Speaking to a packed sanctuary at First AME Church for their Annual Founder’s Day Experience “Rise Up!”, Stacey Abrams delivered a sweeping, urgent address that blended personal testimony, political analysis, and a moral call to action, warning that the nation is living through a moment unlike any in recent memory. At the event, hosted by Bishop Francine A. Brookins, Abrams cautioned that expanded surveillance, aggressive immigration enforcement, and the erosion of democratic norms have created a climate in which “status is no longer safety,” noting that people can be targeted, tracked, and punished even without wrongdoing. “Democracy is not a concept,” she said. “It is an action verb. It’s what we do in the days between elections.”
“We are losing our democracy not because we don’t know what it is,” Abrams said. “We’re losing it because we’ve forgotten what it’s for.”
“Criminal is now defined however they want to define it,” she said. “And when status is no longer safety, silence becomes a risk—not a shield.”
The daughter of two pastors, Abrams rooted her remarks in the moral formation of the Black church and her own upbringing in the Deep South. She recounted growing up in a household shaped by working poverty but rich in discipline, service, and faith.
“My parents gave us three jobs,” she said. “Go to church, go to school, and take care of each other.”
Church, she explained, taught grounding. School taught preparation. Service taught responsibility. Those values, she said, carried her from voter registration drives as a lonely college student to decades of work defending democracy and economic justice.
Abrams laid out what she described as a familiar authoritarian pattern—one she said Americans often fail to recognize until it is too late. She cited the weakening of voting rights protections, the consolidation of media ownership, the erosion of public trust in institutions, and the scapegoating of immigrants, the poor, and marginalized communities.
“You don’t have to cancel elections to destroy democracy,” she warned. “Russia has elections. Venezuela has elections. You only have to convince people that showing up doesn’t matter.”
She also warned against reducing democracy to a single election cycle. “If democracy only exists on Election Day,” she said, “then it doesn’t exist at all.”
Abrams addressed the growing role of artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, cautioning against treating technology as either inherently evil or magically neutral.
“AI is a tool,” she said. “It didn’t decide to be racist. It didn’t decide to surveil you. People did.”
While acknowledging the dangers of misuse, Abrams urged communities not to abandon technology but to understand and repurpose it for organizing, outreach, and protection.
“If they can use technology to find us, monitor us, and intimidate us,” she said, “then we can use it to register voters, check on elders, protect the vulnerable, and build power.”
Abrams concluded with a story from her childhood—watching her father give his coat to a stranger on a cold Mississippi night because he knew his family was coming for him.
“He gave away his coat because he knew rescue was already on the way,” she said. “That’s where we are now.”
As the congregation rose in applause, Abrams offered one final charge:
“Authoritarianism is coming—but so are we. And if we do our work, we can come for justice, we can come for democracy, and we can come for each other. We cannot demand what we don’t believe we deserve,” Abrams said. “And we cannot wait for someone else to deliver our freedom.”