Civil rights leader and voting rights advocate Desmond Meade has officially ended his campaign for Governor of Florida, submitting a formal letter of resignation to state election officials.
In the letter sent Thursday to the Florida Department of State Division of Elections, Meade announced the immediate end of his gubernatorial bid.
"Please accept this letter as my formal notice that I am withdrawing my candidacy for Governor of the State of Florida, effective immediately," wrote Meade, who was one of several people running as a No-Party Affiliation candidate.
He was one of several independent candidates in the race for governor, in which Republican Byron Donalds and Democrat David Jolly are the frontrunners in the November election.
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Said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki about Meade's withdrawal from the statewide race:
"Desmond Meade has spent his life fighting for people the system left behind. Long before he was a candidate for Governor, he was a community organizer and civil rights leader who brought Floridians together across political and ideological lines."
"His leadership on Amendment 4 helped restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians with past convictions, one of the largest expansions of voting rights in our country in decades," she added.
Indeed, Meade was the face and driving voice behind Florida voters passing Amendment 4 in 2018 as president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). He later emerged as one of the most prominent civil rights leaders in the nation.
His activism helped end Florida’s system of barring anyone with a felony conviction from voting for life.
Before Amendment 4 passed, the only way to bypass this system was to go before a panel of elected politicians and plea for your civil rights back. There were no criteria, no rules, and every governor and Florida Cabinet treated the pleas differently.
For his voting rights work, Meade was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow — commonly known as a “genius" grant — for 2021.
In 2024, a portion of Southwest 268th Street in south Miami-Dade County, or Moody Drive, was renamed “Desmond Meade Street,” a neighborhood he grew up in as a young man struggling with addiction and homelessness.
