- [Speaker] Funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

- The ballot is our voice, and if we fail to cast that ballot, we missed an opportunity for our voice to be heard.

- Throughout this country's history, African-Americans had never had full citizenship in the 18th century, in most of the 19th century, and it took African-Americans a social protest movement to demand that right to vote.

- They were beaten, they were hung, they were burned alive.

They were sprayed with fire hoses, bitten by dogs to prevent them from registering to vote.

And then they had to face that same gauntlet of terror to actually vote.

- Voting was dangerous.

- It required for you to really get out there and fight for it.

- The more you fight, the fighter you more and the more you fight, the fighter you more.

- But I've not been afraid to speak out because I knew somebody had to say it or it would not have been said.

- I knew that I had to step up to the plate, stand and deliver.

- I made up mine and perseverance come from the notion that you know that change is not gonna occur by waiting on it to occur.

You have to get up and do something.

- Somebody had to die for me to have the right to vote.

- [Narrator] From Jim Crow legislation at the turn of the century to today's efforts to return civil rights to citizens who have served their felony sentences.

With a Made Up Mind examines the history of the fight for ballot access in southwest Florida.

For Black Americans, the history of voting in America has been a constant struggle.

The push to expand the vote has always been met by the poll to have that right constricted.

The devices to prevent people from casting a ballot have changed over the years.

From poll taxes and white primaries to at large voting and outright threats or actual violence and intimidation, the goal was to suppress the right to vote but the hope for liberation is strong.

Black Americans mobilized around voter registration drives, created organizations to choose candidates that would fight for them.

Some even sought candidacy for office themselves.

This struggle was fought at the national level down to the local precincts and into the streets.

Between 1865 and 1870 during the years of reconstruction after the Civil War, the US Congress passed a reconstruction amendment that were ultimately ratified by the states.

The 13th Amendment emancipated enslaved people.

The 14th Amendment granted equal citizenship to formerly enslaved people.

The 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote, but the national amendments weren't perfect.

Florida, along with other former Confederate states, took advantage of loopholes that allowed states to set requirements to qualify voters.

The poll tax was just one of those qualifying measures.

- Florida was one of the first of the ex-Confederate states to impose a poll tax.

- I believe it cost around a dollar during the late 19th and early 20th century, and they would be given a sort of slip or receipt and they would have to turn that receipt in when they went to the voting booth to vote.

The poll tax was effective in disenfranchising African-American voters because so many of them couldn't afford the poll tax.

It was sort of making voting a luxury.

- [Narrator] In Fort Meyers, a growing population was organizing to raise money to help their neighbors to pay the poll tax and exercise their right to vote.

Black residents were segregated by neighborhoods like Safety Hill, now called Dunbar, where community members built schools, a hospital, self-sufficient businesses and churches.

- The African-American church experience is where an African-American could develop agency and leadership abilities.

You had the maid or the man who was doing menial work and while they had to keep their heads down when they were working, on Sunday mornings, they were a steward or they were a deacon.

- The black church is perhaps the most enduring, spiritual, social, economic, and even political institution in the community and as such, it has the ability to transmit values, they religious values, values concerning education or participation in the political context.

- [Narrator] The church was where black leaders connected faith and hope with voter mobilization.

- That may have began with Robert Meacham.

He established a church in Fort May as in 1888.

- Robert Meacham was born a slave in Gaston County, Florida.

He's going to manage to get his freedom and his mother's freedom, but more importantly after the Civil War, he becomes involved in politics in reconstruction Florida.

He's going to play a role in the 1868 Constitutional Convention in Florida.

Then after that, he will become a state senator from Jefferson County, Florida.

- [Narrator] Meacham finished his political career in Punta Gorda as Postmaster General in 1880.

- He's one of that first crop of blacks after the Civil War to become involved in local and state politics.

Having people of color in these positions must have been very important to freed men and women who thought that they were going to be treated as first class citizen.

- [Narrator] Helping to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Florida is another of Meacham's accomplishments and showcases the critical connection of faith to politics.

- That African Methodist Episcopal Church was very powerful, was the most powerful church, African-American church during reconstruction.

- Well, I think there's a mobilization of African-American voters around the church, maybe starting with Meacham in 1888 and the increase in voter registration, the most important increase takes place between 1895 when there were 13 African-American registered voters to 1904 when there were 59.

To put that into context, in the 1900 census, there were only 45 African-American heads of household.

- [Narrator] As the number of informed voters increased, so did suppression tactics.

Florida established the white primary system in the 1900s.

- The white primary was a separate election that was held before the main primary and the only people allowed to vote in that primary, this is for the Democratic party, would've been white people.

- But blacks in Florida could only register as Republicans or as independents.

So in Florida and in a lot of southern states, whoever won of the Democratic primary won of the general election.

- [Narrator] Further disenfranchisement came from local lawmakers who wrote editorials and passed resolutions, encouraging black citizens not to vote saying it wasn't in their best interest.

Qualified voters were eliminated from the register or were accused of not paying the poll.

Tax candidates and office holders were discouraged from soliciting the black vote, and if those didn't work, physical intimidation, cross burning, threats and acts of violence were effective voter suppression tactics.

- In the 1910s and 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was really interested in depressing the black vote in Florida.

They held rallies usually days before an election to try and intimidate black voters.

- Racial violence in this state, a lot of people just so unaware of the lynchings.

In fact, Florida will lead the nation in the 1920s in the number of lynching.

- [Narrator] But at the same time, after decades of protest and mobilization, women were added to the voting polls in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution.

- African-American women were prominent in that whole voting, getting it organized.

So that really made a difference when the African-American women could vote.

- It created a great deal of hysteria on the part of white supremacist in Florida because they were worried about black women voting.

And in the presidential election of 1920, this hysteria kind of hit a boiling point.

So that racial violence was really kind of threatened throughout the major cities in Florida.

- That presidential election was said to be the most violent in American voting history.

That's when the town of Ocoee was destroyed because of the African-Americans wanting to vote there.

- [Narrator] Ocoee, just outside of Orlando, is the site of what is now called the Ocoee Massacre.

- In Ocoee, there was a black community, two sections of town where blacks lived and many had registered to vote.

And a man named Moses Norman, a wealthy black man, went to exercise his right to vote and he was turned away from the polls.

- [Narrator] When he again tried to vote, he was turned away by white residents, including members of the KKK.

Norman sought refuge with July Perry, another prominent citizen in Ocoee's black community.

A mob arrived at Perry's home and a gunfight ensued.

The mob set fire to area homes and churches.

- Once section of the town is basically going to be wiped out.

July Perry will be killed, hung up to a tree or a pole or something and of course we don't know exactly how many people were killed as a result of that.

- [Narrator] The Ocoee massacre was one of many attacks on black communities across the US during a six year span of racial terror from 1917 to 1923.

While the threat of violence was all too real, voter registration drives did not let up, especially in Fort Myers, where periodically, the new voter totals in black precincts surpassed the totals in all white precincts.

It was clear that black citizens were holding onto the hope of exercising their civil rights.

Surreptitious suppression tactics like the white primary endured for decades, that is until 1944 when civil rights attorney, Thurgood Marshall, won the landmark case Smith versus Allright in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the quote Lily-White Democratic Party primary was unconstitutional.

This spurred local activist to action.

In Florida, Harry T. Moore, president of the Florida Conference of the NAACP branches, immediately organized the Progressive Voters League.

- The NAACP wasn't supposed to be involved in partisan politics.

And so the Progressive Voters League was a kind of a front organization that enabled the NAACP to engage in politics.

- [Narrator] The Progressive Voters League mobilized to register as many black voters as possible.

In Lee County, Arminas Walker served as president of the league and was a member of the organization's state board of directors.

- The leader of the Fort Myers Lee County NAACP, Arminas Walker, actually set himself a target to register a thousand African-American voters for the 1948 elections, and he succeeded in doing that.

- [Narrator] From 1944 to 1950, the Progressive Voters League registered over 116,000 black voters in Florida, representing a third of all eligible black voters in the state.

The efforts in Lee County captured the attention of Thurgood Marshall and Harry T. Moore.

- And being too successful could mean getting a visit from the Klan or some white vigilante group.

- And we know that the Ku Klux Klan and others were keeping an eye on Harry T. Moore and his efforts to register not only African-American voters, but also poor voters.

- And of course, he's going to lose his life.

In fact, on Christmas night 1951, a bomb will go off under his house killing him and his wife.

- [Narrator] Moore was one of the first NAACP officials killed in the struggle for civil rights.

Harassment and intimidation in Florida continued to result in extremely low voter registration rates.

In 1957, Congress established a commission to investigate allegations that certain citizens were being deprived of their right to vote and deprived to have that vote counted because of their color, race, religion, or national origin.

In the 1960s, citizens across the nation began peacefully to stand up, sit down and march for their rights.

The battle was fought at diner counters, on buses, on school steps, and in the streets.

And while Martin Luther King Jr. strategized in Washington, Selma and even St. Augustine, Florida, men like Leo Sears ran for office as early as 1961.

Although Sears did not win a seat on the Lee Memorial Hospital board, it was a start.

Men like Marvin Davies and Reverend Isador Edwards Jr, through their leadership in the local branch of the NAACP led to the community towards civic engagement through voting, they fearlessly fought for racial equality in southwest Florida.

- Isador Edwards was a young Baptist preacher from Jacksonville, Florida.

He was a strong leader, fairly safe.

We used to say he had ice water running through his veins for blood.

He was not afraid of anything and that's what it took.

And much of what we accomplished was accomplished during the 10 years he led us.

He led us from '62 to '72.

- [Narrator] Then in 1965, the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law.

- This act flows from a clear and simple wrong.

Its only purpose is to right that wrong.

Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color.

This law will ensure them the right to vote.

The wrong is one which no American in his heart can justify.

The right is one which no American true to our principles can deny.

And I pledge you that we will not delay or we will not hesitate or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.

(applause) - [Narrator] The Voting Rights Act put a halt to poll taxes and literacy tests and it required states and local jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to submit any election changes to the US Justice Department for approval.

- The Voting Rights Act of 1965 really ignited a passion among black people to vote.

- That was the year that I voted in 1965 and to this day, I have a record of when I very first voted here in Fort Myers.

I had come home and graduated from Florida, I had participated in protests.

I had encouraged people to vote and knocking on doors and I remember being very, very happy to have this paper in my hand that I had accomplished something for the fight and the struggle.

- [Narrator] But the work was not done.

Activists in Southwest Florida took on the next challenges, the ability to choose proper representation and winner take all at large voting.

- After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the NAACP and other civil rights groups started to target this method of at large voting.

- Well, if you understand how a large election works, the person who running for office may not be accepted by his district.

So he spends his time campaigning in those other districts to get elected to office.

- And what they began to campaign on really in the mid 1970s was this idea of moving to single district voting so that a smaller group of voters, presumably ones where majority black voting population, could actually elect their own officials.

- When we have single member district election, we can hold that person accountable because only the people in that district can vote.

And then when that person's not doing their job, it is easy to get them outta office to replace them with somebody who's more applicable for that community.

- [Narrator] In the 1970s and eighties, the black community in Lee County began to use the legal system to address those barriers to elected representation.

In 1980, Hora Smith was elected to the Lee Memorial Hospital Board, becoming the first black resident to hold elected office.

- One person whose resilience and hope we all know about because she was local, and over the course of 14 years, she applied and ran for office and that's the honorable Veronica Shoemaker.

She is an excellent role model for what you must have in order to be successful.

- In the midst of the civil rights movement, she internally felt the calling.

I think that she thought that she could do more for people in our community as well as in Lee County by running for office.

- [Narrator] Shoemaker, an independent florist and NAACP president, first ran for office in 1968.

She ran countless times for school board, county commission, and other council races before finally winning the 1982 Fort Myers council election.

- And I would go out in the afternoons and knock on doors and ask people to vote for me.

And I will always remember when I say I'm Veronica Shoemaker and I'm running for city council.

- Finally, after 14 years of trying, she actually won.

And she won not only a seat for herself, but she won for the rest of the African-Americans in this county and that was quite a coup.

- [Narrator] Shoemaker then joined community leaders like Abdul Aziz and the Lee County NAACP to sue the city of Fort Myers to overturn the city's at large voting method.

The successful lawsuit created the single ward system where now candidates run in and are elected in their designated geographic areas.

- Shoemaker opening the door by winning that lawsuit opened a door for Ann Knight and those who came after her to actually run for office and for us to get representation in the community.

- [Narrator] Since then, members of the black community have served in local government as elected officials.

At large elections still exist in Lee County and regardless of the great strides achieved in civil rights over the past several decades, challenges to access the ballot continue.

- We're dealing with voter suppression laws that range from restrictive voter IDs, urging voter registrations, and then have to come back and you find a way to overcome those laws, whatever they might be until they're changed.

- No matter how low we can go, we can come back from that that I know that this is a country of second chances and I know that everyone is rooting for a person that could overcome things and that's exactly what I've done.

- In 2018, Florida voters overcame one restriction with Amendment four, the Voting Rights Restoration Act, which restored the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions, but it did not come without a struggle.

- And the problem that we were having here in Florida was that once a person made a mistake, they were stripped of their civil rights, which relegated them the second class citizenship status.

And no American should ever lose their citizenship because they made a mistake and if they made a mistake and they paid their debts, they should definitely be given the opportunity to regain their citizenship status, to be able to be a part of democracy and nothing speaks more to citizenship than being able to vote.

- [Narrator] Yet even after the recent win to restore voting rights for returning citizens, concerns remain about further efforts that threatens civic engagement.

- We see it play out today in many forms, not only through felony disenfranchisement, but in redistricting, in gerrymandering, right?

We are seeing politicians picking and choosing their voters instead of just allowing this system or allowing society or constituents to actually make that decision on their own.

- Lawmakers putting barriers towards voting and in the name of making voting a privilege rather than a right I think really harms everyone.

- And it's why it's so important to be very vigilant right now as it pertains to voting rights.

The progress that African-Americans have made in this country has had to do with voting.

So we can see now why voting is so important and why it might be attacked.

- How people fought to vote and were denied the right to vote, that just really inspired me to become involved in our community and in the political arena.

- First, need to stand up for your rights as Bob Marley says.

Register to vote and use that power and to speak out when you see things that are going on that are not appropriate.

- You have got to be involved in the voting process and educate yourself because if you're not at the table, you are going to be on the menu.

- When people don't see democracy working for them, they're less likely to participate in it because they feel it doesn't matter.

So we have to do the things to make the difference to give people hope in the democratic process.

- Civic participation is the lifeblood of our democracy, right?

And so if we do want a thriving, vibrant democracy, then we must do all that we can to ensure that everyone participate.

- If you have the right to vote, you are an equal citizen of the United States.

If you have the right to vote, you can protect your freedom and your justice.

Voting is essential.

(upbeat music) - [Speaker] Funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.