Stacey Abrams to join Howard University as endowed chair on race and politics
Stacey Abrams, the former two-time candidate for Georgia governor, voting rights activist and author, is joining the faculty of Howard University, the historically Black college in the nation’s capital announced Wednesday.
Abrams will be the inaugural Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics. She expects to start the multiyear appointment in September and will travel some to D.C. but remain based in Georgia.
“We are entering an inflection point in American politics where the conversation of race and Black politics will be a central facet,” Abrams said, “and having the chance to help guide part of the conversation for young people who are studying at Howard University is an exceptional opportunity.”
Howard President Wayne A.I. Frederick said the appointment speaks to Walters’s legacy around the topics of Black politics and the role politics plays in African American life. “Stacey Abrams epitomizes that in our contemporary experience, in our society.”
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“The work she has been doing on voter registration and voting irregularities, especially in Georgia but across the country, speaks to a lot of what Ronald Walters embodied. This appointment is extremely important for our students,” he said, adding that he hopes it will help them create solutions to those problems.
Walters, a leading scholar of politics and race who was a professor at Howard for 25 years, organized one of the country’s first lunch-counter sit-ins in Kansas in 1958 and decades later advised Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. “His focus on African American leadership has shaped so much of how we have seen leaders engage over the last 30 years,” Abrams said.
Abrams’s new role is the latest in a string of high-profile hires for Howard in recent years. In 2021, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the writer whose work has earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” and a National Book Award and led to a congressional hearing on reparations for slavery, joined the faculty, along with Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The award-winning actress and director Phylicia Rashad was named dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.
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“We’re going to be the answer to societal issues,” Frederick said. “We’re going to hire public intellectuals who will bring the type of discourse” to campus that will inform and inspire students to solve problems.
Howard students have activism embedded in their DNA, he said. “We want to make sure they are good advocates, they understand the issues, that they’re going to be in positions to help make the laws, help to change the laws, but that they are educated in what needs to be changed and why and how to change it. We want them fully equipped to be politically active.”
Abrams, who is 49, has experience as an adjunct professor at her alma mater, Spelman College in Atlanta, and said she has an “extraordinarily strong” relationship with the HBCU and its former president, Johnnetta Cole, a mentor to her. She also has strong ties to the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a master’s degree in public affairs, and Yale University, where she went to law school.
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But Howard is located in a powerful hub of influence in many fields, she said. “Washington, D.C. is an essential part of how we protect democracy, how we think about social policy, how we challenge norms,” Abrams said. “And Howard University is a crucible for how we can engage all of those pieces. And so when they approached me, I was excited.”
Abrams will be using the endowed chair for a variety of things, Frederick said, “everything from teaching students to holding workshops and symposia … and also collaborate with other faculty members as we conduct research about these critical issues as well.”
The creation of the endowed chair was first announced in 2020 when Ronald Walters’s wife, Patricia Turner Walters, gave the university the couple’s collection of African American art valued at more than $2.5 million. The artwork is now on display at the Howard University Gallery of Art. Ronald Walters died in 2010.
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In an interview this week, Abrams did not rule out running for office again but said that was not her focus at the moment.
Abrams became nationally known for energizing reluctant voters and building support for Democratic candidates with intensive efforts aimed at both rural and urban areas. Some presidential candidates sought out her expertise in voter mobilization in recent years, and she was considered a likely vice-presidential candidate for Joe Biden.
In 2018, Abrams lost by less than 2 percent of the vote when she sought to become the country’s first Black female governor. In November, Abrams lost her rematch to the incumbent, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. She had previously served as Democratic leader of the Georgia General Assembly.
Abrams said she has carved out a career that has included public policy, political leadership, social justice, activism, organizing and listening, as well as work in business, in entertainment and for the environment.
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She has practiced tax law for a large firm, co-founded several businesses, served as deputy city attorney for the city of Atlanta, launched several nonprofit groups and written more than a dozen books.
She said she works in the for-profit, nonprofit and public sectors, often simultaneously, because they are inextricably linked.
She plans to bring a practical approach to politics and policy to the classroom. “People don’t care about your politics,” she said. “They care about their lives.”
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