In a moment when Black Americans’ voting rights seem under threat, state Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Fla., finds herself aiming to follow in the footsteps of her ancestors and mentors. She takes inspiration from elder and fellow state Rep. Yvonne Hinson, D-Fla., who stood up to horrors while fighting for the right to vote during the Civil Rights Movement and, at 79, tells Nixon she’s tired of battling her Republican colleagues to maintain it.
“Who am I to sit around and to not answer the call,” Nixon, a Jacksonville native, told Salon in a video interview, underscoring Hinson’s adamance that they’re not going back to the time before the Civil Rights Act. “It cost me nothing to disrupt what was happening.”
Nixon, who represents Florida’s predominantly Black, 13th House District, is running for U.S. Senate to take on the rest of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s six-year term. With the Democratic primary just over a month away, she’s pitching herself as a fierce progressive not unlike the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights Movement that inspired her, at least in her willingness to put herself on the line for a chance at effecting change.
“A lot of [voters] want someone who’s going to fight back and not just give strongly-worded debates and speeches or write strongly-worded emails or letters to the editor,” Nixon said, reflecting on how Floridians have received her protests. “They want someone that they know is going to fight for them and actually bring forth good ideas on how we can build a new vision for our country, one where hardworking everyday people get to shape what our communities look like and what our economies are.”
In late April, the Jacksonville Democrat made headlines for disrupting a Florida House floor vote on new congressional maps. Dressed in a bright magenta jumpsuit and wielding a hot pink megaphone, Nixon paced the floor in the final moments of the roll call, criticizing her colleagues for moving to install an “illegal” and “unconstitutional” map that she said would disempower voters. “You are violating the [Florida] Constitution,” she shouted into the megaphone as the last spate of votes came in.
“She’s looking for a way to try and get the opposition to understand what they’re doing to people, and she’s willing to go beyond decorum. What good is decorum?”
Nixon said she took to the floor against the redistricting bill as a planned, last-ditch effort to slow down the vote and raise the alarm on what she called Florida Republicans’ efforts to disempower voters.
Hinson, the outgoing representative of Florida’s 21st House district, told Salon that Nixon has been a “leading force in protest” against the opposition in the Florida Legislature since she arrived there in 2020.
“That’s the way she is,” Hinson said. “She’s looking for a way to try and get the opposition to understand what they’re doing to people, and she’s willing to go beyond decorum. What good is decorum?”
The redistricting bill, Nixon and other Florida Democrats argued, violates the state constitution’s 2010, voter-passed Fair Districts Amendment, which established strict rules for drawing legislative and congressional districts to prohibit partisan and racial gerrymandering, because the new congressional map stands to cede up to four Democratic seats in the U.S. House to Republicans in the midterms.
Florida having the nation’s second-largest population of Black Americans also makes any reconfiguration of the maps, without appropriate consideration of the districts’ makeups, a threat to their voting rights, Nixon argued, noting that the state previously lost a majority-Black district with two seats due to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2022 congressional redistricting. Notably, her megaphone disruption occurred on the same day as the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Louisiana v. Callais decision, which effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act and its protections of Black-majority districts.
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“What we’re witnessing in real time is a willingness on both sides to compromise not only our Constitution, our constitutional rights, [but also] the freedoms we’ve come to learn, our patriotism,” Hinson said. “Our entire democracy is at stake, and we need to know who we’re working with, who’s willing to give up our democracy.”
“Freedom — you got to fight for it every single day, and you can’t be willing to give any mileage on that. Not even an inch,” she added. “There’s got to be some core principles you’re just not willing to move with, and I think [Nixon’s] may be more rigid than anybody.”
April’s disruption was not the 42-year-old representative’s first. In 2022, she and former state Rep. Travaris McCurdy led the Democratic members of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus in a House floor sit-in to disrupt debate on Black American representation in the redistricting process that year.
The 2026 redistricting bill passed 83-28, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law on May 4. The maps have been challenged in court, with a coalition of civil and voting rights organizations suing over what they allege is a violation of the state constitution’s anti-gerrymandering provision. A circuit judge, however, allowed the maps to take effect during the litigation to avoid confusion ahead of the upcoming primary.
Despite being formally reprimanded by the Florida House Rules and Ethics Committee — a rare disciplinary action — the protest was far from her last. In May, Nixon staged a five-hour sit-in outside of Gov. DeSantis’ office at the Florida Capitol to urge a DeSantis staff member to speak with her about affordability in the state. She and two other protesters who were with her at the time were arrested.
McCurdy, who lost his bid for reelection in 2022 and in the special Democratic primary in June 2025, told Salon he pictures Nixon as part of a lineage of change-making Black women, like Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, former state Sen. Arthenia Joyner and late state Sen. Geraldine Thompson.
“On the campaign trail, I hear her often say we have nothing to lose but our chains, and our chains are oppression, our chains are the political games that people in power are playing,” McCurdy said.
He pointed to her and her husband’s founding of Cafe Resistance, a brick-and-mortar coffee shop and bookstore in northwest Jacksonville that features, among texts from marginalized authors, copies of books the state of Florida has sought to ban from schools, as an example of how she “understands the problem.”
“We need representatives from the state of Florida who aren’t just going to go along to get along,” McCurdy said. “We need people who are knowledgeable. We need people who are passionate. We need people who take no time, no days off. We need people who are not afraid to speak truth to power.”
Nixon told Salon she doesn’t regret any of her actions.
“I’ve had so many seniors who talked about how [the April disruption] reminded them about how they used to speak out and how they used to protest and push back against all these grave injustices that we currently see right now,” Nixon said. “That’s what makes me happy with my decision, and I realized that I did what was right.”
“A lot of folks have turned their backs on us here in the state of Florida, and we still persist, nevertheless,” she added.
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