For many years, at the entrance to the downtown area in Pensacola, Florida, stood a towering Confederate statue. It was removed last year after protests.
In conservative cities like Pensacola, it’s challenging enough to get a large number of people to turn out for a protest. If HB 1 becomes law, it will make challenging racial inequality even more difficult.
A few blocks down, another statue of a Confederate soldier turned KKK leader sits proudly in a park that once hosted lynchings, a few feet away from a bust of Andrew Jackson. Just across the street, the T.T. Wentworth Jr. Museum, named in honor of a founding member and president of the Klan, overlooks the park.
For years, activists in Pensacola, the nation’s first city, have argued for the removal of these racist symbols, to no avail.
The city of about 50,000 residents, part of a metropolitan area with ten times that number, has also seen its share of police violence. In 2019, police shot and killed an unarmed Black man named Tymar Crawford in front of his children. A grand jury decided not to charge Daniel Siemen, the police officer who killed him.
Like many cities across the country, Pensacola erupted into protest following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd. The protests lasted for nearly three months, peaking on June 6, when protesters shutdown the highly trafficked General Daniel “Chappie” James Jr Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the first African American four-star general in the United States Armed Forces, for nearly forty minutes.
This act of civil disobedience convinced the mayor to establish a Citizen Police Advisory Committee, which the grand jury report recommended after Crawford’s death. (However, the mayor has since dissolved it). The city did agree on July 14, 2020, to remove the Confederate statue that marked the entrance of downtown since the late 1800s and rename the city’s museum.
But just when Pensacola’s fight against racial inequality is gaining momentum, First Amendment rights in Florida are coming under attack.
Florida House Bill 1, which passed on March 26 with about two-thirds of representatives voting in favor of the bill, would enhance criminal charges against protesters who attend an event that the police could interpret as a riot. The House is 65% Republican. In some cases, it could result in felony convictions, under Florida law would result in the loss of voting rights. The bill also gives the state the power to repeal a municipalities’ decision to reduce police budgets.
The bill will be read on the Senate floor this Wednesday and voted on the following day. Unlike most bills, if HB 1 is passed in the Senate, it will become law the moment Governor Ron DeSantis signs it.
The sponsors of HB 1 say it is needed to prevent another violent riot like the insurrection that took place on January 6 in Washington, D.C. Both HB 1 and its state senate companion, SB 484, were filed the day of the insurrection. But the bills are a replica of DeSantis’ Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act, which was crafted as a response to the state’s extensive Black Lives Matter protests last summer. Activists say silencing this group is the bill’s true purpose.
“We were one of the reasons why HB 1 is in existence right now. Can’t nobody tell me otherwise. If we didn’t do what we did on June 6, 2020, we wouldn't have HB 1,” says Jamil Davis, Florida lead organizer for Black Voters Matter. “When we stood on that bridge, there were Amazon trucks on that bridge. There were Walmart trucks on that bridge. We stopped commerce from happening for thirty-five to forty minutes because Chappie James Bridge is literally the last bridge that you are on before I-10.”
Under DeSantis’s act, blocking bridges and roadways, which the Pensacola Dream Defenders did on June 6, could be charged as a third-degree felony, with the organizers subject to liability under the The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Gina Castro
Protesters against HB 1 in Pensacola, Florida, on April 10.
On June 6, a protester was hit by a vehicle and carried on the hood of the car to the other side of the bridge. DeSantis’s act would protect drivers who injure or kill protesters with their vehicle. It also prohibits the defunding of police budgets. (One of the few actions the mayor’s Citizen Police Advisory Committee was permitted to do when it was created was make recommendations about a police department’s budget).
In conservative cities like Pensacola, it’s challenging enough to get a large number of people to turn out for a protest. If HB 1 becomes law, it will make challenging racial inequality even more difficult.
“This bill would keep people in fear of going to a peaceful protest because of the insinuation that they could be arrested and sent to jail with no bail if one thing happens that law enforcement could deem riotous or chaotic. It makes people even more afraid to build people power and gather,” says Hale Morrissette, a regional organizer with Pensacola Dream Defenders.
In February, law school professors from seventy-one universities across the country wrote a letter to Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls, Republican of Palm Harbor, and Senator Wilton Simpson, Republican of Trilby, in opposition of HB 1. They argued that the bill is unconstitutional, noting its “over-broad definitions of ‘committing a riot’ and ‘aggravated rioting,’ which sweep in persons merely present at protests who do not themselves engage in violent conduct.”
The letter also took issue with the bill’s definition of “encouraging a riot,” saying it goes “beyond incitement of violent acts,” and its definition of “mob intimidation,” which the professors said is “so capacious that any number of commonplace activities fall under it.”
Pensacola economist Rick Harper, in his testimony before the Senate Committee on Appropriations on April 9, estimated the bill’s economic impact at between $25 million and $70 million, due to the increased incarceration it will cause.
Florida already has the third largest prison population in the United States.
“The passing of this bill will be fiscally irresponsible long term,” Morrissette testified to the Senate Committee on Appropriations. “This is really evident and it’s the opposite of the bipartisan effort to reverse mass incarceration in this state.”
Activists in Pensacola agree that this bill, if passed, will not kill the Black Lives Matter movement. But it will definitely make the price of freedom all the more costly.
“Organizing is my birthright. Protesting is my birthright,” Davis says. “They’re not going to stop any of us.”