- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

Florida This Week is made possible in part by support from the Tampa Bay Times.

- Coming up next, the recording about an alleged Russian hit squad, roils a local congressional race.

- I call up my Russian and Ukrainian hit squad, and within 24 hours they're sending me pictures of her disappearing.

- Is that red tide outbreak linked to the Piney Point phosphate spill?

Environmentalist try to protect two giant tracks of undeveloped land.

And, the mystery surrounding lost graves of African-Americans.

All this and more, right now on Florida This Week.

(orchestral music begins) (orchestral music continues) (orchestral music continues) (orchestral music continues) (orchestral music continues) - Welcome back, this week, just in time for summer red tide was recorded along the shores in Manatee Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.

- The fish kills were the worst in Pinellas County but this outbreak is not as bad as the one in 2018 that caused massive killing in marine life and had a huge negative impact on the Gulf Coast tourist economy.

Also a new GOP candidate for Congress in Pinellas county was secretly recorded promising to send a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad to kill his Republican primary opponent.

In a secretly recorded phone call with a fellow Republican activist, William Braddock repeatedly warned that activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for the seat now held by Democrat Charlie Crist.

The reason for calling in the hit squad, Braddock claims Luna is not conservative enough.

- [Republican Activist] How do we make her go?

- [Braddock] I call up my Russian and Ukrainian hit squad, and within 24 hours, they're sending me pictures of her disappearing.

- [Republican Activist] Oh dang!

- [Braddock] No, I'm not joking.

- [Republican Activist] Wow!

- [Braddock] This is beyond, this is beyond my control at this point.

- [Republican Activist] So it's really bad.

- [Rob] Politico, which broke the story says Braddock would not confirm that it was his voice on the recording.

He also suggested the recording may have even been altered and edited.

According to the Tampa bay Times, Luna obtained a temporary restraining order against Braddock last week.

Governor Ron DeSantis said this week that Florida law enforcement officers will soon go to Texas and Arizona to help with border control.

DeSantis' announcement came during a news conference in Pensacola, after the Governors of Texas and Arizona requested help from other states to battle illegal immigration at the Mexico border.

It's unclear how many law enforcement officers will be sent from Florida or what kind of training they will receive.

And a new task force was announced this week with funding from the legislature to find missing burial sites of African-Americans around Florida, and to report to the governor by January 1st.

- According to estimates made by state and federal archeologists there are nearly 3000 abandoned African-American cemeteries across the state of Florida that have not been yet identified.

- But, now with this task force, we find our chance as a state to work together to think through the best ways to honor those who were lost but who should never ever be forgotten.

- [Rob] This comes as there's a controversy over a long missing African-American cemetery in Tampa, which may be under the Italian Club Cemetery parking lot.

Buried there along with a thousand other people in long lost graves could be a major figure in Florida's history.

Former state Senator Robert Meacham, who rose from slavery to eventually help write Florida's constitution and establish the state's public school system.

Community leaders want the city of Tampa to help find the lost graves.

- Well, joining us in the studio now are two authorities on black history and civil rights.

Ray Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Southern History professor emeritus at USF St. Pete.

He's written extensively about the civil rights movement and his books include Freedom Riders, and books about Arthur Ashe and singer Marian Anderson.

And Fred Hearns, is the black history curator at the Tampa Bay History Center.

He's a longtime journalist, author and community activist.

And, has led more than 300 tours of historic black neighborhoods in Tampa.

Ray and Fred, welcome to Florida This Week.

Great to see you.

- Thank you.

- So Fred, has the city of Tampa come forward?

Are they willing to spend some money to look for these lost graves at the Italian Club Cemetery?

- Well, so far I have not heard of the city making a financial commitment to a search at the Italian Club site.

The city has made a commitment of $50,000 at the Zion Cemetery site, which was the first one that was recovered and that the Tampa Bay Times wrote about and Ray Reed did research.

And so that was the first one to surface.

So the City, Hillsborough County Government, as well as state of Florida have committed $50,000.

That will get us started toward trying to give some closure to what happened at the Zion site.

But, the site of the Italian Club?

I have not heard yet of the city making a commitment.

- And Robert Meacham?

We don't know where he's buried.

A significant figure in Florida history.

- Exactly, and Robert Meacham, we do know based on the research that has been done by the Times, he is buried at what is now, now known as the Italian Club Cemetery in east Tampa.

Robert Meacham's daughter-in-law, Christina Meacham, is the woman that who for whom a school was named, elementary school in the Central Park Village area.

And, the Meacham name is known throughout the state of Florida is an outstanding legislator and a leader of the black community.

So, we hope the Meacham school will be rebuilt.

We hope that others will step forward and help fund the ground truthing, and the other research needs to be done at the College Hill site to find not only where Mr. Meacham is buried, but other African-Americans.

- So, Ray, how did we lose these people?

I mean, how did we lose sight of where these people were buried?

And you point out too, that at the Tropicana dome in St Petersburg, there still may be some unexplored graves there under the baseball stadium.

- When they built the stadium they removed the whole get so-called gas plant neighborhood.

And there were 18 black churches and three black cemeteries on that site.

And I think they, they tried their best but I don't think they were careful enough to get all of the, all of the graves.

At least that's the suspicion.

It's a pretty strong suspicion among members of the community.

And we'll see if Tropicana site gets redeveloped whether they'll take the time to find out what's underneath that parking lot.

- Ray, I want to ask you about critical race theory.

It's this week in Kissimmee, the Republicans had a gathering.

And, it was one of the main talking points of Senator Rick Scott and Senator Ted Cruz and others.

They were deriding critical race theory.

In my question last week to one of our Republican guests, and I'll ask you this, this week, where do you draw the line between black history and critical race theory?

Is that line easy to find?

- Well, it's probably not easy to find.

Although, I would say of all the crazy things that have happened in the last four or five years, this controversy over critical race theory may be the most ludicrous, frankly.

You know, the term is probably an unfortunate one.

It's kind of like defunding the police.

It's not, probably not the best political choice.

And it came out of the law school in the 1970s, Derek Bell at Harvard and a number of other professors developed out of critical legal theory.

It was called and they did critical race theory.

And that's why they use the term.

But really all it is, is a an emphasis on institutional racism.

You know, it's the notion that it's not just individuals who are prejudice.

It's a much deeper reality.

It's kind of a social, cultural construct within a society.

And it's, I mean, it's intellectually unassailable.

I mean, I would say of the thousands of scholars teachers who specialize in this area, I'd be hard pressed to find one or two who would be critical of the concept of critical race theory.

I mean, their arguments about the details, certainly.

But it's sort of like, you know, you can't see the oxygen in the air, but it's there and you couldn't breathe it out.

And that's the institutional structure of racism is a fundamental part of American history and African-American history.

And, I don't think anyone who's ever studied it, could doubt it So it's, it seems to me that this attack, which is a manufactured one I believe, is really not so much bigotry as it's demagoguery.

It's hard for me to believe that Governor DeSantis who has a Harvard degree after all, and is well-educated person, is willfully ignorance.

I mean, he must know full well that what he's doing is intellectually absurd, but he seems to think that it's politically, politically advantageous to him.

- Let me ask you about an op-ed that you wrote in the Tampa Bay Times, co-wrote with Howard Simon, the former ACLU director in Florida.

And you say, the assault on democracy and voting rights is so widespread taking place in so many states, young volunteers can devote a summer or perhaps even a full year of working for democracy where voting rights are under attack.

And you list the states where that's happening, Florida Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio.

You say that these young volunteers can organize to staff offices, register voters, assist with the application process to vote by mail staff, phone banks, and drive people to the polls.

Everyone can be involved in resisting the metastasizing of undemocratic voting laws.

You were here a few months ago, you said you were pretty optimistic about the future.

This was before January 6th.

Before Florida voted for these new voting laws that restrict some access to voting.

You're calling for a new freedom summer.

- Yes, I probably was too optimistic at the beginning of the year.

You know, I've been spending the last few months writing a biography of John Lewis.

And part of it, that I've been working on recently is about Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964.

I feel like I'm sort of reliving it.

And, it was sort of a coincidence really that Howard and I wrote this piece on, on proposing a new freedom summer, but it was one of the turning points in American political history and that kind of new conception of citizen politics.

- [Rob] This is 1964, volunteers from the north heads to the south where blacks are being denied the right to register to vote and vote.

- That's right.

But almost a thousand college students that were trained in Oxford, Ohio.

And then they came down to Mississippi and they worked in the freedom schools and they registered people to vote.

And, the idea was that black people had been murdered in huge numbers of Mississippi for generations.

And, they thought it was kind of a dangerous strategy, but if they put white kids there as well, and they were in harm's way and people could see these are like the kids next door, then maybe, the national public opinion would pay attention.

And of course, what they didn't expect is that Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, three of the volunteers were murdered on the first day.

Of course it took the whole summer to find their bodies but that became a, you know, a huge, huge controversy.

And there was a lot of disillusioning experiences for the individual volunteers.

They saw the hatred and the hurt in black society in Mississippi.

But what came out of it is this new conception of kind of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

And, so the anti-war movement and, you know the gay rights movement and the women's movement they all kind of used freedom summer along with the freedom rides earlier as one of the templates for this, this kind of politics.

So we were hoping that we could have this again.

I mean, I probably, or hoping in a more dangerous situation right now, actually, sadly than they were in 1964.

- Fred, is that the way you view it?

I mean, with the laws passed in Tallahassee recently to curtail some voting rights, that you agree that this is an assault on on democracy and on voting freedom?

- I believe so.

And I do have to say that Dr. Arsenault hit the, hit the nail on the head.

It almost feel like it feels like we're reliving some of the battles that many people thought had already been decided.

The new assault on voting rights, which I think is what it is, it just takes us back to John Lewis and bloody Sunday.

And, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

So, a lot of people feel like this assault is coming on the heels of Barack Obama being president for eight years.

And that a lot of people feel like this is sort of payback if you will.

That's what I hear in the streets, yeah.

- One last question, Juneteenth has become a national holiday and the entire Florida delegation Republicans and Democrats apparently said, okay the Juneteenth becoming a national holiday.

Fred, did you ever see something happen this quickly, so fast?

I mean, this is a positive thing.

- Well, it is a positive thing.

But yes, I have seen legislation, which actually had more teeth, happen in a week when Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.

One week later, we finally had a fair housing bill which had been lobbied and discussed and debated back and forth for years in Congress.

So, the federal government can act swiftly when there's a will to do so.

And right now on the heels of George Floyd's murder and all of the protests from last summer and this awakening of people to issues that have been here all along and feeling like we've got to do something we've got to deliver something to show that we're on the side of, of the people who have been oppressed and denied rights for so many years, African-Americans.

So yes, I have seen the federal government move rapidly when there was a will to do so.

But after all, it's a holiday that really does not address Florida history.

And that's what I'm all about.

So I support Juneteenth, but it really doesn't direct people's attention to our history here in the state of Florida, in Tampa.

- Fred, Ray, I wish we had more time, but Fred Hearns thanks a lot.

Ray Arsenault, thank you very much.

Thanks for being on Florida This Week.

- You're welcome.

(electronic music plays) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) - A state proposal would extend State Road 56 in Pasco county through the lower green swamp and the upper Hillsborough preserves.

Two large tracks of undeveloped land, totally about 22,000 acres.

The new road would connect Southeast Pasco County to Polk county near the Northern Hillsborough County line.

Mariella Smith is a Hillsborough County Commissioner and has been a long-time advocate for the environment and for smart growth.

She's also a fourth generation Floridian.

And Mariella Smith, welcome to Florida This Week.

Great to have you here.

- Thank you.

It's great to be here.

Good to see you again Rob.

- Thanks.

You said in the Tampa Bay Times the other day that you were incensed about this idea.

Now you're a Hillsborough County Commissioner.

Why should you care about a road being built through Pasco County?

- The road would the, the route that concerns us is a proposed route that would run along kind of the Hillsborough-Pasco border and then dip into some of our most valuable ELAPP preserve.

ELAPP is our Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection management arm.

And, we have in our county spent a long time, a lot of tax dollars and community volunteer efforts, as well as staff efforts in acquiring and preserving this land, which hooks up with and connects with other preserves.

You mentioned 20 some thousand acres, but it's actually part of about 150,000 acres of wildlife preserves owned by the county and the state that have been strung together from the green swamp all the way through our county.

And this, proposed road would sever the connections, and several of the wildlife corridor.

As well as the very important wetland and watershed connections that the water follows from the green swamp all the way to the Hillsborough River, which is the main drinking water source for the City of Tampa.

There are enormous environmental impacts.

The state's own reports that they've been working on for two years and produce hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports includes several pages listing the threatened and endangered wildlife that is on there.

Everything from bald Eagles to florida black bear and very rare wild orchids.

So, a road going through there would, you know, increase the mortality for these animals.

As well as cutting through this watershed, and interrupting the flow of water in this important watershed from the green swamp to the Hillsborough River.

- I want to asked you about a related issue and this is just to the Southwest of this area that where the road is being proposed.

The University of South Florida in Tampa has called for proposals to develop the USF forest preserve which is nearby and it's along the Hillsborough River and they want to make money from the forest preserve.

This is pristine land, but there's about 550 acres of wetlands and there's almost 800 acres of, of total land.

What do you think of that proposal to try to develop that part of Hillsborough County?

- Well, it's awful.

I mean, this is also very valuable part of this ecosystem and a wildlife corridors and wetland system in the same areas, as you mentioned.

And, the state has owned this land for many, many years and held it in preservation as it should be.

Except for the golf course part.

But...

The state should be preserving this land.

There have been some, you know, reactions in our county of alarm that the state is now talking about selling this off for development.

And, and so people in our county are saying, well maybe we should use our county ELAPP dollars to rush in and make sure that we buy this from them instead of letting developers buy it and, and preserve it.

- [Rob] Commissioner, we're almost out of time, but is that a good idea?

I mean, I take it you support that?

- I mean, you know, last resort, this land needs to be preserved by hook or by crook.

But, what should be done is the state should continue preserving their own land.

I'm very concerned that if we use our County dollars to rescue them from this and preserve this land that they've been preserving, it could start a precedent of them threatening to develop their other state owned preserves, the SWFWMD preserves and others in our county.

We have to buy those as well.

- Commissioner, thanks a lot.

Wish we have more time.

But Commissioner Mariella Smith, thank you.

- Thank you.

(electronic music plays) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) - Thousands of dead fish have washed ashore this week onto Pinellas County beaches.

This comes as red tide blooms have also been discovered in Manatee and Hillsborough counties.

The blooms are drifting north along the coastline.

It's hoped that the fish kills will dissipate in the coming days.

It's uncertain.

If the cause is related to the recent release of 215 million gallons of polluted water from the Piney Point fertilizer plant in Manatee County.

Ed Sherwood is the Executive Director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.

His organization's main focus is using science to keep an eye on the health of Tampa Bay.

Ed Sherwood, welcome to Florida This Week.

- Thank you, I appreciate you having me.

- So Ed, do you think, or based on the science that you know, do you think that these fish kills that we're seeing in Pinellas County and the red tide blooms associated with it, can we trace that to Piney Point?

- We know that the red tide that we're observing now started to be observed in Tampa Bay at the end of April.

And that was from tides and currents carrying the bloom that was originating further south of us into our region.

But, we also know that excessive nutrients went into the bay during our normal spring dry season.

And those were a significant amount of nutrient loading going into the bay.

And it's in areas where this red tide is interacting with our shorelines.

So we know that these excessive nutrient loads are probably having, are contributing to probably the intensification of the blooms ever since it started being observed at the end of April in Tampa Bay.

- Would it be fair to say that you think that that the Piney Point disaster made things slightly worse or worse?

- That we're still trying to understand what the additional research and samples, you know the potential contribution.

But, as I mentioned, we didn't have a very significant rainfall, you know through April, May of this year that's our typical dry season.

And, the only significant nutrient load inputs into the bay during that time were from the Piney Point facility.

So, it is, it is pretty much a, a thing that would probably exasperate any algal blooms that have occurred over that time period.

Then we've been seeing the cycling of different outlets species ever since those discharges took place in early April.

- Let me ask you about those other sources of nutrients.

What's the main source of these nitrogen nutrients that are going into Tampa Bay that might cause or help amplify red tide blooms?

Where's it coming from?

- Yeah, there's a variety of different sources but they're the main sources that are contributing the most nutrient loads to Tampa Bay are from stormwater and atmospheric sources.

So, anytime it rains and washes off the land surfaces we do get a significant nutrient loads going into the bay.

And as I mentioned, we didn't get much rain over the April, May period.

So, the only other significant load during that time period was from Piney Point.

The other sources through atmospheric deposition, but with from when it rains and also just from dry deposition it's called on the base surface.

Just from the nitrogen contained in the air, and that could also be a contribution of nutrients to Tampa Bay and stormwater sources.

Both of those are affected by emissions and more nitrous oxide emissions in the, in the atmosphere.

- Well, Ed Sherwood thanks a lot for coming on Florida This Week.

And, we're going to keep an eye on it.

Thank you for being on the program.

- I appreciate your time, and I appreciate everyone's interest in trying to reduce nutrient loads to our coastal water bodies.

(electronic music plays) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) (electronic music continues) - Thanks for joining us.

You can see this, and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app.

And, Florida This Week is now available as a podcast.

You can find it on our website or wherever you download your podcasts.

Finally, in honor of Juneteenth, musician Jean-Baptiste has released new music.

In his song Freedom, he celebrates the holiday in the streets of his native New Orleans.

Stay safe, and we'll see you next week.

And, have a Happy Juneteenth.

♪ Let me see you wobble.

I'm stuck to the dance floor, ♪ ♪ With the, with the, with the whole tape ♪ ♪ With the, with the, with the whole tape ♪ ♪ Can you make it break.

I say yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Oh yeah, oh yeah ♪ ♪ Let me see you wobble ♪ ♪ Cause you do ♪ ♪ Imma do too ♪ ♪ When I move my body, just like this ♪ ♪ I don't know why, but I feel like ♪ ♪ Freedom ♪ ♪ I hear a song that takes me back, and I let go ♪ ♪ With so much freedom ♪ ♪ Free to live ♪ ♪ Imma get ♪ ♪ Cause it's my freedom ♪ - Florida.

This Week is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.