Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. was supposed to appear at a Thursday evening town hall to discuss the state’s much-criticized Black history guidelines. The organizers of the event say Diaz pulled out just the day before, while Diaz claims he informed them last week that he wouldn’t attend.
“After personally confirming his attendance, it is deeply disappointing that Commissioner Diaz now lacks the will and courage to defend his Department’s misguided curriculum changes. Instead, the Commissioner and DeSantis’ administration have once again turned their back on the largest Black city in the state,” state Sen. Shevrin Jones, one of the panel’s organizers, said in a statement.
State Sen. Dr. Rosalind Osgood was less diplomatic, saying, “It's a coward move to kind of just back out at the last minute” after she found out about it on Twitter.
Diaz claimed, on Twitter, “There was nothing sudden about my inability to attend Senator Jones' town hall. As I told the senator last week I will be visiting schools through the state to welcome back students, parents and teachers for the first day of school.” As Politico’s Florida Playbook points out, Diaz had agreed to participate in the event on July 23, at which point he very well knew when the first day of school would be. What changed to make it so urgent for him to visit schools throughout the state on this specific day rather than, say, visiting schools in the Miami Gardens area so he could make it to a panel on an important topic? The obvious answer is that what changed is the amount of heat on Florida education officials over the Black history guidelines and their instruction that “slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit.”
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Miami Gardens lies between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Diaz could have easily hit schools all up and down that corridor if he needed to show his commitment to welcoming back students, parents, and teachers. For that matter, he could have started the day in Tampa or Fort Myers and hauled ass east to be in Miami Gardens in the evening. Nah, needing to provide a personal welcome on the first day of school to a lot of people who are unlikely to know or care who the state education commissioner is (unless they’re angry at him) does not hold water as an excuse.
Another relevant fact about Miami Gardens beyond its geography is that it is, as Jones noted in his statement, a majority-Black city. Interest in the event was high—according to Jones, more than 1,000 people had signed up to attend. Was Diaz going to have more than 1,000 people eager to hear from him through his day of welcoming back students, parents, and teachers?
Let the record show that whether Manny Diaz Jr. pulled out of the Miami Gardens Black history forum a day in advance or a week in advance, he’s offered no reason to believe that he did so for any reason other than being too much of a coward to go in front of a heavily Black audience and defend the guidelines his agency released.
Take that, GOP schemes to rig ballot measures! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard gleefully dive into the failure of Issue 1, which was designed to thwart a November vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The Davids discuss why Republican efforts to sneak their amendment through during a summertime election were doomed to fail; how many conservative counties swung sharply toward the "no" side; and what the results mean both for Sherrod Brown's reelection hopes and a future measure to institute true redistricting reform.