Desmond Meade, Florida’s leading voting rights activist, pushes for jobs, housing and dignity for formerly incarcerated people like himself
The event’s pomp, to say nothing of the size of the gift, was a world removed from his lowest days fresh out of prison. Back then, he was jobless, in drug rehab and thinking a lot about death, including his own.
“I didn’t want to be that person who died and nobody came to the funeral or even knew that he died,” he would later write inThere’s no chance of such anonymity now. Whether on the Miami Dolphins’ home field, at a rally outside the Capitol in Tallahassee or on college campuses across the country, the burly, 54-year-old Meade is visible and known.
But as his national profile has risen, Meade has expanded his message beyond voting rights to address the many obstacles formerly incarcerated people face. Voting is at the heart of making them whole, Meade says. It’s just the start, though.“Our mission … is much greater than that,” he told an audience in Austin this month during a SXSW Conference discussion on rebuilding these lives.
“I would consider it,” he said in a recent interview. “We need people in office who are more concerned about the needs of the people, all the people of Florida, than the needs of their political party.” Meade is integrally linked to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which he has led for more than a decade. The nonprofit’s greatest success was the overwhelming passage of Amendment 4, the initiative that represented the nation’s largest expansion of voting rights since the civil rights era. More than 1.4 million Floridians who had served time regained the right to vote.
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