Photo courtesy of the Governor's Office
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger attended the NAACP Alexandria 2026 Freedom Fund Dinner Thursday to celebrate the Black leaders who have shaped the Commonwealth and recognize the decades of work by the NAACP to build a safer, stronger, and more prosperous Virginia.
In Alexandria, Spanberger addressed the sold-out 93rd annual Freedom Fund Dinner where she encouraged Virginians to make their voices heard this November — including on the three constitutional amendments on the ballot. The Governor also accepted the chapter’s Breaking Barriers Award for being Virginia’s first female Governor.
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Read Governor Spanberger’s full remarks as prepared for the NAACP Alexandria 2026 Freedom Fund Dinner below:
Thank you for including me in this incredible event. Thank you for honoring me with this incredible award.
And thank you, President Franklin, at the end of your term, and for putting together this beautiful event to bring us all together in community and with inspiration.
And Attorney General Jones: your family’s inspiring story reminds us all about the people who have come before us, and the struggles they have endured, and the amazing work that they have done.
And sometimes those people, we are lucky enough to have them as members of the family. And so I thank you for your leadership, and for continuing to share the inspiration that you are lucky enough to have in your family with the rest of us.
Tonight, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to be with you and to receive this award and to reflect on what it means to break barriers.
And I’ll be honest: on the campaign trail, a lot of people wanted to talk about what it means to be the first woman Governor. And I really struggled with that, because I know that the reason I ran for office in the first place was to help somebody else.
My daughters are now 18, 15 and 12, and when I was out campaigning and then in Washington DC, I would miss a lot of bedtimes.
And my husband would always tell my kids, “Mommy's missing bedtime because there are other mommies who are working two or three jobs. So your mommy's missing bedtime so that she can help those mommies.”
And I ran for office for those mommies and for their babies and their kids and their future. And so it doesn't really come naturally to talk about me being a “first.”
But as Inauguration Day got closer, I kept hearing other people tell me what it meant to them.
A mother telling me that her daughter just couldn't believe that a girl was going to be Governor.
A man who told me that he was so proud to vote for me because he knew his late mother would have loved to have seen it.
And a teenage girl who came up to me and said, “If you are going to be the Governor, I am going to run for President!”
Because when you break barriers for people, you change their idea of what is possible.
And so when I stood on the steps of the Capitol and I took the oath of office, the history and the gravity of the moment was not lost on me. It finally set in and I let myself feel it and enjoy it.
And then a few days later we had a massive ice storm in Virginia. The trees were down, the roads were iced over. And at that point in time, nobody was calling me to congratulate me on making history.
They wanted to know when VDOT was going to hit the highways. They wanted to know when the lights were going to go back on. They wanted to know if they'd be able to get to work in the morning.
And you know what? That's exactly how it should be. Because making history matters. It matters enormously. But the whole point of breaking a barrier is that on the other side of it, it becomes normal.
It's amazing to me that there are kids out there growing up right now thinking it's perfectly normal to have a woman as a Governor, as a Mayor, as a Senator, as a Delegate -- cutting ribbons on good days and answering calls about ice storms on bad ones.
But none of us break barriers on our own. And so I think about the women who forged a path in their own dreams, through their own hard work, their own belief that change and progress would be possible for so many of us that we could follow in their footsteps in any career, in any role, in any challenge.
I think about the suffragists who fought for voting rights at the General Assembly year after year, the voting rights advocates memorialized not too far from here at Occoquan, with a special call out for the women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated who were part of that work from the beginning.
I think about the generations of people who worked to make things better to ensure that their kids would know a world that was stronger, more open, and more inclusive.
I think about Mary Sue Terry, who was the first woman elected statewide in Virginia. And when she ran for Governor in her concession speech, she famously said, “Somewhere in Virginia tonight, the first woman Governor is watching.”
And it makes me think of a story. I was elected to Congress with the class of 2018, it was a very vibrant class, lots of really interesting people. And one of my classmates and friends is a woman named Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, elected from Illinois.
And we were talking one day having a relatively inconsequential conversation and she said something that really stuck in my mind. She’s from Illinois, and she said that when she was a little girl, Carol Mosley Braun was her Senator and Oprah Winfrey was on TV. So she thought she could be anything.
There was something that has stuck with me knowing that this young woman who stepped forward when she ran for Congress in a district that was 97% white and said “I’m going to run for Congress. I can do it.”
I was thinking about that story and the notion of breaking barriers. And really that history and the breaking of barriers, it's not just limited to a couple of different examples.
Right now in Virginia, in our General Assembly, our Commonwealth has elected a record number of Black legislators and a record number of women.
We have our first Black Speaker of the House.
We have Chief Justice Cleo Powell, the first African American woman to lead the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
And last year we elected Ghazala Hashmi as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia -- the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office in the entire country.
And we elected Attorney General Jay Jones as Virginia's first Black Attorney General.
And in our cabinet, we have a record number of Black cabinet members, extraordinarily talented men and women who were leading by example, leading state agencies, leading priorities, working side by side as members of our administration.
They are breaking barriers. And it is happening because people are casting their ballot. All of this has been happening because people are using their voices.
And every one of the first that I just mentioned, as people come through the door, someone somewhere we have to remember fought to open it.
Sometimes it was just a crack and then it was a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger. And then once you walk through it, you have to keep it open for those who come behind you.
That's the real challenge with barriers, that they don't break on their own. It takes people working together.
And despite all of the progress that we've made, there are many more barriers to be broken. And in fact, there are many who try to put barriers up day in and day out.
In just the last few years alone, the United States Supreme Court has dismantled so many of the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act, putting up barriers to vote.
States across the country have used that opening to make it harder to vote, make it harder to vote, closing polling places, purging voter rolls, creating new barriers where the old ones were supposed to have been torn down.
We have a President who continues to lie repeatedly, verifiably, and shamelessly about the results of an election he lost. Someone who uses those lies to justify his efforts to undermine the basic machinery of American democracy.
And this is why I have made it my mission in my administration to break down barriers in Virginia, especially at a time when Washington is trying to build them back up.
Now we know Virginia has not always been at the forefront of voting rights, quite the opposite. But in fact, Virginia has made remarkable strides. Just look at the last few years alone and thank you to the legislators in the room who voted, expanded early voting, no excuse absentee voting, election day as a state holiday, 45 days of early voting.
When federal protections erode, when those barriers go up, Virginia has been strengthening our protections. We have broken down our barriers.
In the first few months since I became Governor, I have signed into law an expansion of the Virginia Voting Rights Act to combat voter suppression.
We have extended the process for absentee and provisional ballots, giving voters more time to fix errors and make sure that a technical mistake does not silence a legitimate vote.
We are laying the groundwork for automatic voter registration in a way that streamlines and modernizes government services and removes red tape, breaks down barriers.
Together, this slate of legislation builds something powerful, a Commonwealth where the franchise, the vote is protected, expanded and honored.
And in the face of federal chaos, we have been moving Virginia forward because our democracy is strongest when every eligible citizen can participate.
And on the subject of eligibility, there is still one major barrier to break.
Virginia is one of only three states that permanently strips voting rights from citizens with felony convictions.
The right to vote is foundational to who we are as Americans and yet in Virginia, whether you got it back after serving your time or you didn't, comes down to one person: The Governor of the Commonwealth has the ability to restore someone's rights.
And here's the reality, it shouldn't be that way. One person alone has the discretion about whether that process is streamlined, whether it's deliberately complicated.
And let me be clear about this: the process I inherited from my predecessor wasn't much of a process at all. It was literally a pile of paperwork that had barely been touched.
The previous administration removed the online portal to apply for your voting rights, moving us backwards, putting up barriers, going from digital to analog. This forced people to fill out a hard copy application, adding to a system that was already terribly backlogged.
But I believe that Virginians who have served their time should be able to take a hold of their second chance.
And when I took office in January, we implemented a more streamlined process and I am proud to report that our administration has restored the rights of well over a hundred thousand people.
And there is something deeply inspiring about talking to someone who has had their rights restored and then who speaks about what that means, knowing that once again, their voice matters, that when the community says you have paid your debt to society, that we really mean it because we are welcoming someone back into the community and saying, “Welcome back. We expect so much of you, and we expect you to engage civically with your voting rights.”
And while I am proud that we have restored the rights of so many Virginians, I also believe that it should not depend on who the Governor is to decide whether eligible people receive their right to vote once again.
And this is why I am standing shoulder to shoulder with Attorney General Jones asking people to vote “yes” for our constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to Virginians.
Early voting has begun. I know I'm at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner, so I don't think I need to remind you all, but let's make sure our friends, our family, our neighbors understand how extraordinarily important this vote is.
And while I look forward to celebrating the passage of this amendment, ensuring that into the future, restoration of rights is automatic, my commitment to you and to every Virginian is that for those who fall in that gap, we will see it through and ensure that we are restoring the rights of every eligible voter.
It's an extraordinary time. It's a time of challenge. It's a time of hardship. It's a time when we are seeing barriers put in place, meant to keep people from getting access to healthcare, getting access to student loans so they can study to be nurses or doctors and take care of our communities. The barriers put in place by bad policy, H.R.1 specifically, will continue to impact Virginia into the future.
And as Governor, I am working tirelessly so that as people are putting barriers in place and frankly trying to rip apart our social safety net, we are working to build it, to create every bit of scaffolding to protect people from the worst of harms.
It is not easy. We will not be able to fix everything that has been broken at the federal level, but here in Virginia, what we are endeavoring to do is ensure that every time there is a hurdle, a roadblock, a challenge or difficulty placed in front of our fellow Virginians, meant to keep them back, meant to keep them from getting healthcare or access to a quality education or even the right to use their voice, that in our Commonwealth, we will break down those barriers.
We will lead by example, and we will ensure that our kids are growing up in a Virginia where wherever they look, there are examples of success, examples of people who care about them, examples of people who wish to inspire them.
So that every little Virginian will say, “Many years from now, I grew up in a place and at a time where I believe I could be anything” -- because that is what we want for our children.
That's what I want for the babies of all those mommies who are working hard.
I am so grateful to be included in this event. I'm grateful for the recognition, and I am so honored to be your Governor.
