This interview is published in Marie Claire France.

Bacardi Jackson, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida, oversees the organization's strategic direction. Her mission? "To protect, defend, strengthen, and promote the constitutional rights and freedoms of all Floridians." We spoke via Zoom. 

Marie Claire : What was your background before leading the ACLU of Florida?

Bacardi Jackson: I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, a center of the civil rights movement. (Martin Luther King was assassinated there on April 4, 1968, editor's note). The fight for civil liberties is part of my history and who I am.

My father worked with Dr. King, my mother was the main organizer of the protests to stop the Vietnam War. But to clarify, I've lived in Florida for 19 years. I have deep roots there; my oldest son grew up there, and my two younger sons were born there.

Book censorship in the United States is particularly intense in Florida...

Indeed, Florida is leading the wave of censorship sweeping the country. Books banned from our schools and libraries feature LGBTQ+, Black, or brown-skinned historical figures or figures. In short, books from communities other than white and cisgender.

How is censorship implemented?

It only takes one person, even if they are not a parent, to contest the presence of a book in a classroom or school library for it to be immediately removed.

The majority of books censored in Florida are the work of two people who went around schools protesting the books. This is contemptuous, intentional, targeted, and hateful. The fact that two people have this power speaks volumes about how broken the system is.

Among the banned books, which ones were most shocked by their removal?

"The hill we climb" (a poem written by Amanda Gorman after the assault on Congress by Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, and recited by the poet during Joe Biden's inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2021, editor's note). In Florida, 54 math books were banned because they referred to Black mathematicians who worked at NASA, for example.

A member of the Florida government found this offensive, so he banned these books. We are seeing a concerted effort to target and erase the history of certain people. Before working at the ACLU of Florida, I worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center (a foundation that defends minority rights), working on children's rights. We fought against the fact that parents requesting the reinstatement of banned books could not appeal.

But you know, what's happening in Florida right now goes beyond censorship; school curricula are also being changed.

What has changed in school curricula?

For example, AP African American History courses (freshman courses taught in high school, editor's note) have been eliminated in high school. The word "democracy" has been removed from some Civil Rights and Social Studies textbooks. It has been replaced with "Representative Republic" or "Constitutional Republic."

Does book censorship hide a broader political project?

From where I stand, I think many of the answers to this question are in the 2025 Project (an extremist agenda written by the Heritage Foundation for Trump's second term in 2025, editor's note). This agenda, championed by the governor of Florida and implemented by the current president of the United States, is to advance white supremacy and promote Christian nationalism, which is just another term for white supremacy.

The indoctrination that comes through the censorship of books and documents is aimed at not letting girls, LGBTQ people, and Black and brown people know that they have power.

The 2025 Project includes some very insidious things, including the promotion of "marital fertility." Science shows that the more educated girls are, the fewer children they have. The idea behind the 2025 Project is to push girls to get married and have children rather than get an education. The indoctrination, which involves censoring books and materials, aims to keep girls, LGBTQ people, and Black and brown people from knowing they have power. All of this works in concert, as part of the white supremacist agenda.

How do teachers react to this rewriting of history?

They are disoriented, terrified. Many have left. Last year, we started the school year with over 9,000 teaching vacancies. Teachers came to me to say they had been physically threatened. One showed a film in class, about Black history, nothing radical. Four very strong white men came to her to physically threaten her. People are afraid. Our educators are afraid. Our children are afraid.

Last year, my 15-year-old daughter had to read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" over the summer. We were talking about the book, and she looked at me: "Mom, is it illegal to read this book?" Imagine what that means to a child, my child, who is also worried about the trouble her teacher might get into for recommending this classic. (Bacardi Jackson smiles and points to the bookshelf behind his desk.) Look, I only have banned books.

Is Florida, as some activists claim, the laboratory for the policies at work under the Trump administration?

I often call our state the bastion of bad ideas. Florida is the testing ground for repressive ideologies and policies, the model and blueprint for what we see nationally today. I've adopted a mantra: Liberating Florida is liberating the nation. If we can save our democracy here, we'll have a model for doing so nationally, too.

Was there an event in recent history that explains why Florida took this liberticidal path?

The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, was a watershed moment. We witnessed his murder on television. The entire world reacted and became aware of the extent of systemic racism in our system. Young people of all ethnic backgrounds across the country woke up, and the veil was lifted.

DeSantis wants to put our children to sleep first, because he knows that the murder of George Floyd is a generational event.

This realization, I think, scared those who were counting on the continuation of white supremacy in a country where a white majority holds power. Here in Florida, that's when we saw the attacks on the freedom to protest. Then a law literally called Stop Woke was enacted (since declared unconstitutional, editor's note). Stop the wokeness. Stop the awakening of our children and the people who see you. When you want to put a generation of white supremacists in power, you have to focus on the children. DeSantis wants to put our children to sleep first, because he knows that the murder of George Floyd is a generational event.

Where is the resistance?

I'm fighting the exact same battles my parents fought in the 1960s, and in very similar circumstances, where it can cost people their lives. People have left this state after receiving death threats. We lost an ACLU staff member because he didn't feel safe. Basketball player Dwayne Wade left Florida because his family was in danger there. We're at a time where speaking out has real consequences. We really have to ask ourselves if we would have had the courage to march with King.

What role does the ACLU of Florida play in this resistance?

The ACLU has existed for 105 years nationally, and for 60 years in Florida, we've been on the front lines of the resistance. We use every tool at our disposal, launching lawsuits. Our national office has already filed five lawsuits against the Trump administration. Here in Florida, we have countless lawsuits against the DeSantis administration, and we continue to support anyone who has the courage to file one. It's an important part of our work.

We also have field teams and organizers who go out into communities to encourage people to mobilize: in Tallahassee (the state capital), at school board meetings, city council meetings, and county commission meetings. We need to make people understand that they can run for office on these boards and commissions, that they have power. But we're not alone.

Resistance is also about the people who are creating African-American history programs for young people. I just read the story of a teacher who is looking for a way to teach students who no longer come to school, terrified that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will come looking for them and deport them. The resistance is there, perhaps not very visible, because some of it must remain invisible. It is waging a fierce fight for our democracy

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional. I was outside the Supreme Court that day, celebrating the advocacy achievement that seemed impossible a decade prior when bans on marriage for same-sex couples passed by wide margins in state after state. Couples, families, and advocates gathered on the steps outside the court, singing, crying, and embracing. I thought about my younger self who could not have imagined a life and future as a queer adult, and about the generations of LGBTQ people who came before me and faced so many more obstacles to realizing their own queer adulthoods.

Though the fight for legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples spanned decades, the final stages of progress seemed lightning fast for many people outside of the LGBTQ legal movement.

In June of 2013, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Windsor that the federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman violated the Constitution's equal protection and due process guarantees. That decision opened the door to immediate constitutional challenges to the remaining state-level bans on marriage for same-sex couples. Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the Constitution.

The Obergefell ruling was a defining moment in our country’s legal history that came after decades of hard work and setbacks. Today, my child’s generation cannot even fathom that same-sex couples could not marry in many states when they were born. That transformation in law and culture has been met with fierce backlash from opponents of LGBTQ equality.

Immediately following the court’s decision in Obergefell, the aggressive movement to prevent marriage equality trained its financial resources and advocacy efforts on curtailing legal equality for LGBTQ people under local, state and federal civil rights statutes. In November 2015, a ballot campaign in Houston, Texas became the testing ground for new anti-LGBT messaging. Houston voters were voting on a repeal of a municipal non-discrimination ordinance, HERO, that would have extended local civil rights protections to fifteen classes of people, including veterans, people of color, disabled people, women and LGBTQ people.

The campaign in favor of repealing the ordinance focused its messaging entirely on the false claim that passing the ordinance would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms and harm women and girls. Campaign ads depicted shadowy figures looming over young girls and the refrain “no men in women’s restrooms” became the tagline that ultimately drove voters to repeal the ordinance at the ballot that November. Hoping to redirect voters towards the many groups the ordinance would protect, the pro-HERO campaign did not engage with the opposition’s messaging directly. The strategy failed. Whether we wanted to or not, LGBTQ advocates needed to face our opposition’s messaging head-on, particularly when, in the months that followed, dozens of bills were introduced across the country to ban transgender people from using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity. We did not pick a fight over bathrooms, the fact that we exist and go to the bathroom became the focal point of efforts to undermine legal gains for all LGBTQ people.

Between 2016 and 2019, efforts to enact anti-trans legislation largely stalled. Ballot measures seeking to roll back trans-inclusive laws or codify anti-trans ones also failed. It was not until the introduction of the Equality Act in Congress, a bill that would add explicit protections for LGBT people into federal civil rights statutes, that a new anti-trans strategy gained momentum. As with previous efforts to stall local non-discrimination ordinances in 2015 and 2016, efforts to kill the Equality Act claimed that protecting transgender people would threaten others. This time, our opponents focused on sports. Once again, transgender people did not pick the fight, we just existed and became the focal point of efforts to stop civil rights legislation.

Just as equality opponents were building momentum coalescing around sports, in June 2020 the Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, confirming that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to LGBTQ people. In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court found three LGBTQ workers fired because they were either gay or transgender – including American Civil Liberties Union client and transgender woman Aimee Stephens – were discriminated against on the basis of their sex in violation of the law. The court concluded that it is inherently a form of sex discrimination to discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation or transgender status. This confirmed that LGBTQ workers were federally protected under our nation’s civil rights statutes.

Like Obergefell, Bostock sparked a fierce backlash from anti-equality advocates. Limiting the decision’s scope immediately became a top priority for anti-LGBTQ legislators. Between 2021 and 2023, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ people, the majority of which sought to limit rights for transgender adolescents.

At first, these bills focused on the very small number of transgender students participating in school sports, but soon lawmakers escalated their attacks and began to introduce bills targeting medical care. When the first categorical ban on medical care for transgender adolescents passed in Arkansas in 2021, then-Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill concerned that it allowed for vast government overreach into the private and vulnerable decisions of adolescents, their parents and their doctors.

That measured resistance to usurping the careful and aligned judgment of youth, their parents and their doctors quickly gave way to copycat legislation across the country that sought to categorically ban evidence-based medical care for transgender adolescents. In February 2022, Texas even threatened to investigate families for child abuse for simply following the advice of medical providers to treat their adolescent transgender children with gender affirming medical care. All of a sudden, families began to fear that they could lose custody of their children by following best practice medicine.

While transgender youth and their families desperately sought refuge from fights that kept arriving at their doorstep, the ACLU and other LGBTQ legal groups immediately went to court to try to stop the escalating harms of the health bans. Our timing was critical; each day these bans were allowed to be enforced was another day transgender youth were going without needed care. Thankfully, we were largely successful at first and, until July 2023, stopped every law from going into effect. District court judges ruled that, because these bans discriminated against transgender people on the basis of their sex and transgender status, as well as infringed upon the rights of parents to direct the medical care of their minor children, they were likely unconstitutional. These district court orders protected vulnerable adolescents from losing the medical care that had allowed them to thrive.

This protection changed when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Tennessee’s ban to go into effect. That decision set off a chain reaction in the appellate courts and soon nearly every medical care ban went into effect, forcing families to uproot their lives to try to preserve care for their adolescent children. Compelled by the severity of harms facing our clients and transgender adolescents across the country, the ACLU and Lambda Legal asked the Supreme Court to review the Sixth Circuit’s harmful decision in November 2023. Not only did the appellate court’s decision upend the state of health care for transgender youth, it also began to undermine critical constitutional protections for everyone. For those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting for our community, it was clear that the stakes were only getting higher and bringing our fight to the Supreme Court was a necessary step to slow catastrophic erosion of medical care and legal rights.

Ultimately, the LGBTQ movement did not pick a fight over restrooms or sports or health care for minors. Rather, opponents of LGBTQ equality strategically positioned transgender people as a threat to others as part of their decades-long goal to undermine LGBTQ equality movements overall.

For the people who now tell transgender people that instead of fighting these bills targeting our health care, our education, our history, we should have waited for a more opportune time to defend our rights and survival, the question is: what should we have done? Just accepted our wholesale exclusion from public life? Who would that have helped? Certainly not cisgender women in sports, or LGB people seeking to learn about their histories, or people hoping to form families with IVF.

We did not pick this fight, we simply existed. But not fighting to exist was never an option.