TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — “I can hear the moans.’‘
That was the lament of Sen. Darryl Rouson, a 66-year-old Black Democrat from St. Petersburg on Wednesday as the Senate voted to pass the congressional redistricting map that is expected to reduce Black representation in Congress.
A lawyer and son of educators, Rouson said, “I don’t consider the governor a racist” for demanding a map that protects fewer Black voters for the first time in 30 years when the state has more congressional districts than ever but, he added, “there is no explanation” for a policy that will hurt people.
By Thursday, the moans turned to chants as several Black members of the House staged a one-hour sit-in on the chamber floor to disrupt the debate over the congressional map that Gov. Ron DeSantis had both demanded, and drawn, and to warn that the state was going backwards in time.
The protests startled Republican lawmakers but, with power in numbers, they shouted over the protesters and called a vote on the map. Then, with a 68-38 vote along party lines, the House abruptly ended the special session and passed the map.
DeSantis signed the congressional map on Friday, and it was immediately challenged in state court.
The map is expected to give Republicans 20 of the 28 seats in Congress, in a state in which Republicans hold a narrow advantage in the number of registered voters.
The map is an about-face on two fronts: It reverses 30 years of representation in historic Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Orlando and, since 2017, in North Florida, and it abandons the legal argument legislators relied on when they passed a different map that was vetoed by the governor.
It also serves as another example of the bitter divisiveness that has characterized the DeSantis term and another demonstration of the willingness of the Republican-controlled Legislature to stoke the feud.
“The political end game is to make it so there can be ‘race-neutral’ districts across the country, but what we need to understand is it’s absolutely going to result in the diminishment of Black representation in Congress,’’ said Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat. “And because Black people are the backbone of the Democratic Party, it is going to mean less Democratic representation in Congress.”
The League of Women Voters of Florida, several Black advocacy groups, and individual voters filed suit Friday alleging that the DeSantis map violates the Fair Districts amendments, illegally diminishes minority districts and is gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
Legal experts say the court fight over the DeSantis map could serve as a catalyst for rulings about the future of both the Fair Districts amendments of the Florida Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act.
“The debate ... is, what reigns supreme?’’ asked Miguel De Grandy, a former Republican legislator from Miami who has since represented the state in redistricting cases.
At the federal level, the governor “is trying to say the Voting Rights Act does not protect districts that are drawn with the intent to maximize minority representation,’’ De Grandy said. At the state level, “the question is, is it the Fair Districts amendment or the constitutional case law that has been developed in the federal courts? I think the latter is what will ultimately control.”
Unless a judge imposes an injunction on the map, it is likely to be in place for the November mid-term elections, likely giving Republicans four additional seats in Congress, and eliminating two districts that have elected Blacks members to Congress. The advantage is expected to help move the GOP closer to Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives where it now is 12 votes short of a majority.
Reversing 30 years of policy
The new map represents not only a change in approach for Republicans this year, it is a reversal of the GOP strategy established 30 years ago.
In 1992, Black Democrats aligned with white Republican legislators to persuade a federal court to create three congressional districts to elect the first Black members to Congress since 1876, when Josiah T. Walls of Gainesville left office after serving for five years. He was first sworn in on March 4, 1871.
New legal arguments gave minority voters new tools to demand that states maximize the number of racial and language minority districts when drawing boundaries.
But Florida’s Democratic leaders, who were trying to preserve their legislative majority at the time, resisted. They feared the loss of Black Democrats from white-dominated districts would make it easier for white Republicans to get elected.
After multiple special sessions and failed attempts at compromise between the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, the federal court declared an impasse and hired a special master to draw the maps.
The 1992 map resulted in three Black Democrats elected to Congress: Corrine Brown in Jacksonville, Alcee Hastings in Broward County and Carrie Meek in Miami-Dade County, giving their communities minority representation at the federal level for the first time in history.
In 2015, a court-created map reconfigured Brown’s Jacksonville to Orlando district and replaced it with an Orlando-based district and created Congressional District 5, which stretches 200 miles along the Georgia border and is dotted by eight counties. Former state Sen. Al Lawson defeated Brown in that race, giving Black voters an outsized influence in representing the North Florida region for the first time.
“On average, the counties that make up the current Congressional District 5 have an average African American population of 25% or more, making up a cohesive community of urban and rural voters, many of whom have lived in these communities since the 1880s,” said Sen. Loranne Ausley, a Tallahassee Democrat.
The district not only comprises the communities of Black residents in Tallahassee and Jacksonville, Black voters also comprise a substantial portion of the smaller counties along the Georgia border. In addition to Gadsden County, the counties of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton all have more than 30% Black populations.
But the map proposed by the governor and passed by lawmakers eliminates that district, leaving “an entire swath of this state [with] no African-American member of Congress,” said Sen. Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville.
To Gibson and her colleagues that is “taxation without representation.”
For months, DeSantis pushed for eliminating Congressional District 5, but legislators balked.
In January on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, he became the first governor in recent political history to submit a congressional map in the midst of the state’s redistricting process. The Senate first passed a map that ignored the governor, leaving Congressional District 5 largely intact.
When the governor threatened to veto that plan, the House and Senate developed a compromise two-map plan that even Democrats conceded would have given Black voters an opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.
But DeSantis vetoed that plan and then submitted his own map. It included a district that breaks up the Black communities of Congressional District 5 into Republican-dominated districts.
DeSantis and his legal counsel cited recent court rulings that state that for the district to be drawn as a majority-minority district, it must have at least 50% of its voting age population be Black and include cohesive communities that can be drawn in a geographically compact shape.
“The evolution of the case law has clarified that, yes, there are protections embodied in the Voting Rights Act for compact and large enough minority communities to form a majority in the single-member district,” said De Grandy, who was a legislator in 1992 and involved in the redistricting litigation, “but not to basically go out of your way to create bizarre configurations in order to create majority Hispanic or Black districts.”
However, to opponents, the governor’s argument has turned the 14th Amendment “up on its head,’’ said Cecile Scoon, the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. “The 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment were established primarily to give African Americans, who had been enslaved for hundreds of years, equal rights.”
‘Scared’ by racial progress
For Black Democrats, the Legislature’s willingness to cede control of the redistricting process to the governor was more than about drawing political lines for partisan gain. It was a stark reminder of other recent wrongs that they say have “diluted the voices” of Florida’s 3.7 million Black Floridians.
“Every day I wake up I have to fight because Republicans are pushing this legislation regarding racial issues,’’ said Sen. Bobby Powell, a Democrat from West Palm Beach. “You’re fighting critical race theory. You’re fighting banning books. You’re fighting reduction of Black districts and congressional maps. It’s a fight. It’s a fight. It’s a fight.”
Powell blames a confluence of factors, including the fact that a Black Democrat, Andrew Gillum, “came really close to becoming governor.”
DeSantis defeated the former mayor of Tallahassee in 2018 by a narrow 32,000 votes. Although DeSantis “appointed Black people to significant roles to show that he is not racist,” Powell said, things changed after Black people protested the murder of George Floyd.
“After George Floyd happened, racial awareness was at an all-time high in terms of the disparity between Blacks and whites,’’ he said. “And you started seeing corporations and companies releasing equity statements. And you started seeing people putting Black people who were qualified — not just to meet a quota — in positions of diversity and corporate suites.”
But, Powell said, that “period of racial progress became a scary thought to those who have made a living or have made progress off of the oppression of people.”
So, he said, the governor and Republicans in the Legislature “tapped into those fears” and adopted an approach used in the 1960s by former President Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater — known as the southern strategy — when Republicans increased political support among white voters in the South by exploiting white fear of people of color and appealing to racism against Blacks.
In 2020 and 2021, DeSantis signed the “anti-riot” law that enhanced criminal penalties against protesters and signed SB 90 to limit voter registration, early voting procedures and mail ballot drop boxes. This year, DeSantis pursued the congressional map and on Friday signed the “Stop WOKE Act” which targets how schools and businesses handle racial issues.
The measure punishes corporations that provide diversity training and prohibits schools from instruction that includes The New York Times’ 1619 Project or lessons that could be perceived as leading to white guilt.
“We cannot allow ideologues to try to distort what has happened in this country’s history,’’ DeSantis declared at the bill signing in Hialeah Gardens. “And so we will absolutely teach all aspects of history that are true.”
What is ‘race-neutral’
It’s an “exhausting” development, said Brenda Holt, 68, a county commissioner in Gadsden County for 20 years.
Her small rural county is the only Black majority county in the state, with 55% of its population African American. In 2012, she was one of the plaintiffs that sued the state over its congressional maps, leading the Florida Supreme Court to invalidate them after finding that partisan intent had tainted the redistricting process.
The daughter of a sharecropper who grew shade tobacco, Holt spent a career teaching algebra at Florida A&M High school. She remembers when Black voters in her county were turned away when they’d show up to vote in the supervisor’s office. She now sees the governor’s politics as an attempt to “whitewash history, again.”
“We can’t talk about anything that slaves had to do to take care of George Washington, but we can talk about all the things George Washington did,’’ she said, referring to the ““Stop W.O.K.E Act.”
In 2017, when the court imposed the congressional map and Lawson was elected to Congressional District 5, it was the first time her county was represented by a Black member of Congress.
“Yes, it has made a difference,’’ she said. Lawson recently helped the county receive $4.6 million to build an emergency operations shelter, which the county didn’t have during Hurricane Michael or the COVID pandemic, she said.
She scoffs at the governor’s suggestion that his map is “race neutral.”
“How can it be race neutral when you have more whites than blacks in the district?” Holt asked. “It’s not an FCAT question. It’s a real question. Isn’t it race neutral if you have the same number of whites as blacks?”
History of transgressions
Throughout the debate on the congressional map, it was the Legislature’s most conservative Republicans who spoke up to defend the governor and his plan, as many Republicans remained silent.
Rep. Randy Fine, a Palm Bay Republican, defended the governor’s argument that favoring Black voters in Congressional District 5 violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
“When we guarantee that a group of people gets to select the candidate of their choice, what we are saying is we’re guaranteeing those who aren’t part of the group get no say,” he said.
Sen. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican, said he believes that times are different than they were 30 years ago when the Black members of Congress were first elected.
“I think we’ve come very far in a few years, even though I know some of those concerns and problems still persist,” he said. “What we are seeing is that we have Black members that are winning seats that are not designated as minority-majority seats. That means they are beginning to do what needs to happen and that is the culture is absorbing and we’re coming together more.”
Chief U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker is among those not convinced that Florida has overcome its racist past.
In a a lengthy court ruling overturning a 2021 state law that attempted to impose new limits on voter registration, voting procedures and drop boxes, Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, wrote that “Florida has a grotesque history of racial discrimination.”
He cited the testimony of historians who detailed how after the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, Florida altered its Constitution to allow the governor to appoint all statewide officeholders, “ensuring white domination of the executive branch.”
He cited the 1887 law requiring registration certificates to vote and the 1888 “Eight Box Law” which “worked as a de facto literacy test” and a poll tax.
He also detailed the state’s more recent history, noting that “in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
Walker declared the right to vote “under siege,” and said racial disparities in Florida are the “stark results of a political system that, for well over a century, has over-represented white Floridians and underrepresented Black and Latino Floridians.”
“To be sure, there are those who suggest that we live in a post-racial society,’’ Walker wrote in his order. “But that is simply not so.”
For many Black elected officials, the notion that the state has moved beyond its racist past and no longer needs the protections afforded to it in the Voting Rights Act is unrealistic.
“It is not about the color of the skin, it’s about the lived experience of people who understand that the poor will always be with us …. and bringing that perspective,” said state Rep. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere.
Walter Smith Jr., a retired 82-year-old who served as a command sergeant major for the U.S. Army, traveled from Jacksonville to Tallahassee to join a rally protesting the DeSantis congressional map on Tuesday. He said he feared the governor’s congressional map would propel Florida back to the time when he was growing up.
When he was 19 years old and getting his military training in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, he entered a restaurant where his colleagues who were white were eating. Although he was wearing his Army uniform, “I was not allowed to go in that restaurant to get something to eat,’’ he recalled. His message to legislators: “Stop going back, and learn history.”
Rep. Michelle Rayner, a Democrat from St. Petersburg who is running for Congress, said she tells people, “my lived experience as a Black woman informs the way I think about policy.
“There are many times that I and other Black colleagues have told members in this House that a policy will hurt our people, hurt our communities, and we are summarily ignored,’’ she said. “So it’s rich to say that we have moved past this.”
Sen. Shevrin Jones, a West Park Democrat, said that including Walls, the Gainesville congressman and former slave who lost his re-election in a contested race in 1876, there have been only 11 Black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction, including the four Democrats serving today and one Republican.
The governor’s talk of “race-neutral,’’ he said, “is a code word for: Forget your representation.”
For him, Jones added, the fight is also personal. Before heading back to Tallahassee for the special session, he said his mom called him.
“She said, ‘Shev, your dad and I have seen this before and to see it again is scary,’” he said. “She was sad because they don’t have that fight in them anymore, and they just don’t know if this generation has enough strength to do what they did.”
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(Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau reporter Kirby Wilson contributed to this report.)
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