Lawmakers gear up for Black History Museum battle
Months after a committee selected St. Augustine as the preferred location of a future Florida Black History Museum in a vote tainted by controversy, a new battle appears to be taking shape in Tallahassee.
Lawmakers have filed three competing proposals for facilities in St. Augustine, Opa-Locka and Eatonville, which were the three finalists weighed by committee members.
Each bill professes its site as the best location and asks for state funding to help get the project moving.
St. Augustine's bill cites the committee selection, while its backers spoke about the historic city and the tourism it draws.
'The great thing about putting it in the St. Augustine area is that tourism is driven by people who are studying history,' Sen. Tom Leek (R-St. Johns) said in an interview with WJAX. 'People who want to come to the nation's oldest city, right?'
Opa-Locka's proposal says the city is the most ready to break ground and asked for $1.5 million to help construct a temporary museum until a proper project is advanced.
Rep. Bruce Antone (D-Orange) filed Eatonville's proposal Thursday and marveled at the site right off I-4 and minutes from the world's tourism capital.
'The best quality museum is best suited for Orlando,' he said.
Antone's proposal asks for $75 million over five years and frames the museum as a Florida Museum of History. While much of the space would be dedicated to Black history, he said at least a third would go to exhibits showcasing nature, citrus, railroads, rockets and the Cuban migration.
Because of this, Antone said his bid did not compete with the other two.
'It's going to be a tough road ahead, but again, I'm just going to try to outwork and outsell my colleagues. I think we can get it done,' he said, predicting any museum in Orlando would be self-sufficient once it's operational. 'It can be an economic driver and work if done properly.'
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Miami Herald
37 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Separated from kids in Cuba and Haiti by Trump travel ban, parents plead for help
As Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits come to terms with what a new U.S. travel ban means for their families' hopes to reunite, many have flocked to social media in anguish — including children — seeking help. 'President Trump, I ask you to please reconsider family reunification for residents,' said a 10-year-old in a Hello Kitty T-shirt in a video she recorded in Havana. The video was published by her mother, Lia Llanes, a U.S. permanent resident living in Miami, in one of the several Facebook groups where Cubans are discussing the new prohibitions. 'I am a child who, like many others, is waiting for an interview to reunite with our parents so we can grow up in this beautiful country and become a citizen,' the child says in the video. 'With great pride, I ask you again, please reconsider. And I ask God to enlighten you. Thank you.' The child had been taking English lessons, preparing for a new life in the United States, which she thought was just days away, Llanes told the Herald. The petition to bring her daughter to the U.S. had just been approved in late May, and the family was just waiting for the visa interview at the U.S. embassy in Havana, the final step in a lengthy process to legally emigrate to the United States. Then President Donald Trump announced last week a travel ban suspending the issuing of immigrant visas to Cuban relatives of U.S. permanent residents, upending the plans of many families to reunite. 'It's very heartbreaking to know that your claim is approved and this happens,' said Llanes, who runs a small business and obtained a green card after being paroled at the U.S. border in 2022. She said her daughter spent two days 'without talking to anyone' after learning the bad news. 'It's hard to explain,' she said. 'It's strange because you have your daughter there, and you're here, and one minute, you have good news, and then the next, everything changes.' Trump's new ban restricts travel for most citizens of Cuba, Venezuela and five other countries while also placing Haiti and 11 other nations on a full ban. It's a distressing blow to families who had already been waiting years to reunite in the United States. Standing in a room full of boxes with the beds she hoped her children would sleep on when they join her in the United States, Clara Yoa, a U.S. permanent resident, could barely contain her tears as she recounted how she felt after learning about the travel ban. 'I no longer have a life,' she said in a video she published on Facebook. Yoa came to the United States in 2019 from Cuba, and has her own small cleaning company in Tampa, she told the Herald. Like Llanes' daughter, her children, now 16, 17, and 19, were also waiting for the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Havana. But their arrival had become an urgent matter because her own mother, who has been caring for Yoa's three children in Granma, a province in eastern Cuba, has metastatic cancer. Adding to her desperation is that a Cuban doctor told her that due to the stress caused by their separation, her eldest now has a heart condition. 'I hope that the people at the top, those who sign and pass the laws, also take into account that we, permanent residents, also have our children in a prison country, and we want to have them here with us,' she said, her voice breaking in the video. 'At least they should take into account that there are children who aren't going to come here to commit terrorism or harm this country.' The ban, announced last Wednesday, suspends immigration visas for adult children of U.S. citizens and relatives of U.S. permanent residents from the 19 countries included in the executive order. Only the immediate relatives of U.S. citizens–parents, spouses, parents and minor children will be allowed to enter the United States under a directive the White House said will 'protect the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats.' Cubans, Haitians and Venezuelans with visas issued before June 8 will still be able to travel to the United States. But on Monday, some relatives of U.S. permanent residents who attended scheduled visa interviews at the U.S. embassy in Havana were issued a document in Spanish stating they were not 'eligible for an immigrant visa' under the new directive, a decision they could not appeal. The document also stated that their cases did not merit an exception, citing U.S. national security interests. The State Department did not say if applicants whose immigration visas were denied solely based on the new travel restrictions would have a chance down the line to present their case again. It also did not say if cases involving young children would fall under exceptions the Secretary of State can make on a case-by-case basis. But an agency spokesperson said, 'Urgent humanitarian medical travel may be considered a basis for such an exception. Only applicants otherwise qualified for a visa will be considered.' On Wednesday, a mother with a Miami cellphone number joined a WhatsApp chat group for Cubans with pending immigration cases, wanting to know if anyone had heard of a child being denied an immigration visa at the U.S. embassy in Havana. Her child has a scheduled interview later this week. 'I am just talking to him, and he is so innocent, so oblivious about all this, and he will be very happy tomorrow at his appointment,' she said, crying in a voice message. One of the group's most active commenters replied: 'God is great. Perhaps when they see that little boy in there, they would approve it.' A historic exodus Many families left separated by the ban were part of a historic exodus from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela in recent years. In introducing the travel ban, Trump partly blamed the Biden administration for allowing more than a half million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans into the United States under a humanitarian parole program that allowed nationals of the four nations to migrate to the U.S. for two years as long as they had a financial sponsor, passed background checks and arrived through an airport. But part of the reason so many people from the four countries took advantage of the program, known as CHNV, stems from legal immigration hurdles and restrictive policies introduced by Trump during his first term. Among other things, his administration suspended the Cuba Family Reunification Program and a similar one for Haitians. During those years, U.S. embassies in the three countries either suspended visa processing or scaled back appointments, preventing people from immigrating legally while their populations faced political and humanitarian crises, which contributed to the historic exodus Trump is now citing. Anguish and uncertainty Since Trump signed his proclamation last Wednesday, Cubans in the U.S. and on the island have been debating and sharing information about the new immigration restrictions on several groups on WhatsApp and Facebook. Many are praying for a 'miracle' as they share their stories and give each other hope that the ban might be temporary. The directive states that after three months of its enactment, the President will review the recommendations by the Secretary of State regarding whether to continue the restrictions on nationals of the targeted countries. A review will be conducted every six months thereafter. But the lifting of restrictions relies on the foreign governments improving 'their information-sharing and identity-management protocols and practices.' So far, the Cuban government has not signaled it is interested in improving its cooperation with the U.S. and instead attacked Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After the travel ban was announced, Cuba's foreign minister said the measure 'aims to deceive the American people, blaming and violating the rights of migrants. Anti-Cuban politicians, including the Secretary of State, are the main proponents of this measure, betraying the communities that elected them.' Trump's proclamation also notes Cuba remains on the U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism. The ban also comes at especially difficult time for Haitians in a country wracked by gang violence. In a statement, Haiti's U.S.-backed Transitional Presidential Council said it plans to 'initiate negotiations and technical discussions' with the Trump administration in order to remove Haiti from the targeted countries. This is likely a tall order considering that more than 1.3 million Haitians remain displaced and armed gangs, now in control of most of Port-au-Prince, have made it difficult to circulate, raising questions about authorities' ability to improve vetting procedures and information sharing with the U.S. For Haiti, the ban prohibits the entry of all of its nationals unless they fall under the few exceptions contemplated in the new directive. Like many Haitians who arrived back in the U.S. on the first day of the travel ban, Eraus Alzime, 71, didn't fully understand its impact. The father of 10 was in Haiti visiting his children when he received a call urging him to get back to the U.S. To get out, he had to travel by bus and went through three gang checkpoints, he said. 'Of course you feel panicked,' Alzime said. 'The bandits make you get off so that they check your suitcases and see what you are carrying. You don't have a choice, you have to do it, if you don't you can end up dead.' Alzime, a U.S. citizen, said he applied for six of his children to emigrate to the U.S legally. The oldest is 43 years-old while the youngest is 14. His adult children won't be able to travel to the United States under the current ban. 'I filed for my kids and they've yet to give them to me,' he said. A victim of the country's incessant violence, Alizme says he has no choice but to travel to Haiti for his kids. 'I have to go see how they are doing,' he said. 'We live depressed' As the news about the travel ban sinks in, parents worry about the psychological toll the prolonged separation will have on their children, especially those who are too young to grasp immigration policy. Gleydys Sarda, 26, and her husband took the difficult decision to flee Cuba and left their 3-year-old son under the care of his grandparents in 2022. They didn't want to expose him to what they knew could be a dangerous land journey to the U.S. Southern border, she said. Now, he is 6 years-old, under the care of a grandparent and increasingly anxious to be with his parents. 'We live depressed because of the long wait; we ran out of excuses to tell him when he asks why he cannot be with us,' said Sardá, who is a U.S. permanent resident and works for Amazon at a warehouse in Coral Springs. 'Lately, he has been repeating more than ever that he wants to be here, that he is tired of waiting, and now this restriction broke our hearts. We have no other way.' Sardá's visa petition to bring him to the United States has yet to be approved. The couple tried to bring him using the special parole program created by the Biden administration, but they never heard back from U.S. immigration authorities. Sardá, who is currently pregnant, frets at the idea of traveling to Cuba to see her child, which currently seems to be her only choice to spend time with him, if only for a short time. The last time she visited in January, 'the goodbye was too hard. When we are there, the three of us are very happy, but after we leave,I feel I leave him worse,' she said. Sarda said the boy got depressed after they left, 'and so do we. I was in bed and didn´t want to go to work or leave the house.' 'Now I am also expecting my second child, and it would break my heart to go to Cuba with one child, return with one and leave the other in Cuba.'
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘Where was God?' The Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting 10 years later.
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This was quite remarkable, because less than 48 hours earlier, on the night of June 17, 2015, Sanders had just closed her eyes in benediction — during Bible study at her beloved Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — when she was jolted by an explosion of gunfire. The 57-year-old woman, a fourth-generation member of 'Mother Emanuel,' the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, dove under a table and pulled her 11-year-old granddaughter down with her. She squeezed the child so tightly she feared she might crush her, instructing her to play dead as a 21-year-old white supremacist methodically assassinated nine of the 12 Black worshippers in the basement fellowship hall. Those she watched die included her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, who had tried vainly to distract the shooter, and her 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, who was shredded by 10 hollow-point bullets. At one point, Sanders smeared her legs with the blood pooling at her feet so that the killer might think he had finished her off. It worked. What happened in court two days later, a procession of forgiveness by Black victims for a remorseless racist murderer, both awed and befuddled the world. Many found it to be the purest expression of Christianity they had ever witnessed and could not imagine ever being graced in any such way. With the help of a soaring and melodic eulogy for the victims by President Barack Obama, the church known as Mother Emanuel soon became an earthly emblem of amazing grace. FILE - Tyrone Sanders and Felicia Sanders comfort each other at the graveside of their son, Tywanza Sanders, on June 27, 2015, at Emanuel AME Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, File) Grace Beahm/Associated Press Now fast-forward to December 2016. Felicia Sanders is back in court, the lead witness in the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof. She is under cross-examination by Roof's attorney, who is trying to establish that Roof threatened to kill himself that night, a desperate stab at a psychiatric defense. This time there is no nod by Sanders at forgiveness, no prayer for the soul of her son's unrepentant executioner. 'He say he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that,' Sanders responds coolly in her Lowcountry lilt, glaring at Roof from the stand. 'He's evil. There's no place on earth for him except for the pit of hell.' Roof's lawyer, blindsided, tries once more to prompt Sanders about Roof's suicidality. She is having none of it: 'Send himself back to the pit of hell, I say.' Had something changed about Felicia Sanders? Had she, in the 18 months between the Emanuel murders and the trial, forsaken the commitment to forgiveness that was such a hallmark of her faith and that had so moved the world? Not in the slightest, I concluded, while researching a book about the history of Mother Emanuel and the meaning of forgiveness in the African American church. To the contrary, Sanders and other church stalwarts helped me understand that the forgiveness expressed toward Dylann Roof had not been for Dylann Roof but rather for themselves. Those who appeared at Roof's bond hearing did not speak for everyone in the congregation, or even in their families. A decade later, some still describe the path to forgiveness as a journey they travel at their own pace. But the grace volunteered in June 2015 grew organically from the fiber of African Methodism, a denomination two centuries old. It obviously had deep scriptural roots — 'Forgive us our trespasses' and 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' But it also was an iteration of a timeworn survival mechanism that has helped African American Christians withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls and their sanity still, somehow, intact. One year after the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., relatives and friends of the slain gathered to honor their lives. Grace Beahm/Associated Press Churches like Emanuel, which has roots in antebellum Charleston, have long served as physical and spiritual refuges from the scourges that confront Black Americans. Its own long history, a two-century cycle of suppression and resistance, illuminates the relentless afflictions of caste in the city where nearly half of all enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Emanuel's predecessor congregation, which formed in 1817 after a subversive walkout from Methodist churches by free and enslaved Black Charlestonians, faced immediate harassment from white authorities. The police raided services and jailed worshippers by the scores. When an incipient slave insurrection plot was uncovered in 1822 and traced back in part to the church, 35 men were led to the gallows, nearly half of them from the congregation. The wood-frame building was dismantled by order of the authorities and the church's leading ministers forced into exile. Emanuel's founding pastor after the Civil War, Richard Harvey Cain, used its pulpit as a springboard into politics, winning seats in the state legislature and Congress in a career that mirrored at first the heady hope and then the stolen promise of Reconstruction. During the depths of Jim Crow, Charlestonians assembled at Emanuel to voice outrage over lynchings and jurisprudential travesties. Its civil rights era pastor, Benjamin J. Glover, also led Charleston's NAACP, staged peaceful protest marches from the church, and was repeatedly jailed. Congregants were urged to action there by Booker T. Washington (1909), W.E.B. DuBois (1921), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1962), and then, a year after King's assassination, by his widow, Coretta Scott King (1969). She came to support a hospital workers' strike that bore eerie echoes of the sanitation workers' strike that had drawn her husband to Memphis. Nearly five decades later, the first person shot by Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015, was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a remarkable prodigy who had been the youngest African American elected to South Carolina's legislature and was serving his fourth term in the state Senate. A horse-drawn carriage carried the casket of the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney past the Confederate flag and onto the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, S.C. on June 24, 2015. REUTERS The weight of it all takes the breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But in interviews over the years, each of the six family members who spoke mercifully toward Dylann Roof explained that they did so for their own spiritual release. They depicted the moment in mystical terms — unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed, it was God talking. But none said they meant for their words to be read as a grant of exoneration or a pass from accountability. No slate had been wiped. Indeed, some did not care much whether Roof lived or died (he remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the close of his term). Rather, the mothers and children and widowers of the dead described their brand of forgiveness as a purging of self-destructive toxins, a means for reversing the metastasis of rage, and at its most basic a way to get out of bed each morning in the face of it all. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a method not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it. 'He is not a part of my life anymore,' the Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of Bible study leader Myra Thompson, told me in explaining his forgiveness of Roof. 'Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him, completely. I'm not going to make him a lifetime partner.' This may be disconcerting for some white Americans who found reassurance in the notion that those who forgave Dylann Roof were, by association, also forgiving — or at least moving beyond — the four-century legacy of white supremacy that contributed to his poisoning. They decidedly were not, and the question of whether we make serious progress toward eradicating the psychosis of race in this country and the inequities it bequeaths in wealth, education, housing, justice, and health, not to mention hope, awaits an answer on the 50th or 100th anniversary of the massacre at Mother Emanuel.
Hypebeast
5 hours ago
- Hypebeast
ASICS Unveils GEL-KAYANO 12.1 "Black/Silver" Hybrid
Name:ASICS GEL-KAYANO 12.1 'Black/Silver'Colorway:'Black/Silver'SKU:1203A759.001Retail Price:$160 USDRelease Date:2025Where to Buy:ASICS Notes:ASICSis set to release theGEL-KAYANO 12.1'Black/Silver' in 2025, blending heritage design with modern performance. Priced at $160 USD, the new silhouette merges the upper of theGEL-KAYANO 12with the outsole of theGEL-NIMBUS 17, offering a lightweight mesh build and the brand's iconic tiger stripes. This hybrid model aims to deliver both comfort and stability in a sleek, monochrome package. Notable details include Japanese branding on the tongue and blacked-out 'ASICS' logos on the heels.
