How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

In gerrymandering voting maps and gutting one of the biggest expansions of voting rights, the Florida governor seeks to dilute Black political power

Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.

He was born in Midway, a small town that's part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.