A historic Black fraternity is pulling its 2025 conference from Florida to protest the rightwing governor Ron DeSantis’s “continued assault” on minority communities, which includes new state teaching standards that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved people.
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated said the decision to move its event from Orlando, joining a growing number of companies and organizations boycotting the state, was to highlight DeSantis’s “harmful, racist and insensitive policies against the Black community”.
As well as his controversial stance on slavery, DeSantis has signed laws gerrymandering Black voting districts and making it harder for minorities to cast ballots.
The nation’s oldest Black intercollegiate fraternity, whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr and Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, is the latest group to pull their business from Florida.
Last month, the National Society of Black Engineers announced it was relocating next year’s conference from Orlando in opposition to DeSantis’s extremist positions on “race, sexual orientation, gender and guns”.
In May, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a travel warning and declared Florida “actively hostile” to Black and other minority communities.
Willis Lonzer III, general president of Alpha Phi Alpha, made the announcement on the opening day of the fraternity’s 2023 conference in Dallas, noting the economic hit of the lost business to the state.
“In this environment of manufactured division and attacks on the Black community, Alpha Phi Alpha refuses to direct a projected $4.6m convention economic impact to a place hostile to the communities we serve,” he said in a statement.
“Although we are moving our convention from Florida, Alpha Phi Alpha will continue to support the strong advocacy of Alpha Brothers and other advocates fighting against the continued assault on our communities in Florida by Governor Ron DeSantis.”
DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination is floundering, has backed the decision of Florida’s board of education to impose middle school curriculum teaching that enslaved Blacks “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”.
At a press event last week, DeSantis suggested the standards “are probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life”.
He denied he was involved in writing the standards, which he insisted were “rooted in whatever was factual”.
The governor has been widely condemned for his position, including criticism from Vice-President Kamala Harris, the first woman and Black person to hold the office.
“They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us and we will not stand for it,” she said at an event in Jacksonville, Florida.
“There is a national agenda. Extremist so-called leaders … want to replace history with lies.”
Lonzer, the Alpha Phi Alpha leader, said fraternity leadership was dedicating its five-day convention in Texas to highlighting “the continued fight needed for social justice on behalf of African Americans and other marginalized communities”.
He said the group had joined a broad coalition protesting Florida’s “barrage of harmful and discriminatory policies on protests, voting rights, education, and diversity, equity and inclusion”.
Earlier this month, a tourism body in Broward county, Florida, said that more than half a dozen companies had canceled events there because of the state’s “harmful and divisive political climate”, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
The pattern has been repeated across the state, with next month’s Game of Thrones fan convention, Con of Thrones, among those withdrawing from Orlando.
DeSantis’s press team have called the boycotts “a media-driven stunt”.
