Who Represents Black Florida? The Answer Just Got Complicated

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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August 27, 2026

Joseph Williams, Word in Black

Three August primary victories reveal just how complicated race and representation have become in the Sunshine State.

U.S. Congressman Byron Donalds speaking with attendees at the 2025 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Florida politics has always had its share of strange reflections. But after primary elections in the Sunshine State this month, Black voters looking into the state’s political mirror may struggle to recognize what they see.

A Black Republican who enthusiastically carries President Donald Trump’s MAGA banner — but who has a complicated personal history — could become the first Black governor of this bright-red state.

Meanwhile, an influential white Democratic congresswoman, displaced after Florida lawmakers erased her district, won the party’s nomination to run in a heavily Black district, one that has sent Black representatives to Washington for more than three decades.

And a Black progressive state legislator whose Senate campaign was dismissed as underfunded — and whose wardrobe was mocked by the wife of her vastly better-funded opponent — pulled off one of the biggest Democratic upsets of the 2026 primary season.

Welcome to Florida in 2026, where race, representation and political power seem to have been reflected in a funhouse mirror: everything is recognizable, but almost nothing looks quite the way you expect.

The original article describes how messy the political race is for Florida’s Black voters.

Learn about the politician who ran as a Democratic Socialist and upset the primaries.

You can follow politics that impact the Black community in our Breaking News.

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