Above Photo: Doak Campbell Stadium.
Tallahassee, Florida – The $27 million in regressive sales tax money diverted from potentially legitimate Blueprint projects to enhance the football experience of powerful white friends of the Chamber of Commerce and Florida State University (FSU) trustees who could care less about poor people in general and Black and brown people in particular, represents a betrayal.
It is a betrayal by Nick Maddox and every single Black politician that sold their souls in support of this FSU monstrosity. These include Bill Proctor, Carolyn Cummings, Curtis Richardson and Dianne Williams Cox.
Obscene levels of Black infant mortality have not gone anywhere. Yet the Tallahassee power structure would never spend this amount of money to deal with the mortality of Black and brown infants and their mothers.
Census tract 10.01 has had childhood poverty rates as high as 80.1%. Childhood hunger in Leon County has been higher than 20%. Illiteracy in Leon County is off the charts.
Yet for many years the neighborhood libraries in Leon County have been closed and never reopened reportedly for lack of funds.
Finally, this is not over. FSU President Richard McCullough should return the money. FSU and the Seminole Boosters have already received thousands of dollars from a corrupt Community Redevelopment Agency in the past. FSU does not need the money. What we have here is the exercise of pure power, greed and racism, the very foundations on which white supremacy is based.