Rick Scott to Black Students: But I Lived in Public Housing!

Florida Gov. Rick Scott.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/6184531584/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In response to hazing scandals at Florida A&M University that left one student dead, Florida Gov. Rick Scott has demanded the suspension of A&M’s president, James Ammons. But students at Florida A&M, a historically black college in Tallahassee, the state capital, don’t want Scott meddling with their business, and so on Thursday night, they marched on the governor’s mansion and gave Scott an earful.

To his credit, Scott, clad in sweatpants, greeted the marchers outside his home. To his detriment, he decided to talk.

Apparently grasping for some common ground, Scott began his speech by reminding the protesters that he’d lived in public housing as a youngster. The Florida A&M marchers were less than pleased. “We’re not poor!” one of them shouted back. Another, A&M student senate president Marissa West, told the Miami Herald that Scott’s remarks offended her. “I guess he was trying to make some type of relation to our student body, as if we had lived in public housing,” she said.

More on the march, from the Herald:

Students marched en masse from their campus to the Governor’s Mansion, about a 2-mile walk, at about 9 p.m. chanting “We are FAMU!” After about 30 minutes of chanting from outside Scott’s guarded gate, chief of staff Steve MacNamara told West and Student Body President Breyon Love that Scott had just returned from a trip to Israel and was sleeping, West said. Not long after, she said, Scott came out and ventured into the crowd wearing sweats. He grabbed a megaphone and took part in a Q&A with Love about funding FAMU and worries that it would merge with Florida State. He said he knew nothing about either topic, West said.

But Scott didn’t say he would rescind his recommendation to suspend Ammons, so many students remained on his lawn. “This is not the time for FAMU to be without its university president,” West said. “We believe in our university president.”

It wasn’t the first time Scott’s public housing yarn blew up in his face. In February, Scott, a first-term governor elected in 2010, made a similar quip to a room full of black, Democratic lawmakers, also at the governor’s mansion, the St. Petersburg Times reported. “I grew up probably in the same situation as you guys,” he said. “I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.” Needless to say, not all the lawmakers in the room empathized with Scott’s hard-luck story.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate