A.G. Gancarski
In Jacksonville Saturday to speak to the Florida Young Democrats, Rep. Alan Grayson made another stop beforehand: a vigil for Vernell Bing Jr., who was shot down by a police officer last month.
“They told me that I’m the only elected official who’s shown up the last two weeks,” Grayson said.
“It tears them up,” the Orlando congressman and U.S. Senate candidate added. “A death like that has to mean something.”
For Grayson, who believes Bing was “cheated out of 50 years of life,” the meaning is part of an illustration of a larger trend.
At the rally, linked above, Grayson struggled with parlance — referring to Bing as “that boy,” a phrase corrected by someone on hand to “that man.”
Yet his remarks about needing not just “equality of opportunity, but equality of results” were received respectfully.
Grayson, by and large, is an unknown commodity in Jacksonville. But he expects that to change. He has paid staff here, including local Democratic activist Ben Weaver, and 5 percent of all Democrats in Florida are in Duval County … which could be pivotal in the Senate primary Aug. 30.
Grayson, whose message of unrepentant “Feel the Bern”-style liberalism is not necessarily the brand you see elsewhere in the Duval Democratic Party, is a different kind of Dem than people are used to in the 904.
And the Bing rally illustrates why.
“I hugged the mother, prayed with her,” Grayson said, before talking about the root causes of what happened to Bing and countless other young African-American men.
“There’s a pervasive problem called racism,” Grayson says, with impacts reflected in everything from medial salary numbers to educational outcomes.
Pointing out that the average African-American per capita income of $37,000 is well below the average of $57,000 for whites, Grayson said there was a “$20,000 poll tax” on blacks “based on the color of your skin.”
Grayson referred, in a 25-minute phone conversation Saturday evening, to a young man named Andrew Joseph in Tampa, who died in 2014 crossing Interstate 4 on foot after being ejected from a fair by police officers.
In the wake of that incident, Grayson sat down with parents, made calls for civilian review boards, and petitioned the FBI and Justice Department to investigate patterns of racial profiling.
Since people in the Bing case have already petitioned for federal redress, Grayson is “willing to look over the request they’ve made” and see if his input or signature will help.
Grayson sees parallels between the Jacksonville area where Bing was killed and metro areas in other parts of the state, saying that the neighborhood in Jacksonville “could fairly be called a ghetto” given the evident disparities.
In Tampa, there are “enormous amounts of segregation” as well, with “blacks denied political power,” disenfranchised through laws, such as those that strip suffrage from convicted felons.
Over 2 million Floridians can’t vote, said Grayson. Over half of them are black.
“We literally lead the nation in black disenfranchisement.”
Grayson sees himself as the polar opposite of his opponent, Patrick Murphy, whom he sees as a “right-wing Republican” who was just one of seven Democrats to support the congressional Benghazi investigation.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has overlooked Murphy’s deviation from party line; Grayson, however, is not there.
Grayson wants voters in Jacksonville “to understand — I work hard, I pay attention, and I get things done.”
He has less than three months to make that pitch.
