Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
In Florida, a deadly rampage filled with hate at the corner of history
Ron Desantis was roundly booed Aug. 27 during remarks in the aftermath of a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville, Fla. What did he expect?
The Florida governor was speaking against the targeting of people “based on their race.”
But the words seemed empty and insincere, coming as they were from a man who has done the very same thing, not with bullets but with divisive rhetoric and legislation that have targeted the interests of Black people as a political calculation.
So, during a somber remembrance for the three people killed by a gunman the day before, simply, it appears, because they were Black, the governor’s hollow words did not sit well with a grieving crowd of about 200 in Jacksonville.
“You’re not welcome here,” said one person.
“Your policies caused this,” said another.
The boos were loud enough that Desantis felt the need to step away for a moment from the microphone.
At the behest of a local city council member, the crowd quieted, but its disquiet was still palpable.
The shooter was a 21-yearold white man armed with an Ar-15-style rifle and a pistol who killed himself after taking the lives of two men and a woman.
The gunman fired 11 rounds at 52-year-old Angela Carr as she sat in her vehicle.
Then he entered the store and fatally shot Anolt Laguerre Jr., 19, who worked at the Dollar General.
Next, the gunman shot and killed 29-year-old Jerrald De’shaun Gallion as he entered the store.
The man, whose name we will not repeat, had decorated one of the weapons with swastikas. He also had written racist manifestos before his violent rampage, leaving little doubt about his motives.
As awful as the carnage was, it could have been worse. The gunman initially had gone to a nearby HBCU, Edward Waters University, but left after students called a security guard. The dollar store apparently was Plan B.
In any case, people died at the hands of a stranger for no reason other than the color of their skin — and for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The timing of the tragedy intersects with so many other events, past and present, that it’s hard not to draw connections:
It occurred one day before the 63rd anniversary of “Ax Handle Saturday” on Aug. 27, 1960, when about 200 white rioters beat Black sit-in protesters with ax handles and baseball bats in Jacksonville.
“A swing, a sound, then red,” recalled one of the protesters, Alton Yates, an Air Force veteran.
(When police arrived, they arrested Black people who had attempted to defend themselves.)
The shooting occurred two days before the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Aug. 28, 1963, “I Have a Dream Speech” whose visions of racial harmony still have yet to be realized. And whose speech that day said so much more but has been winnowed to a misleading excerpt too often quoted in attempts to shut people up when they point out persistent injustices decades later.
It occurred as well in the midst of a year in which racial violence is resurgent.
It occurred months after antisemitic groups projected hateful images, including swastikas, on a building in Jacksonville.
It occurred as lawmakers in Tennessee were trying with all their might to do as little as possible about gun violence after a shooting in March at a church school in Nashville, Tenn., took the lives of three 9-year-old children and three adults.
Meanwhile gun violence seems to be everywhere. Even here. Especially here. With the new school year barely one week old, a professor was fatally shot Monday at Unc-chapel Hill.
Closer to home, at N.C. A&T, a shooting on campus that involved no one affiliated to the university on Aug 26 left one person wounded.
And on the first day of school at Western Guilford High School, two stolen guns were detected by a scanner and confiscated from the backpack of a 17-year-old.
When brings us back to Ron Desantis, who has loosened gun laws in his state and whose all-out assaults on any and all things “woke” and on teaching Black history as it really was — not sanitized to avoid offending white people — have been cynical and relentless.
When Desantis finished his remarks in Jacksonville, the crowd booed a second time.
Given the willful racial ignorance and animus Desantis has stirred in the service of his sputtering presidential ambitions, they were being kind.