Collins, Askew, Pepper each provided strong leadership from Florida | Opinion

March is a history-heavy month for Floridians and for people of good will across the South. Today, March 10, is the birthday of what many believe to be Florida’s greatest governor, LeRoy Collins. March 7 is the anniversary of the bloody civil rights march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. March 9 is the anniversary of the second march in 1965, at which then-former Gov. Collins acted as a peacemaker to allow the second march to end without bloodshed at the hands of police.

This is a message to a rising Florida generation who may not know who we were just decades ago. Recent political events in Florida obscure shining moments in our history that we could have been proud of, had we managed to sustain them. Florida had more than its share of corrupt leaders. But at one time, a few stood tall. LeRoy Collins was one of a wave of leaders of what we called the New South.

Claude Pepper, a law school graduate from Harvard became a U.S. Senator in 1936. He championed the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and, later, after being unseated by a political hack who labeled him “Red Pepper” for his liberal views, won a House seat and, for the rest of his life, worked to protect Social Security, pass Medicare, and generally provide security for the elderly.

Gov. Collins, elected in 1954, fought for education in Florida which had never been a priority. He counseled Florida Legislators to obey the U.S. Supreme Court integration mandate based on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and when die-hard racists tried to pass an “interposition resolution” defying the decision, adjourned the Legislature to prevent its passage, at least temporarily.

Gov. Reubin Askew, elected in 1970, led the fight for open government, on the basis that secrecy fostered corruption. When the Legislature wouldn’t pass the legislation, Askew got it on the ballot in 1976 as the Sunshine Amendment, where it passed with 78%. Florida’s “Government in the Sunshine” law is still one of the nation’s best open government laws though it is now being slowly eroded.

Bob Graham, though he helped reinstate the death penalty after it had lapsed across the U.S., had a positive environmental agenda. Lawton Chiles, as a member of Congress, successfully fought the environmentally catastrophic Cross Florida Barge Canal. State Treasurer Bill Gunter led the fight to disinvest Florida retirement funds from apartheid South Africa and to publicize the failure of state agencies to appoint women to management posts.

Today, it seems, all that is in the past.

LeRoy Collins used to tell how, when he was a boy, an old Civil War veteran would march in the Memorial Day parade. At the battlefield, where, as a young military cadet from the institute that became Florida State University, he was first called to defend the Capital, the old man would plant his walking stick in the ground. He’d dance around the stick chanting, “This is where I stood. This is where I stood.”

When the Interposition Resolution finally passed in 1957, Collins couldn’t veto it because it was a resolution, not a law, but wrote across the bottom, calling it “an evil thing, whipped up by the demagogues and carried on the hot and erratic winds of passion, prejudice, and hysteria.” Collins explained that statement was his way of saying, “This is where I stood.”

Today, as new winds of prejudice and hysteria rise in Florida and across the nation, we need to ask ourselves whether this is who we really are. Will we someday be able to tell our children with pride, “This is where I stood.”

James V. Cook is a civil rights lawyer who lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Send letters to the editor (up to 200 words) or Your Turn columns (about 500 words) to letters@tallahassee.com. Please include your address for verification purposes only, and if you send a Your Turn, also include a photo and 1-2 line bio of yourself. You can also submit anonymous Zing!s at Tallahassee.com/Zing. Submissions are published on a space-available basis. All submissions may be edited for content, clarity and length, and may also be published by any part of the USA TODAY NETWORK.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Collins, Askew, Pepper each provided strong leadership from Florida | Opinion