In 2013, Raumesh Akbari, AB ’06, wasn’t planning to run for office. She was an attorney working in her family’s beauty supply business in Memphis when a friend suggested she enter the race for Tennessee state representative. The primary was eight weeks away. She decided to run anyway.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who looks for when preparation meets opportunity,” Akbari said. “I just jump in.”

The groundwork for her political career was laid years earlier. Akbari grew up in Memphis in a district that includes the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. As a child, she played in a park near her grandmother’s house, the same park where she would later organize voter registration drives.

She loved literature and history, especially stories about the Civil Rights Movement and the Holocaust. Those early readings sharpened her understanding of inequity and responsibility.

At WashU, where she majored in African and African American studies and political science, that interest came full circle. The coursework pushed her to think critically and write precisely. It also widened her perspective.

“I learned to see from the vantage point of people who are under-resourced and underrepresented,” she said. “It gave me a global view.”

Outside of the classroom, she stepped into student leadership. As president of the Association of Black Students, she helped guide campus conversations around race and public life. She met influential civil rights figures, including Mae C. Jemison, Dick Gregory, Bob Moses, and Cornel West, all of whom came to campus to speak. She attended the 2004 presidential debate between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, hosted at WashU — an experience that underscored how closely national politics and campus life could intersect.

After graduation and law school, Akbari returned to Memphis. When the opportunity to run for office arose in 2013, she leaned on family and friends. Her parents and her twin sister, Raumina, campaigned alongside her. Friends from WashU traveled south to knock on doors in the final weeks before the primary. She won. 

In the Tennessee House, and later in the Senate, her priorities reflected both her upbringing and her education: education policy, criminal justice reform, and economic development in historically marginalized communities.

Early in her first term, she worked to prevent the state takeover of several Memphis-area schools that were beginning to improve. By building bipartisan support, she helped pass legislation that allowed 10 schools to retain local control. In 2021, she helped pass a unanimous law requiring police interrogations of juvenile suspects to be recorded — a measure intended to protect young people and safeguard officers from false allegations. After three terms in the House, Akbari was elected to the Tennessee Senate, where she now serves as minority leader. In a legislature where her party holds far less than a majority, passing legislation requires careful coalition-building.

“Every bill I pass has to be bipartisan,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d never get anything passed.”

This spring, she will return to WashU for her 20th reunion. For students watching today’s political climate with frustration or uncertainty, she offers a straightforward message: Stay engaged.

“There are people who are depending on you,” she said. “You have to fight for yourself and for those who might not have a voice at the table.”

Header image: The Tennessee State Capitol. Credit: Travis Saylor/Pexels