Florida is a dangerous place for people of color to live or visit, a civil rights group announced this week with a travel advisory and media tour that leaned on some misleading characterizations.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s formal travel advisory this week labeled Florida as unsafe due to the education and social policies of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
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NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson accused DeSantis’s government of “failing to teach an accurate representation of the horrors and inequalities that Black Americans have faced and continue to face” in a statement announcing the advisory.
In a subsequent interview on MSNBC, Johnson warned that DeSantis was working to take the circumstances of black Americans back “to the 1950s” in Florida.
“It is making sure that if individuals have to go to Florida, they know to be cautious,” Johnson said during the MSNBC interview.
But Florida is, overall, a safe and prosperous place for black Americans based on a wide range of metrics.
Florida’s rate of violent crime fell below the national average for the first time in more than a decade after 2018, the year DeSantis won election, according to FBI data.
Florida has only the 23rd-highest murder rate per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While Florida’s equality rating with US News and World Report comes in at 22nd in the nation, it still gets higher marks on a range of measures of equality than Connecticut, Illinois, and even California.
Florida ranks 12th in closing the unemployment gap by race.
Florida’s public school system ranks among the top five in the country and gets higher marks for racial equality in education than does California, New York, or Maryland – the latter state being the home of the NAACP’s headquarters.
Johnson, the NAACP president, had taken particular issue with Desantis’s work on race-related curricula in public schools.
DeSantis stirred controversy last year when he signed legislation banning certain types of controversial material on race and gender from the classroom.
In January, his state government moved to stop the College Board from making available a pilot version of the Advanced Placement African American Studies course the nonprofit is developing for nationwide distribution next fall.
Critics accused DeSantis of attempting to stop students from learning about key components of American history, such as slavery and the civil rights movement.
But DeSantis’s education commissioner highlighted specific aspects of the lesson plan that Florida officials found objectionable, and none of them had to do with foundational American history. The state said required readings involving black queer studies, critical race theory, and “black feminist literary thought,” all of which officials said would violate laws against progressive material.
The teaching of subjects such as the Civil War and the Jim Crow era was not restricted.
And after the College Board released a revised curriculum document that omitted the controversial elements flagged by Florida officials, the state applauded the nonprofit and invited it to resubmit the course for review, suggesting DeSantis’s government would potentially allow schools to teach AP African American Studies absent the progressive elements.
However, by that point, the College Board was facing a massive backlash from liberal groups accusing it of caving to DeSantis; the organization went on to backtrack once again, announcing that it would consider adding back in the critical race theory and gender-related materials.
Johnson’s claim that DeSantis has “failed to teach an accurate representation” of the hardships black Americans have faced throughout history is misleading.
The NAACP leader also pushed back when presented, in an interview on CNN, with a statement from the Florida Chamber of Commerce noting that “in just the last few years, Florida has moved into the number one spot in the United States for black-owned businesses and the number two for Hispanic and number two for women-owned businesses.”
Johnson called the statement “propaganda language” and claimed nothing DeSantis did in office contributed to that prosperity for black business owners. Instead, he argued, Florida’s “attractive” geography made it a destination for commerce.
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It’s unclear how Florida’s geography, which has remained the same for centuries, could have contributed to a growth in black-owned businesses in just the past few years.
Florida actually had one of the top three lowest black unemployment rates in the country in the first quarter of 2023, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while Washington, D.C., had one of the highest.