Darryl PaulsonEighth in a series.
Republicans and blacks dominated politics in Florida for about 20 years immediately after the Civil War. The end of Reconstruction also brought an end to Republican dominance for the next 115 years.
Even though the Democrats drew the election district lines in 1992, Republicans took control of the Florida Senate in 1994, the House in 1996 and, two years later, Jeb Bush won the gubernatorial election. Florida became the first southern state to have Republicans in complete control of the legislative and executive branch.
By the 1990s, few blacks supported the party of Lincoln. One reason was that the Republican Party stopped being the protector of black voters after Reconstruction. The New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt also won broad support in the black community as they created jobs and social services.
The final break occurred in 1964 when Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate. Goldwater was one of four Republicans in the Senate who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although Republicans had won Florida’s electoral votes in 1952, 1956 and 1960, and Nixon had won 20 percent of the black vote in 1960, Goldwater captured only about 2 percent of the black vote.
Florida’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Claude Kirk, won election in 1966. Facing a tough re-election campaign against Democrat Reuben Askew, Kirk tried to appeal to white voters who strongly opposed school busing. Kirk twice fired the Manatee County School Board to prevent desegregation.
Kirk refused to appear before Federal District Court Judge Ben Krentzman, arguing that the governor was “sovereign” and, therefore, not compelled to comply with the judicial order. “King Claudius” was fined $10,000 a day for contempt and quickly ended his shenanigans. Kirk also lost his re-election bid.
The 2000 presidential election heightened tensions between blacks and the Republican Party. Anticipating a close election, the Republican-controlled Legislature contracted with Data Based Technologies (DBT) to remove “illegal felons” from the voter rolls. The 173,000 names generated by DBT included thousands of “false positives.” These were people who had the same or similar names to felons and many were wrongly purged.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation into the 2000 presidential election in Florida concluded that black voters were disproportionately purged from the voter rolls. In Miami-Dade, 65 percent of those purged were black even though they accounted for only 20 percent of the population.
The Republican Party continued to purge voters. In 2012, the Party conducted two purges: one of noncitizens and one involving felons. Of the 180,000 names provided by the State Department of Elections of potential noncitizens, only 85 were removed. Of the 4,000 felons who were purged, 44 percent were black even though blacks are only 16 percent of the population.
In 2011, the Republican Legislature passed an “election reform” bill that curtailed early voting from eight to 12 days and also limited the number of hours of early voting in many counties. In four if the past five presidential elections, early voting was used more by blacks than whites in Florida. In 2008, 54 percent of blacks voted early, almost double the white rate.
The 2011 reforms resulted in long lines during the 2012 election. Thousands of Floridians were still in line when the polls closed at 7 p.m. It was not until 2:54 a.m., or nearly eight hours after the scheduled close, that the last voter cast his ballot in Lee County.
The Democrats instituted one if the most restrictive felon vote laws in the nation. Republicans, realizing that most blacks were Democrats, did little to change that policy.
In 2010, Florida had a felon population of 1,541,602 and a voting age population of 14,799,219. In other words, 10.47 percent of Floridians were disqualified from voting due to a felony conviction. According to The Sentencing Project, “more people were disenfranchised in Florida than any other state.”
Political cartoonist Bill Day recently had a cartoon showing a crow, a “Jim Crow,” perched on a limb saying “This attack on voting rights is not racial.” The nose of the crow, represented by an elephant trunk, was expanding like Pinocchio’s nose.
Next: Black Voting in Florida: What Lies Ahead?
