By Jackie Llanos, Florida Phoenix
“Tag, you’re it,” the crowd at the Florida Capitol complex shouted to call on the next generation of leaders to advance voting rights, a duty they said the late Democratic Sen. Geraldine Thompson has passed on to others.
Ocoee Democratic Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis came up with the chant that took hold of the Wednesday press conference, calling for the Republican-controlled Legislature to pass a Florida Voting Rights Act. Bracy Davis plans to run for Thompson’s former seat in Orange County, with her family’s blessing.
Democratic Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis holds a sign honoring the legacy of late Sen. Geraldine Thompson. (Photo be Jackie Llanos/Florida Phoenix)
“At Sen. Thompson’s funeral, one of the speakers mentioned, ‘Who’s next?’ And I thought long and hard about it. It’s us,” Bracy Davis told the Florida Phoenix. “It’s those that are still here, those that are still trying to fight for democracy, equality, and justice. And it’s our time and it’s our turn.”
Thompson, who spent most of the past two decades serving in both chambers of the Legislature, died in office on Feb. 13 following complications from knee surgery.
Bracy Davis is sponsoring a bill, HB 1409, the late senator filed last year, which would establish same-day voting registration, make Election Day a state holiday, require election materials to be offered in other languages, and dismantle the state election police.
Meanwhile, Republicans are focused on further restricting the citizen-led ballot initiative process, following the defeat of the abortion-rights and recreational marijuana constitutional amendments.
The bill also honors Florida civil rights trailblazers Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore, who established the Brevard County branch of the NAACP and worked to register hundreds of thousands of Black people to vote. The couple died when a bomb exploded in their house on Christmas night, 1951. While the FBI investigated members of the Ku Klux Klan in connection with the bombing, no one was ever convicted.
“The idea behind creating a Voting Rights Act to honor the first martyrs of the civil rights movement came about because a few of the speakers from here today went to an event that Sen. Thompson was holding where she told the story about the Moores, and we left that event so inspired by her words and her wisdom that we wanted to memorialize them,” said Abdelilah Skhir, a senior strategist for the ACLU of Florida. “And so we set a goal of creating the most ambitious pro-voter bill ever filed in Florida, and we accomplished that with Sen. Thompson.”
Other speakers at the press conference condemned a state attorney’s decision to drop the charges against the 18-year-old Trump supporter who brandished a machete near an early voting site in northeast Florida.
Martin Harris, a policy associate with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said he was at the polling location where that happened.
“It’s really concerning the lack of accountability from the state attorney’s office,” he said in an interview with the Phoenix. “I’ve convened with voting rights organizations here in Florida to try to uplift this horrible situation so that it can be prevented in the future, but just the lack of accountability is ridiculous.”
