Black Floridians Politically Silenced
Black Floridians face less democracy in the post-Civil Rights era than ever, since Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Marching on the Miami-Dade County school board with historian Dr. Marvin Dunn in Miami’s Overtown, supporting comprehensive Black history education in Florida public schools, on August 16, 2023. (newswire)
It started with Florida's 2018 citizen-initiative petition for the Voting Restoration Amendment, known as Amendment 4, which was estimated to potentially enfranchise up to a million citizens with nonviolent criminal records, mostly Black men. It passed with over 64% of the statewide vote, the same year Ron DeSantis eked out an election win to succeed Rick Scott as governor.
In 2019, Gov. DeSantis signed SB 7066 into law, a measure backed by the Florida Legislature, led by a Republican Party supermajority, that added fines and fees to Amendment 4, which critics likened to a poll tax.
In 2021, in the wake of global outrage following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, Gov. DeSantis signed into law bills that aimed to suppress uprisings, like those that happened in Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville.
In 2022, while the Trayvon Martin Foundation commemorated a decade after the unprovoked killing of the Miami Gardens teen, Gov. DeSantis singlehandedly redrew Florida's congressional map to eliminate a Black voter access seat centered on Tallahassee, home to Florida’s Black descendants of slavery.
In 2023, Gov. DeSantis said Black people benefited from slavery, while signing into law legislation that restricted Black history education in Florida's K-12 schools and colleges. U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Naples (originally New York), a Black Republican running to succeed DeSantis, affirmed DeSantis, and said the Black family unit did better under segregation.
In 2024, Gov. DeSantis then used taxpayer funds to run ads against citizen initiatives for abortion access and cannabis, issues addressing immediate health and criminal justice disparities for Black people. Both measures garnered majority support from voters, but not enough to meet Florida's extraordinary 60% citizen initiative passage threshold.
In 2025, Gov. DeSantis signed a law heavily restricting the citizen-initiative process, one of the only mechanisms Floridians have to bypass the supermajority in the legislature to pass laws. The governor clamped down on the collective voice of voters to change state government.
Then in 2026, at the behest of President Donald Trump, Gov. DeSantis redrew Florida's congressional map (again), which he said was intended to add Republican-leaning seats to Congress by cracking minority voting access districts in Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville, and limit Black voting power in populous and heavily-packed Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and the Palm Beaches (Miami metro).
Maya Angelou famously said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." The administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, time and time again, treated Black people, their lives, their education, their healthcare, their voting rights, and their freedom, as disposable.
Is the governorship of Ron DeSantis leaving a better Florida for the demographic with the longest and most brutal history of repression in the state, better than it was? The obvious answer, for Black Floridians, is "no."
The political calculation, it seems, is to draw Black Floridians off the map, and, if they are tightly-packed, like in South Florida, ghettoize them in a sea of non-Black representation. Modern Black Florida is the most reliable, yet most historically-suppressed voting bloc in the state, and its current alignment with the Democratic Party stems from a number of key moments:
In February 1964, Democratic Miami Congressman Claude Pepper was the sole Florida congressmen of 12 to support the Civil Rights Act
In June 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. marched for desegregation in St. Augustine, during the city's 400th anniversary celebration
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Historically, Florida's Black voters were aligned with President Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, as was the state's first and only Black congressman for over a century after Reconstruction, Josiah T. Walls, elected from 1870-1876, while culturally conservative white Southerners were Democrats, or “Dixiecrats.”
The parties realigned in the 1968 election with President Richard Nixon, where his narrow win depended on appealing to Southern white resistance to integration. Culturally conservative Dixiecrat Democrats, following figures like Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, became Republicans, while Black people in Florida, federally enfranchised under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, mostly became post-Civil Rights-era Democrats.
Modern attacks on Democratic Party representation in 2026, as authorized by the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais, are veiled attacks on the voices of Black people to participate in their government. It is illegal to be racist, so discrimination must be coded by political party, and the most reliable voting bloc of the Democratic Party are Black voters, and specifically Black women, as was the case in the 2024 U.S. general election.
In Florida's 2022 and 2024 election cycles, Black voter turnout trended downward, amid assaults on the lives of Black people and culture.
Black Floridians experienced decades of expanded social access for working families, the poor, elderly, disabled, and otherwise disaffected through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, under Democratic Govs. Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, many programs which continued to be funded under Republican Govs. Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, and Scott.
Only in recent years has an administration moved to restrict the voices of all Florida voters, and especially muzzle the voices of Black Floridians, with such obvious and willful intent.
In January 2027, after eight years, Florida will have a new governor. For particularly Black Floridians, that day can’t come soon enough.
