Iowa is not ‘Florida of the Midwest’

Since the predicted “red wave” washed over Florida and Iowa last November, but appeared few other places, we have heard numerous comments from Florida Gov. DeSantis and Iowa Gov. Reynolds that Florida is the “Iowa of the southeast” and that Iowa is the “Florida of the Midwest.” While I have seen few similarities between the two states in my infrequent travels to Florida, it has been clear to me that one particularly distinguishing characteristic has been in the historical availability of educational opportunities to African Americans.

Florida and Iowa were admitted to the union less than two years apart, Florida on March 3, 1845, and Iowa on Dec. 28, 1846. There the comparability ends, however, with Florida being admitted as a “slave state” and Iowa as a “free state.” Even before Iowa’s admission, however, it had established itself as being protective of the rights of African Americans, when in one of its first cases, Matter of Ralph, the territorial Supreme Court refused to give control of the former slave back to his “owner.”

We have recently seen that modern day manifestations of the vestiges of slavery are still with us. Florida, with the full support of Gov. DeSantis, has developed teaching standards requiring middle schoolers to be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Gov. DeSantis cited blacksmithing as such a skill, but I’ve seen no indication that Gov. DeSantis would allow his hypothetical blacksmith to choose his occupation.

What if Gov. DeSantis’s blacksmith wanted to be a lawyer, as was the case with Muscatine’s Alexander G. Clark shortly after the Civil War, when he enrolled at the University of Iowa Law School? What if the career choice was to be a research scientist, as was the case with George Washington Carver, born as a slave in Missouri but whose education at Simpson College and Iowa State College prepared him to develop hundreds of products derived from plants? His calling might have been to establish a school for African American children in the south, as was the case of Marshalltown’s Laurence Clifton Jones, a graduate of the University of Iowa who founded the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi and dedicated his life to educating Black children in the south. Maybe he would have chosen to be an engineer, such as Ottumwa’s Archie Alexander, a graduate of the University of Iowa, a successful engineer and contractor and Governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The opportunities available in Iowa to Clark, Carver, Jones, Alexander and others would not have been available in Florida and other southern states until decades later. I can recall Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett standing in the doorway of an academic building at the University of Mississippi in 1962, preventing the registration of its first African American student, James Meredith, admitted on order of the United States Supreme Court.

To ensure the future of this great nation it is essential that we have a highly educated populace where all people have equal opportunity to advance as far as their abilities and work ethic will take them. The efforts of Gov. DeSantis and others to downplay the effects of slavery is particularly reprehensible when coming from a professed member of the “Party of Lincoln.”

Robert N. Downer is an Iowa City lawyer, a past President of the Iowa State Bar Association and served as a Republican member of the State Board of Regents from 2003 to 2015. The views expressed are the author’s own.