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Across five days and three cities — Tampa, Tallahassee, and Sarasota — students, organizers, parents, resigned professors, and Floridians tell me about the pain the DeSantis administration has wrought on their communities. Some have fled the state after being forced out by discriminatory policies, FaceTiming me from a Massachusetts college dorm or while grabbing coffee in New York. Those left wading through Florida’s red tide — either by choice or because they don’t have another option — are fighting for a different Florida: a Florida for everyone.
Tampa
At a West Tampa vigil on August 28, the crowd was sparse, thinned by the approach of Hurricane Idalia. Florida’s infamous summer mugginess was already knotting my hair. In two days, the hurricane would make landfall, bringing historic storm surges to Florida’s Big Bend and wiping out power for hundreds of thousands of Floridians.
Two days prior, a white supremacist brought a gun into a Jacksonville Dollar General, killing 29-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, and 19-year-old Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, before turning the gun on himself. The police said the shooting was racially motivated.
You could almost taste the grief and anger in the sweaty air as we gathered in a West Tampa public square to remember the dead. Between speakers, chants for justice for victims of gun violence filled the silence, and loved ones called out the names of those they’d lost. Miss Brenda of the Circle of Mothers mourned her nine-year-old granddaughter Felecia Williams, violently murdered in 2014, and her daughter, who, she says, died two years ago of heartache. Deanna Joseph remembered her 14-year-old son, Andrew Joseph III, who was hit by a car and killed in Tampa in 2014 after law enforcement ejected him from a county fair without notifying his parents. (A jury found the sheriff’s department 90% at fault for Andrew’s death.) And the voice of the vigil’s MC, Val Lucas, 24, wavered almost imperceptibly when calling out for 26-year-old Manny Terán, otherwise known as Tortuguita, a Florida-based activist who was killed in January in the struggle against Atlanta’s proposed Cop City.
These deaths, speakers stressed, were not isolated incidents. They connected the Jacksonville shooting, specifically, to DeSantis’s push to criminalize protest in the state; to ban, distort, and defund the teaching of Black history; to disenfranchise Florida voters, including those with felony convictions — a group Floridians had just voted to re-enfranchise; to the legacy of racist violence and policing in the state.
“It’s important to understand that none of the things that we’ve seen in Jacksonville is by coincidence,” said Deanna Joseph, of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Florida, as she addressed the crowd. “It is by design that our people are dying. And there’s no outrage, there is no sense of urgency.”
Some of the organizers see a connection between anti-Black policies and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. “It was a rebellion in its simplest sense,” Laura Rodriguez, 24, told me after the vigil. I sat with Rodriguez, Lucas, and 24-year-old Lauren Pineiro off to one side as speakers and organizers hugged and casually debriefed one another on their ride-out plans for Idalia. The towering palm trees rustled with the wind as a lizard darted up one trunk, and a quintessential Florida sunset unfurled above our heads like a watercolor in washes of pink, orange, and eggshell blue.
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