Last night as I listened to my Governor – elect, Keisha Lance Bottoms, tears welled up in my eyes. There is destiny, my firm unshakeable belief. Some people are not destined to arrive, they are destined to make arriving possible. Stacey Abrams is one of them. In 2018 she lost the Georgia governor’s race by a margin so thin that history itself seemed to hold its breath. She could have retreated into grievance. Instead she went back to the grassroots. Through the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, she registered, organized, and educated voters whom the system had long counted out. By 2020, Georgia had delivered the presidency to a Democrat for the first time in nearly three decades. Weeks later, two Senate seats followed. The ground had moved, and she was the one who had moved it.
Yesterday, Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Georgia governorship and became the first Black woman elected governor of any American state. The history Abrams was denied by a whisker has been written by another woman, on a road Abrams helped pave. This is what we in Yorùbá thought understood long ago that Igi kan ò lè dá igbó ṣe. One tree cannot make a forest. Someone must clear the ground, someone must plant, and someone must wait for a shade she may never sit beneath.
Abrams did not lose in any sense that matters. Her ambition was larger than a title, and her work outlived the ballot. Bottoms earned her victory through her own record and her own campaign, but she walked into a Georgia that Abrams had helped rebuild.
So to every woman, every man, every young builder asking whether sacrifice without a crown is wasted, hear me. The road-builder’s name may not be on the arrival gate, but the gate would not exist without her. My belief is build anyway. Let others win because you dared.
#Bamidele #StaceyAbrams #KeishaLanceBottoms #LegacyOfService