In November 2018, Florida voters passed a resolution, Amendment 4, that allows the 1.4 million people with felony convictions in their state who have served all the terms of their conviction to regain their right to vote. Amendment 4 passed with 65 percent of the vote—a mandate from the people of Florida. Like the brave civil rights activists of the 1960s who organized to overturn Jim Crow laws, Desmond Meade and other leaders of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) have led the charge to upend a system that disenfranchises millions of voters, through their advocacy around Amendment 4 and then working to register newly eligible voters. While comprising only 13 percent of Florida’s electorate, African Americans make up about 45 percent of the state’s incarcerated population, numbers that cascade to marginalize thousands of families. The amendment’s passage was a proud victory for the FRRC.
Today, the Senate Rules Committee in Florida are voting on SB7086, a bill meant to undermine Amendment 4. This bill would make it more difficult for citizens to qualify for their right to vote under Amendment 4 by broadening the definition of completion of a sentence beyond what was previously established by the Clemency Board, and gives power to private entities (rather than judges) to determine whether a person has completed their sentence. The bill would also further punish low-income Floridians by taking away the right to vote from people who have completed their sentence but may still owe interest payments or late fees to the court.
These newly proposed obstacles are disturbingly reminiscent of the voter laws that once prevented African American voters from registering in the Jim Crow South. In Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s, African American voters were asked to read aloud sections of the Constitution, or write the Bill of Rights from memory--tests which were not required of white citizens--in order to be eligible to register to vote. The Florida legislators who proposed these restrictions on Amendment 4 appear to be adopting similar strategies--right down to the exploitation of poverty by making debt a factor in voting rights--to continue to marginalize people of color.
Florida’s 150-year old felony disenfranchisement law was used to deem nearly 58,000 registered voters, many of them African Americans, ineligible to vote in the Presidential election of the year 2000. This helped secure George W. Bush’s election by only a few hundred votes, and spurred the movement to amend the Florida state constitution. Since Amendment 4 passed, activists who fought for the reinstatement of their own right to vote have been out knocking on doors and registering hundreds of formerly incarcerated people to vote in the coming elections. This effort could change American history--perhaps impacting the results of the 2020 presidential election.
I worked for a decade as an educator in the school inside of Chicago’s Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. I am now a leader of an education non-profit that works with students in jails and prisons who striving for a high school or college degree. My work as an educator is rooted in my belief that no young person’s life should be defined by the worst mistake they ever made. In many states, these youth lose their right to vote before they’re even old enough to have it. My students had been told they were gangbangers, thugs, felons, and worse. I wanted my students to expand their identities to include “writer,” “leader,” and “activist,” on that list. In other words, I wanted them to grow up to be like Desmond Meade.
Meade and other returning citizens behind the FRRC and Amendment 4 have made it their work to build a social movement of and for America’s most marginalized people—those who have had all their rights stripped away, and who face tremendous obstacles when trying to gain legal employment, housing, or access to education upon return from prison. Like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, leaders of the struggle for equal voting rights for African Americans in Mississippi during Jim Crow, Desmond Meade and leaders of the FRRC are heroes of democracy and leaders in the movement for justice, not merely for the formerly incarcerated folks on the frontlines. They are leading a struggle that could save us from our nation’s worst fear-based impulses toward racism and bigotry.
FRRC President Desmond Meade.