When Mary Parham-Copelan was running for student-council president of her middle school in Milledgeville, Ga., as a young Black girl back in the early 1980s, she asked one of the older girls she looked up to, Lisa Cook, for help with her speech.

Cook, who hailed from a prominent family in the rural town of about 17,000, told Parham-Copelan that above all else, she needed to command the audience of classmates in the school gym, that she needed to make sure her voice was heard.