Mitch Perry
Fifty years after the passage of the federal Voting Right Act, speakers at today’s 35th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Breakfast in Tampa said it’s time to allow the hundreds of thousands of ex-felons in Florida get their right to vote restored.
“This modern-day disenfranchisement and discrimination is our modern-day challenge,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, the first of a number of local lawmakers to speak at the event, which traditionally begins at 6:45 a.m. on MLK Day.
Florida is only one of four states in which a felony conviction means permanently losing civil rights — including the right to vote. The road to restoring that right is an arduous process that takes years, and a coalition of groups are now working to get a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot in 2016 that would automatically restore the rights of most nonviolent ex-felons.
Their first challenge is to collect signed petitions from 68,314 voters, 10 percent of the total needed, which would trigger a legal review of the petition language by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who led the 2011 reversal of Charlie Crist’s 2007 edict to a minimum five-year waiting period to apply for clemency.
“It looks like it’s going to be on the ballot,” Tampa state Sen. Arthenia Joyner said, receiving polite applause from many of the 1,000-plus members of the audience gathered at the Hilton Hotel. “Service time, restitution, probation, parole, whatever it takes that they’ve done, they deserve to have the right to be full American citizens again.”
The Tampa Bay Times reported last month that the state has a current backlog of 20,000 clemency cases. The ACLU has said voting rights restrictions leave about 1.5 million Floridians unable to vote.
“It makes absolutely no sense that people have to wait,” wondered keynote speaker Joe Madison, an activist and Sirius/XM talk-show host. He told the audience that he gets lots of calls from Florida listeners who have informed him about the years-long wait for the restoration of their civil rights.
“This is not by accident. This is done by purpose,” eliciting a huge cheer from the audience. He then suggested that those left on the voting sidelines in Florida should refuse to pay taxes for five years. “Taxation without representation is the foundation of this very country,” he boomed. “Since politics is the art of compromise, let’s compromise that, and see how quickly that goes through in your legislative session. It’s not going to happen.”
Two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court struck down section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which secured access to the ballot box in parts of the country (including Hillsborough County and four others in Florida ) with histories of black voter suppression. South Carolina Democrat James Clyborn and Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner have teamed up to address the court’s ruling by expanding what is known as preclearance protections currently lacking in the act. But current House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlette said last week that it’s not “necessary” to craft a legislative fix to the Voting Rights Act.
That enrages Madison.
“Now we can sit here and cry that the movie Selma didn’t get any Oscars. I don’t really give a damn about whether it gets an Oscar or not, but what’s more important….I’m going to tell you something. We all should be marching and upset to think that they’re going to gut the Voting Rights Act, and the impact that you know right here in Florida more than any other state that this has on curtailing the vote.”
And befitting the occasion, Madison spoke extensively about the man being honored today, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the three evils that King spoke about: poverty, racism and materialism.
“Dr. Martin Luther King should humbly be remembered as reminding us that white is really not a color. It’s an attitude. And you are as white as you think you are. It’s your choice. And then someone asked (writer) James Baldwin, in that same conversation, what is black? And James Baldwin said ‘black is a condition.’ On my show I often talk about in America, we are culturally conditioned to believe that blacks=inferior, whites=superior. And the manifestation of that cultural conditioning is that too often black people are undervalued, underestimated and marginalized. We have to recondition how we think. “
There were a number of public officials and political candidates at the event, which lasted approximately three hours long.
