Raven Cook

Stacey Abrams was born in Madison, Wis. in 1973, but her family eventually settled in Atlanta, Ga. While she was in high school, Abrams was hired as a typist and speechwriter for a congressional campaign. She attained various higher degrees, culminating in a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1999, and worked as a tax attorney. At 29, Abrams was appointed Deputy City Attorney for Atlanta and in 2007, she was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. In 2011, Abrams became the first African American minority leader in the Georgia House.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Ky. to a poor working class family. As a child, she performed poetry readings for her church community and was heavily influenced by her great-grandmother Bell Hooks. hooks attained degrees from Stanford, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California-Santa Cruz. In her first major book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, hooks explored the intersection of race, sex and class at the core of black women's lives.

John Walker was born in Hope, Ark. in 1937. After receiving his law degree from Yale in 1964, he was admitted to the Arkansas Bar Association the same year and opened his own practice by 1965. Walker opened one of the first three racially integrated law firms in the South, and it filed the first lawsuit in the nation on the harmful effects of racially segregated schools in the state. He was later elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 2010 and served four terms as representative of District 34. This is his story.