversation, she went home and updated the spreadsheet to say that she would run for president of the United States. Continue reading
