The Honorable Thompsons of Windermere, Florida.

Geraldine Thompson and her husband Emerson are first generation beneficiaries of the Civil Rights movement. Mrs. Thompson graduated from the University of Miami in 1970 soon after it desegregated and then got a masters degree from Florida State in 1973, while her husband started college at Bethune-Cookman then transferred and graduated from the University of Florida in 1970 and the Florida State Law School in 1973. The couple soon settled in Orlando where she took a job as an Orange County Public Schools teacher and he took a job as an Assistant State Attorney. At this time during the early 1970’s the hope was that the initiatives mandated by the federal and state government would year-by-year bring the two races closer together thus replacing white elitism and Jim Crow with an integrated, meritocratic society.

By 1980 Mrs. Thompson was Director of the Equal Opportunity Office at Valencia Community College, Emerson was a Circuit Judge and other similar individual accomplishments were made by other Blacks in the community, but race relations did not seem to be getting any better despite these individual accomplishments. In 2008, we, the public, need to ask ourselves, “What went wrong?” or at the very least “Where are we now?”

While a student herself in college, Geraldine Thompson worked at the Economic Opportunity Program Institute (EOPI) where she identified and tapped into a wide variety of social service agencies to address the needs of low-income residents. Then at Valencia Community College, she utilized the College Reach Out Program that was passed by the Florida Legislature to enable thousands of low income and disadvantaged students to fulfill their dream of going to college. Moving on from there, she brought in $450,000 into the metro-Orlando area to fund HIV/AIDS prevention counseling through Mt. Pleasant’s, No Longer Bound Program. She also authored and went to Tallahassee to fight for grants to bring over $600,000 to Orlando for the restoration of the Historic Wells Built Hotel. As a result of her efforts, the Florida Department of State recently approved more than $150,000 to restore the home of Orlando pioneer and physician, Dr. William Wells.

Over the years, Geraldine Thompson became so good at getting grant money, it looked to those around her that it was free and came from nowhere. In fact, so enticing were these monetary successes/entitlements that in 1997 her daughter Laurise was accused of and then plead guilty to fraud charges in federal court. Laurise Thompson was sentenced to eight months of house arrest, placed on five years’ probation, and ordered to pay $36,783.53 in restitution for using different names and Social Security numbers to apply for credit which soon accumulated into thousands of dollars of unpaid debt.

But this was not the first time her hand got caught in the cookie jar. Two years earlier she was fired from what is now the Minority Business Advocacy and Assistance Office for soliciting up to $1500 a piece from minority businesses for a state luncheon. Instead of helping her fellow minority citizens with an affirmative action program that we, the taxpayers of Florida, were funding, she was shaking them down. Laurice Thompson’s name also came up when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) was investigating an allegation from a co-worker that Ms. Thompson had accepted a $1200 watch as a kickback for awarding a black-owned company a $12 million contract to help construct a prison in Miami. Ms. Thompson denied these charges and was never prosecuted for lack of evidence according to the FDLE.

It is also peculiar that during the course of her federal case, the Tampa Tribune and Tallahassee Democrat had to hire attorneys to request that the judge release the transcripts to Ms. Thompson’s secret sentencing hearing. Federal sentencing guidelines call for 6 – 12 months of prison time, but Ms. Thompson only got house arrest and probation, so it appears that the judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, tried to secretly sweep everything under the carpet had the press not intervened on behalf of the public’s right to know.

Also how sustainable is a society where the inner cities are breeding crime which causes we, the public, to fund not just the building of more jails but also the kickbacks for well-positioned minorities, like Ms. Thompson, in state government. As of May 2008, Ms. Thompson, now Laurise A. Thomas, was still in business with her company StrategyWise LLC and registered in Tallahassee as a Minority, Women, and Small Business Enterprise. Her company’s services include Public Relations, Economic Development Services, Education and Consultant Services, Human Relations Consultants, Event & Conference Planning and Scheduling Services.

With their daughter’s sentencing hearing in 1997 now public, we should wonder what affect this has had on these two very prominent Black leaders. Well just recently in a publication funded by taxpayer dollars, State Representative Geraldine Thompson, District 39, ran an article titled, “Black Caucus Responds To Slavery Apology” which reports that on March 26, 2008, the legislature unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. But the article goes out of the way to point out that debate was not allowed for this resolution nor was any request for reparations allowed. It sounds like the agreement was that if the Black Caucus does not lecture the rest of the legislature on the evils of slavery and the need for reparations, then we will vote for a bill that does nothing except glorify its sponsors.


In this same publication paid by the taxpayer, Mrs. Thompson ran the following picture including Al Sharpton and Ernest Page with the caption, "... Al Sharpton and other dignitaries ..."


During the Civil Rights movement, the mantra was equal education for all. Then once the public schools were desegregated and the elite university in the country, such as the Ivy League schools, started admitting a quota of minority and underprivileged students, the clamor came for federally subsidized student loans. Now an open educational system and federally subsidized loans are not enough. Mrs. Thompson in 2007 sponsored a bill, HB 1443, that would give certain students a free community college education through grants, or in the open-ended language of the bill, “have the resources necessary for graduation”. This would encourage a mass wave of high school delinquents and thugs to go to a community college for the sole purpose of having their rent paid and groceries paid, so they could party while the money lasted.


In 2008 she sponsors a bill, HB 505 - Required Instruction For Public Schools, that has as its tenets:

“meet the highest standards for professionalism and historic accuracy”

and

“ history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable”,

yet she ridiculously poses with a U.S. Post Office stamp celebrating Kwanzaa. But Kwanzaa did not originate in Africa as its Swahili name and postage stamp design with African dress suggests though many as a consequence of this postage stamp sponsored by our federal government have come to believe Rather Kwanzaa originated in the mind of Black radical, Ron Everett, a.k.a. Maulana Ron Karenga, during the turmoil of the 1960’s. His group, United Slaves Organization, would have a shoot out with the Black Panthers on UCLA's campus in 1969 resulting in two Black Panther deaths for control of the newly created Afro-American Studies department at UCLA.

And according to the Dartmouth Review, in 1971, Karenga was sentenced to one to ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment. The charges stemmed from a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga and two others tortured two women. The Los Angeles Times described the events: 'Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.'

Here are other bills Mrs. Thompson has either sponsored or co-sponsored since 2007: Federal 2010 Census in Creole, Equal Rights for Men and Women, Hate Crimes, Human Trafficking, Female Genital Mutilation and Florida African-American Culture and Heritage Initiative.

Also an argument can be made that Geraldine shouldn’t even be in the Florida Legislature representing House District 39. Since 1988 the Thompsons have owned a home in lily-white Windermere at 9626 Leeside Ct with a homestead exemption. But when Geraldine was running for office in 2002, 2004 and again in 2006 their home was and still is in Florida House District 41 and Florida Senate District 9. Nevertheless, in 2002 Geraldine ran for Florida House District 39 in 2002 and lost, then in 2004 she ran for Florida Senate District 19 and lost, then in 2006 she ran again for Florida House District 39 which she won and still holds today, but her homesteaded residence is in District 41, not District 39.

As for her husband, the Honorable Emerson Thompson, he did not intervene in a Jim Crow court case that has in effect overturned the U.S. Supreme Court case Smith v. Allwright (1944). The Honorable Emerson Thompson as Chief Judge for the Fifth District Court of Appeals had the authority under Rules 2.040 and 2.050. Trial Court Administration, Florida Rules of Judicial Administration, to assign himself to any case, yet, in the case of Kelly v. Oliver, 826 So. 2d 317 (2002), his court issued a PCA, per curiam affirmed. "Per curiam affirmed" means that all of the judges of the court are of one mind that the question involved is so clear that it is unnecessary to elaborate the matter any further. And what was the question involved in Kelly v. Oliver? The question was, "Are political parties private, voluntary associations who have a First Amendment freedom of association right to determine their own membership and rules for governing themselves?" So why didn't the Honorable Judge assign himself to a case that contradicted the legal victory that Thurgood Marshall achieved in Smith v. Allwright? Maybe Emerson has vivid memories of his "Jim Crow" days and knows that when the white power structure, who made him a judge in the first place, gathers and springs to life, it is best to busy yourself with some other matter and wait for things to return to "normal".

The aspirations of the Civil Rights movement as embodied by the 40-year journey of Geraldine Thompson and her husband Emerson as first generation beneficiaries have been a disaster. Privilege is still reserved for the elites and “new” elites while many others who didn’t get in early on the game must live in crime-ridden ghettos with little hope of coming out unscathed despite having the right to vote and attend desegregated schools. What a bargain, what a hundreds of billions of dollars wasted mess!