Intersections

Florida Senate Rules Committee · SB 308 · February 2026

On the Florida Museum of Black History — SB 308

Florida authorized the creation of a state Museum of Black History in 2023, and after a year-long site selection process, St. Johns County was designated as its home. A welcome development — on its face. But a museum is only as honest as the people who control what goes inside it. Under SB 308, that power rests with a 13-member Board of Directors appointed by the Governor, the Senate President, and the House Speaker. The same Governor who has publicly opposed the teaching of Black history in Florida's classrooms.

Not opposition to the museum — but an insistence that the institution be held to the standard its mission demands. A museum of Black history that softens, omits, or sanitizes that history is not a museum. It is a monument to comfort. The Senate passed SB 308 unanimously. The House never took it up, and the bill failed — leaving both the museum's future and the question of who will tell its story unresolved.

Florida House Education & Employment Committee · HB 999 · April 19, 2023

On House Bill 999 — DEI, Academic Freedom & Higher Education

HB 999 was one of the most sweeping attacks on higher education equity in Florida's recent history. The bill sought to ban funding for DEI programs entirely, prohibit academic majors in fields like critical race theory, gender studies, and intersectionality, strip faculty committees of their role in hiring decisions, and reorient general education requirements around Western civilization — while authorizing boards of trustees to review faculty tenure at any time.

HB 999 did not pass as written — but its core provisions were absorbed into Senate Bill 266, which was signed into law. The impact on Florida's public universities was real and lasting. Dr. Clark's testimony placed evidence in the record at a moment when evidence was most at risk of being legislated away.

Florida House Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting · HB 1D · April 28, 2026

On Mid-Decade Redistricting — Florida's Legacy of Malapportionment

In April 2026, Governor DeSantis called a special legislative session to redraw Florida's congressional map — not after a census, not under a court order, but as part of a presidential push to maximize Republican seats ahead of the midterms. The map stood to shift Florida's congressional delegation from 20-8 Republican to 24-4. The House passed it 83-28. The Senate followed on largely partisan lines.

Before the House Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting, bill sponsor Representative Jenna Persons-Mulicka was represented by two men who presented on her behalf: Jason Poreda, the DeSantis staffer who drew the map, and Mohammed Jazil, an attorney for the Governor's office. It was Poreda and Jazil who cited Florida's 1885 maps and constitution before the committee — invoking them as if they were a sound foundation rather than the origin of a system designed to erase Black political power.

Representative Bruce Hadley Antone moved to have Poreda and Jazil sworn in before their presentation. The committee chairman refused. With over 100 citizens signed up to speak and the Chair asking those remaining to cut testimony to roughly 30 seconds, Dr. Clark made a choice: not to repeat what had already been said, but to place the moment inside the history that made it possible.

She spoke for approximately 36 seconds. Not a deep dive into each era, but an uplifting of the arc — Reconstruction, the 1885 Constitution, the Pork Chop Gang, and the present. The throughline, named.

Florida's legacy of malapportionment has a precise starting point: the 1885 Constitution. It was not the beginning of Florida's political history — Reconstruction's 1868 Constitution had briefly opened the door, giving Black men the right to vote and sending Josiah Walls to Congress in 1870. The 1885 Constitution was the deliberate slamming of that door. It capped representation for populated counties, ensuring that a minority of voters in rural, white-dominated areas could elect a legislative majority. That was the architecture Poreda and Jazil were citing as precedent. Dr. Clark's research made clear what it actually was: the codified beginning of a harm that never fully ended. Through the Pork Chop Gang's frozen maps, through decades of malapportionment, through the Fair Districts Amendments that 63% of Florida voters passed in 2010 to ban exactly this — the line runs straight to 2026.

Florida's Fair Districts Amendment bans partisan gerrymandering; DeSantis has appointed six of the Florida Supreme Court's seven current members.