Desmond Meade
American voting rights activist
Desmond Meade (born July 22, 1967) is a voting rights activist and Executive Director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. As chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, Meade led the successful effort to pass Florida Amendment 4, a 2018 state initiative that restored voting rights to over 1.4 million Floridians with previous felony convictions. In April 2019, Time magazine named Meade as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Meade's autobiography Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens was published in 2020; in 2021 he was awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant."
Early life and education
According to The New York Times, Meade "was born in St. Croix and moved to Miami with his parents when he was 5. His mother worked as a waitress, and his father was a mechanic." He graduated from high school in 1985, then joined the Army as a helicopter mechanic. While in the Army, he began using cocaine, a habit that escalated over the years. In 1990, he faced an Army court martial for stealing from the base; after a three year sentence, he was given a dishonorable discharge.
In civilian life, Meade's drug problem continued. He served time in jail for felony drug possession, and after a fight with his brother was convicted of aggravated battery, also a felony.
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This entry incorporates text from “Desmond Meade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.