Frederica Wilson is passing the torch. But the harder question is whether the seat itself, one of only two Black-performing districts left in Florida, is still here to catch.
This is a first in a three-part series on Florida’s 24th Congressional District. Part two covers the candidates’ performance at the NAACP forum. Part three fact-checks what they said.
I should tell you where I stand before I tell you what I saw, because you deserve to know whose eyes you are borrowing.
I am a son of Miami-Dade, and I came up in this work from the ground floor. I am a minister by calling, and for years I served as a faith leader in South Dade, connecting the Black church to the fights on its own doorstep: restoring the voting rights of returning citizens, and standing with grieving families at candlelight vigils after yet another young life was lost to gun violence. I organized professionally, too. As a lead organizer with New Florida Majority, now Florida Rising, I helped run the restoration-of-rights campaign across South Miami-Dade. I worked races up and down the ballot, from Kendrick Meek’s 2010 run for the United States Senate to Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign for Congress and Annette Taddeo’s for the state Senate. I ran an independent expenditure in Senate District 40, managed campaigns, and organized for a congressional candidate. In 2020, I filed to run for the state House myself, to succeed the term-limited House Democratic Leader Kionne McGhee, before COVID rewrote everyone’s plans and carried me to North Carolina.
There, I kept doing the only work I know how to do. I led WakeUP Wake County on affordable housing, transit access, and land use, and then I founded the North Carolina Housing Table, a statewide coalition that gathers people from the left, the right, and the center around one stubborn conviction: everything starts with a home. I do housing and transportation policy for a living now, and we have already helped push real reform through the legislature. That is my lane. Housing, transportation, and the unglamorous machinery of how communities actually hold power.
I say all of that for one reason. When I watched the candidates for Florida’s 24th Congressional District take the stage at Florida Memorial University on the last Tuesday in June, I was not watching as a spectator. I was watching my own family, my own hometown, and my own life’s work put to the test in a single room. And I came away with a warning, a few strong opinions, and a stack of facts I think you need.
Let’s start with what is actually at stake, because almost nobody is saying it plainly.
What’s at stake: a seat that may not survive the decade
Florida’s 24th runs from Miami Gardens up into Hollywood, Miramar, and Pembroke Park. It is majority Black. It is home to one of the largest Haitian communities in the entire country. It is working-class, immigrant-rich, and, by almost any measure, one of the most economically squeezed districts in the state. It is also, right now, one of only two Black-performing congressional districts left in all of Florida.
Sit with that number. Two.
Here is the plain-English version of how we got there. For 60 years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act let voters go to court and challenge maps drawn to dilute their power. On April 29, 2026, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court took a chainsaw to it. The justices did not technically erase Section 2; they just rewrote the rules so that you now have to prove a mapmaker discriminated on purpose, and they blessed partisan gerrymandering as a legal excuse even when race and party are the exact same line on the exact same map. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the quiet part out loud: the ruling leaves Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”
What happened next tells you everything. Within hours, Florida’s Legislature passed a new map drawn under Governor Ron DeSantis. Tennessee wiped out the only majority-Black district in the Memphis area within days. Louisiana canceled a primary that was already underway, ballots already in the mail, to redraw its lines.
Now the receipts, because this is bigger than Miami:
- The chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Yvette Clarke, says as many as 19 of the caucus’s 62 members, nearly a third, are at risk of losing their seats through 2028.
- An analysis by Black Voters Matter and Fair Fight puts the danger at 19 congressional seats and 191 state-legislative seats, with the number of majority-Black and majority-Hispanic state districts potentially collapsing from 342 to 202.
- CNN reported that this single election could erase at least six Black Caucus members, the largest single-cycle loss of Black congressional representation, in raw numbers, since Reconstruction.
- On the new maps, a white voter in the Deep South has roughly a 71 percent chance that the House candidate they back wins. For a Black voter in those same states, the odds fall to about 25 percent.
The NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson, called it a return to Jim Crow. He is not being dramatic. He is being precise.
So when the candidates in Miami stood up one after another and swore to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, understand that they were not reciting a slogan. They were reacting to a Supreme Court decision, barely two months old, that had just knocked out the load-bearing wall of the house they are all trying to move into. And Florida’s 24th survived the redraw, which is exactly why Frederica Wilson sat on her retirement for months. “Would District 24 be an easy target because Frederica is no longer there?” she asked. That was not vanity talking. That was a woman doing math.
What the people before them actually did
Before we judge anybody’s promises, let’s look at the bar. This seat has a track record, and it is not a small one. The people who held it did not just occupy the chair. They delivered.
Carrie Meek took the seat in 1993, one of the first Black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction. She was 66 years old, the granddaughter of a woman enslaved in Georgia, and she walked into Speaker Tom Foley’s office and talked her way onto the Appropriations Committee as a freshman, which almost never happens. From that perch she brought home roughly $100 million to help Miami-Dade rebuild after Hurricane Andrew. She moved money for the county’s transit, airport, and seaport, built a family and childcare center in North Dade, funded aviation training at Miami-Dade Community College, and amended Social Security to cover household workers. She fought for Haitian immigrants and for seniors, and when Washington tried to strip disabled legal immigrants of their benefits, she fought to restore them. That is what delivery looks like.
Kendrick Meek Sr., her son, took the seat in 2003 and became the first Black lawmaker in history to succeed his own mother in Congress. He sat on Ways and Means, Homeland Security, and Armed Services. His signature achievement was for the Haitian community that anchors this district: in 2006 he passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, the HOPE Act, to jump-start Haiti’s garment industry, then worked to extend it in 2008. After the 2010 earthquake he helped drive relief and the Haiti Economic Lift Program. Before Congress, in Tallahassee, he authored Florida’s class-size reduction amendment. In 2010 he gave up the seat to run for the U.S. Senate, and that is the campaign that first put me in this fight.
Frederica Wilson took the seat in 2011. A former elementary-school principal, she built the 5000 Role Models of Excellence Project, a mentoring program for boys of color that now spans the country. She teamed up with Marco Rubio, of all people, to create the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys. She became one of Congress’s most persistent advocates for Haitian Temporary Protected Status, pushing again and again to extend it, and a reliable voice for hurricane-relief money. Whatever you think of her politics, the woman showed up for this district for 16 years.
I lay all of that out because it sets the standard, and the standard is the whole point. This is not a district that can afford a placeholder. It is a district that has been trained, over three decades, to expect its representative to come home with something in their hands.
Working it back: the torch, the split, and the scramble
This spring, at 83, Wilson announced she would not run again. “Even leather wears out,” she said, reaching for the oldest metaphor in Black political life. She would pass the torch.
Then she did something rare. At a Miami Gardens church, she walked a literal torch across a stage and handed it to Miami-Dade County Commissioner Oliver Gilbert III. “My word is my bond,” she told the room. “If I’m endorsing you, everyone in District 24 should be endorsing you.” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava endorsed him the same day. Gilbert’s message wrote itself: “I don’t believe in real words. I believe in real work.”
But the establishment did not fall in line the way a coronation is supposed to work. Before Wilson spoke, most insiders assumed State Senator Shevrin Jones was the natural heir. Two former county commissioners who held Gilbert’s commission seat before him, Betty Ferguson and Barbara Jordan, backed Jones instead, along with three Broward mayors and Congressman Ritchie Torres. Kendrick Meek Jr., the 29-year-old grandson and son of two people who held this very seat, pulled endorsements from Jim Clyburn and Bill Nelson. The livestream chat, meanwhile, roasted the torch itself. “NOT THE TORCH!!!!” one viewer wrote. Another cracked that the flame “blew out before he left that event.”
That tension, a torch offered from above versus a community that insists on choosing for itself, is the real story of this race. And in a district this heavily Democratic (more than 68 percent voted for Kamala Harris in 2024), the August 18 Democratic primary is not a step toward the election. It is the election.
What this district must center
Match the platform to the people, and the priorities are obvious. This is a majority-Black district where Haitian Creole is the second-most-spoken language at home, where roughly one in five residents is not a citizen, where the median income sits below the state’s and the poverty rate above it, and where half of everyone rents in the most rent-burdened metro in the country. Roughly six in ten Miami-area renters are cost-burdened, and nearly a third spend at least half of every paycheck on a roof. Given all that:
- Housing and anti-displacement come first. It is the kitchen-table issue, and the one the crowd refused to let go of.
- The Haitian community is not a constituency to court once a cycle. TPS, immigration, and Creole-language access are constituent services.
- Voting rights after Callais is a fight for the district’s existence, not a talking point.
- Cost of living and wages call for the benefits-cliff fix and the EITC, not slogans.
- HBCU and public-school funding, plus teacher pay, are FAMU-and-Florida-Memorial country essentials.
- Transit equity means bus rapid transit built with real federal grants, not a 20-year fantasy.
- Seniors and Social Security matter in a district full of fixed incomes, which is why the property-tax cut cuts both ways.
- Development has to reach residents. Homes people can afford, not warehouses they cannot.
The uncomfortable part: we do not have a plan
I need to say one more thing, and it is the thing I have struggled to write.
I came home this year from the NAACP national convention and from the Congressional Black Caucus with a bad taste in my mouth. Not because the people are anything less than brilliant. Because I sat in room after room, staring down the largest rollback of our political power since Reconstruction, a rollback with an actual number attached to it, and I could not find the plan. What I heard, over and over, amounted to “turn out in November and hope.” Turnout is necessary. Turnout is not a strategy. You cannot out-vote a gerrymander drawn by people who already counted your ballots and bent the lines so they would not matter.
And what scares me more than the maps is the fracturing. I watch our coalitions splinter along the very seams our opposition would have chosen for us: Black against brown, native-born against immigrant, elder against upstart, a gender politics too often weaponized to keep us from sharing a table. We are losing seats and losing each other at the same time, and I do not hear enough people naming the second loss.
That is why I keep coming back to Miami Gardens, and to a comment box on a Tuesday night. Because the plan will not be written in a ballroom in Washington. It gets written at tables like the one my godbrother sat behind, in a room full of people who showed up, on a weeknight, to answer a question the powerful would rather they never ask: is this seat still ours?
The close
Everything on that list is really one thing: whether a people gets to stay rooted in the place they built. Housing is rootedness. The vote is rootedness. A funded school, a bus that comes, a home you are not priced out of, all rootedness. And a gutted Voting Rights Act, a map redrawn in the dark, and a wave of townhomes nobody local can afford are not separate crises. They are one project, and its aim is to pull a people up by the roots.
The forum opened, as these things do in our community, with a student retelling how Florida Memorial was founded: in 1879, by newly freed people who knelt in the dirt near the Suwannee River and prayed for a school that would outlast them. “They were praying for continuity,” she said. A hundred and forty-seven years later, a full house answered that prayer the only way such prayers have ever been answered, by showing up.
That is the whole sermon. You defend continuity by showing up. You keep the table set between the elections. And you refuse to let anyone, a court, a governor, a developer, or even a well-meaning elder with a torch, tell you that this seat, this school, this street, this table was ever theirs to give away.
It is yours. Vote like it. Organize like it. Build like it. August 18, and every ordinary Wednesday after.
Denzel D. Burnside III is a Miami-Dade native, a minister, and a former organizer and campaign manager. He is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Housing Table, a statewide housing coalition, where he works on housing and transportation policy.
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