To be or not to be, that is the question of democracy, whether ‘tis nobler to think of sixty percent to pass a bill, or the mere forty-one percent needed to defeat it. In a fifty-one percent majority, you need a lot more naysayers to defeat passage, and a smaller majority to put it through.
Representative government took a major step in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, opening the democratic process to a minority. Considered landmark legislation in the United States, for Florida, the first major civil rights legislation occurred in 1600, when Spain granted freedom to blacks, especially those escaping slavery in Georgia and the Carolinas.
Spain’s motives were not purely altruistic, and the
Spanish king updated the 1600 edict in 1693 to highlight the conditions of
freedom to include conversion to Catholicism and enrollment in the
militia. Furthermore, Spanish Florida
established the first free black community at Fort Mose in 1738 on their northern border,
about two miles north of the Castillo de San
Marcos. What
better line of first defense than a population who stand to lose their freedom
if taken?
Sometimes you need three
lawyers just to tell you what the meaning of “is” is in legal matters, but with
voting rights in the hands of all citizens, demographic minorities hold the
same power as the traditional majorities.
