The first time Representative Mable “Able” Thomas boarded an airplane, she was 25 years old and heading from Atlanta to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. She would represent Jesse Jackson as a presidential delegate.
As the five-star hotel rooms reserved for the Atlanta delegation were cost-prohibitive for the young organizer, Thomas booked her room at the local YMCA but still rode on the bus alongside other delegates to their accommodations to check out the scene.
Upon the delegation’s arrival, word of Thomas’ work on behalf of Jackson’s campaign, as well as her status as a rising political star running for Georgia House of Representatives, had already reached the West Coast, and on the hotel’s message board was a note awaiting Thomas from Jule Anderson, then President of the San Francisco Branch of the NAACP, and President of the San Francisco African-American Historical and Cultural Society, eager to meet Thomas and to contribute to her campaign.
Thomas credits her friend, Helen Young, for trading her place at the hotel, “where all the action” was, for Thomas’ room at the YMCA. For the duration of the trip, Thomas shared a room with Helen’s aunt, State Representative Mary Young Cummings.
“When she met me, her smile was up here,” Thomas, pointing to a high grin, says of Cummings, although “she didn’t know me from Adam’s housecat.”
Following the note from Anderson, Thomas called her about meeting in person, and Anderson said she would find her at a party the Georgia delegation was having.
“But I don’t know you,” Thomas said.
“But I know you,” Anderson replied.
When Anderson did find Thomas at the party, Thomas asked her how she was able to get in.
Anderson told her she came in with a bottle of wine “like she was supposed to be there.” From that moment, the two formed a lifelong friendship.
Anderson, who had family in Georgia and spent part of her childhood there, eventually moved back, at one point living in Atlanta, on the top floor of a place called the Landmark, one of the “crème de la crème” places to live at the time, according to Thomas, who fondly recalls time spent there with Anderson.
“We were friends until she passed away,” Thomas shares, “Those are the kinds of stories I have in my life.”
Indeed, such stories of sisterhood lay at the foundation of Thomas’s work in both the public and private sectors.
In addition to her cross-country plane ride, 1984 was a year of firsts for Thomas.
Upon her return from the DNC that July, she won her first in what would become over two decades worth of terms as a Georgia State Representative, in addition to becoming the youngest person ever at the time, elected to that office.
Thomas unseated Grace Towns Hamilton, who herself carries an important “first” title in Georgia history, as the first African American woman elected to the General Assembly.
“I beat the Grand Dame,” Thomas acknowledges of Hamilton, who once introduced herself to Thomas when she was interning for then Senator Julian Bond.
Part of Thomas’ strength as a leader stems from her acknowledgment of it in others. She possesses a keen memory for people and events as they happened.
During a recent interview in the, You Ask We Answer series from the Women Engaged organization, an intergenerational discussion of Black women and femmes- COO Michelle Wilson, Community, and Youth organizer, Zoe Bambara, and CEO/co-founder Malika Redmond- Thomas talks about her experience as an organizer of what would become the reproductive justice movement. Just shy of two decades later, she intentionally credits by name all twelve founding members of the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, the group who, together, first coined the term.
They are as follows:
Toni M. Bond
Reverend Alma Crawford
Evelyn S. Field
Terri James
Bisola Marignay
Cassandra McConnell
Cynthia Newbille
Loretta Ross
Elizabeth Terry
Able Mable Thomas
Winnette P. Willis
Kim Youngblood
Thomas met the group mentioned above in 1994 when she was not a member of the legislature and was working as a consultant for The National Black Women’s Health Project, founded by Byllye Avery. During that time, Thomas calls “one of the most dynamic times in organizing and standing up for Black women,” she was invited to attend the Illinois Pro-Choice Conference, sponsored by the Ms. Foundation.
When Thomas arrived at the conference, the overwhelming majority of the over 200 attendees were white women and twelve Black women.
“Can you imagine coming into a room with 200 plus white women and twelve Black women in the room?” Thomas asks.
“I said, ‘Who are these Black women?’ I went to each [of them] and asked if they would come to lunch with me, so they did. Everyone went around and said who they were and what they thought were the issues being said.”
As Thomas relayed the event during the YAWA roundtable with Women Engaged, the issues discussed at the conference were centered around abortion and therefore limited to the main reproductive problem for white women.
Thomas said, “Hillary Clinton was going around the country, selling the healthcare reform bill. . .” with a “de-emphasis on reproductive health. . .” and that, over lunch, she and the women she had convened discussed that, “to get a full picture of what was going on with Black women in America, reproductive health should be included.”
From that discussion, an even broader picture emerged than that of reproductive rights and reproductive health, one which would birth not only a new phrase but a movement that would give rise to a fuller understanding of people’s lives through the lens of reproductive justice.
For their part in this historic moment, those twelve women, including Thomas, are now known as the Founding Mothers of the Reproductive Justice movement.
Though at the time, they remained the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice and, having the requisite six different states represented among them, formed a national organization and continued to organize beyond the Pro-Choice Conference.
Partly with money they raised, and partly with money supplied by the Ms. Foundation, the new yet formidable organization placed an ad in the Washington Post and in Roll Call on August 16, 1994, formalizing their demands to members of Congress. The ad was placed to remedy the “unique health problems” Black women were facing by establishing an accessible, universal healthcare system, including comprehensive reproductive health services- free from racial, sexual, and economic discrimination.
It was only after the subsequent formation of reproductive justice organizations that they continued to work towards the collective realization of these demands. Over time, Thomas understood her pivotal role in igniting a movement.
Although, even a cursory examination of her legislative career, both before and after becoming a Founding Mother, reveals a longstanding dedication to women’s rights and reproductive issues.
Two years before the Ms. Conference, Thomas passed House Bill 538, which required insurance companies to cover the cost of mammograms, pap smears, and prostate exams. Initially introduced in 1990, the bill was intensely gutted by the insurance lobby via the House and Senate Insurance Committees and was replaced with a watered-down substitute.
After the bill’s original sponsor left the legislature, Thomas was asked by her friend, Ginger Sullivan, wife of Dr. Louis Sullivan, President Emeritus of Morehouse School of Medicine, to take on the bill.
Not to be bested by the Insurance Committee this go-round, Thomas traveled to the hometown of the Committee’s then chairman, Wesley Dunn, and gave a presentation at the local rotary club to raise awareness about the bill’s importance and thereby pressure Dunn’s support.
Though she was initially given the nickname by a colleague in the CETA program, before running for office, Thomas’ prowess in the legislature would continue to affirm her reputation as “Able” Mable.
She also amended HB538 to include prostate exams at the request of former Chair of the Health and Ecology Committee, Representative Buddy Childress, who had just suffered a bout with prostate cancer, and who, in return, whipped additional votes for the bill.
Even so, Thomas prohibited Childress from being a signatory- that privilege she reserved for the women in the General Assembly. All of the women signed the bill in a showing of solidarity that has since not been repeated.
Thomas blames the current lack of cooperation amongst women in the legislature on the intense partisanship of the political climate and white women- the members of the GOP who vote against their own interests or the Democrats who neglect to vote for their interests, even when provided with the opportunity.
Regarding the latter, Thomas provides the example of the recent Democratic primaries, during which Renitta Shannon was running as a candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Thomas was a co-sponsor of Shannon’s 2019 bill, which would have expanded Medicaid for new mothers up to a year postpartum. The expressed purpose of the bill was to span the insurance and healthcare accessibility gap, two contributing factors to Black women dying in childbirth at a rate four times that of their white counterparts.
The majority GOP legislature voted against the bill in 2019 before re-introducing it themselves and ensuring its passage during the most recent legislative session.
Still, given the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Thomas said, the Democratic white women voting bloc should have been large enough to elect Shannon had they “connected the dots.”
“If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it goes to the legislature,” Thomas says, “Renitta Shannon as Lieutenant Governor would have been a very big deal.”
Like Shannon, Thomas has likewise experienced the co-opting of her accomplishments by white women. However, in Thomas’s case, it was within her own party affiliation who neglected to credit the work of others, as is common practice with Thomas.
More recently, however, Thomas is beginning to receive overdue recognition for her role as convenor of the Founding Mothers. With each retelling of the story, details of other successes emerge, which Thomas accomplished throughout her career with humor, charisma, and profound faith.
Though Thomas is not opposed to stepping back into the limelight to educate communities about the reproductive justice movement or for a possible Congressional run, she wants to write a memoir. The stories would include stories of what she calls “on-time organizing,” like when she fought to earmark $21 million for the initial Medicaid expansion for postpartum mothers.
Thomas says there had been talk of a much lesser figure but that she remained firm and insisted her colleagues not settle.
“I’m just like Babe Ruth,” Thomas says.
“Remember Babe Ruth said, ‘Over the left-field fence?’ That’s where it will go. I say it will be $21 million, so it shall be. Because I knew the Lord was with me.
And favor of the Lord ain’t fair.”
