Was Former Florida Governor Sidney Johnston Catts The Role Model For Ron DeSantis?
A Little Florida Black History For His Ass
Sidney Johnston Catts was born on an Alabama plantation owned by his family on July 31, 1863. Alabama had seceded from the Union two years prior, two years after his birth; the Civil War would end in 1865, and Alabama was readmitted to the Union in 1868 after finally acknowledging the 13th Amendment. Two weeks after Alabama rejoined the Union, the 14th Amendment was ratified. Not only were enslaved people free, but they were also granted full citizenship rights under the Constitution.
Catts was too young to remember much of enslavement itself. He would have grown up under The Black Codes, which replicated slavery as closely as possible. Under the Black Codes, theoretically, free people had to prove their employment or be sentenced to hard labor, possibly on the same plantations they’d been released from. Mass incarceration was in full force, and almost a million Black people were jailed for offenses real and imagined. They also were sent to work on plantations. Despite the end of enslavement, cotton production rose after the Civil War with the same people doing the work.
