FAMU alumna pledges to fight for freedom as new Florida Senate Democratic Leader

Sen. Arthenia Joyner, seated, being installed as the new Florida Senate Democratic Leader

Last week, FAMU alumna Arthenia Joyner took office as the new Florida Senate Democratic Leader. The Democratic caucus, which elected her to job in its 2013 leadership elections, made the decision official with a unanimous vote.

Joyner, 71, is the first black woman to hold the position and will serve until 2016. If the Democrats win the chamber back from the Republicans before her term runs out, then she will become the president of the Florida Senate. The Republicans currently outnumber the Democrats 26 to 14.

In her acceptance speech, Joyner pledged to continue the party’s fight against inadequate health care, unfair sentencing laws, declining state support for public education, joblessness, and harm to the environment.

“All of these issues individually and collectively can break people already stretched to the breaking point to the edge of being durable,” Joyner said. “But it doesn't need to be that way. As a woman, especially as a black woman, I learned many years ago what it meant to be on the outside looking in. I remember what it was like when fears of one group trumped the fair treatment of many and denied those willing to work hard the right to the success they had earned.”

“I learned deep down in my heart the constant ache for freedom that some enjoyed but many more were denied,” she continued. “When hard working people are blocked from basic health care because one ideology is against it. When they are shunned from sharing in the success they helped a company achieve, when they are struggling to pay the bills in a system stacked against them, when they have erred in some minor crime and their sentence is unchallengable, that is the edge of the undurable. As the incoming leader, I pledge to you that like I did a quarter century ago, this wall erected in the name of politics to curb the freedom of the people, will also fall.”

Joyner earned her B.S. in political science from FAMU in 1964 and went on to earn her J.D. from the FAMU College of Law in 1968.