We will vote by God!
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “More than 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated in jails and prisons, up from less than 200,000 in 1972, while over 4.6 million more are on probation or parole … African Americans make up about 13% of the nation’s population but constitute 28% of all arrests, 40% of the incarcerated, and 42% of those on death row.”
Florida, your state, has traditionally treated its substantial Black population badly.
I’m talking about vicious white gangs attacking Blacks for lies the whites believe to be true – I’m talking about forbidding children’s books that outline their group history.
I’m talking about Florida, not the Florida that “noted” white “historian” Victor Davis Hanson regales as the best example of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social and economic progress and brilliance when he compares to what he refers to as a backward, criminal Mexican state/territory of Baja California.
Baja is the world’s longest peninsula with mostly mountains to 11,000 feet altitude and millions of square miles of waterless desert.
Florida, on the other hand, is a peninsula that sits on huge aquifers of fresh water under vast flatlands which themselves have thousands of square miles that blind children could cultivate.
The most egregious traditions, social attitudes and laws these white Americans brought with them was a vicious racism and White Supremacy that still has currency in Florida.
The core of this viciousness was slavery. It was no surprise when Florida attempted to secede from the United States. The Southern White mania for owning Africans was the primary reason to secede. State’s rights!
An underlying problem: Florida’s university system, public and private, suffers. In Forbes Magazine’s top 50 university-ranking we find one Florida university, the University of Florida, closer to #50 than #1. At the same time we find 11 public and private California universities in the top 50 mostly in the top ten including the best, the University of California, Berkeley, #1.
Governor DeSantis, let’s talk about your war on education. “Florida is one of 19 states that have passed laws or used executive orders to limit the teaching of critical race (subjects)….”
Here are some suggestions to repair the DeSantis damage.
Suggestion 1: Black Republicans went to the polls in Ocosse, Florida, November 2, 1920, to vote for Republican President, Warren G. Harding. Their motto: “We Will Vote By God!” They were denied. Two came back armed with rifles to force white Democrats to allow them to vote. Shooting began. White men came from all over Florida; they killed over 50 Black men, women and children. Blacks were denied the vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Suggestion 2: Take every middle and high school student in Florida to see where the town of Rosewood stood populated by mostly Black people until January 1-4 of 1923, when false charges alleged that a Black man raped a white woman. As was usual, enraged white males proceeded to attack and shoot up Black homes. They killed, perhaps, hundreds of Black men, women and children. The State of Florida, under Republican governors, investigated the carnage in recent years and granted reparations to direct descendents of the murdered and their survivors.
Suggestion 3: Tell the people how Park Trammell, Democrat Attorney General and Governor (1913-1917), didn’t prosecute anyone for the 50 lynchings of Black men during his tenures as AG and Governor.
Suggestion (4) for you and “quasi” – sort of historian – Victor Davis Hanson. Educate yourselves and all Floridian about these Florida attacks on Black men, women and children while Hanson was in college; to wit: 1960, Jacksonville; hundreds of Ku Klux Klansmen armed themselves with ax handles with Confederate flags taped to them and attacked young Blacks trying to sit-in at white-only lunch counters at five and dime stores. 1960.
Suggestion 5: How about an educational video showing every kid in Florida how riots broke out in 1966 (Clearwater) and 1996 (St. Petersburg) when white police officers shot and killed two young Black men, one in the back.
Lastly, Governor DeSantis, how about allowing all children to read about the former U.S. Marine, patriot and fabulous baseball player Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente. In Florida, “The pulling of “Roberto Clemente: The Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” is part of a national purge of books amid laws forcing schools and libraries to remove literature about people of color.”