The rule in Democrat Stephanie Dukes’ house when she was growing up was: if you talk about something more than twice without doing something about it, then you’re just spreading gossip.

“Gossiping is not acceptable in our family,” Dukes said in a Zoom interview. “I was raised in a Christian background. You either help someone or you shut up.”

In 2020, there were calls to bring a Confederate statute, which had represented Florida in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, to Lake County and install it in Groveland where four Black teens were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in 1949.

“For that statue to be coming to Lake County, it was a slap in the face of this county to me,” Dukes recalled. “My mother reminded me it was my third time talking about it.”

What she did about it was get into politics. She filed to run for the state house in District 32. While Dukes lost that election to Anthony Sabatini, she, along with lawmakers and community advocates, helped block the installation of the statue, drawing national attention and forcing the Lake County commissioners to reverse course.

The Nov. 5 election to fill the District 13 senate seat opened by the retiring Dennis Baxley marks Dukes’ third attempt to win a seat in the legislature. She faces former State Rep. Keith Truenow, who was endorsed by Baxley and won a three-way Republican primary. District 13 encompasses Lake County and a small portion of southwest Orange County. 

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Education first

“Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in,” Dukes said, referencing The Godfather III.

A former educator, Dukes, 60, was compelled to run once again because of book bans, revisionist standards for teaching African American history and the new prohibition against local governments requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with heat protections like shade, cooling periods and water breaks.

“It was very, very important to me to stand up for the rights of  students to have the ability to think critically in school and to be exposed to literature in the library and not to have knowledge picked for them," she said. "I took issue with that. Those were the thing that really upset me, that made me decide, I have to stay in this.”

Her key priorities in Tallahassee are to ensure that if Amendment 4 passes — the citizen-led measure that would limit government interference with abortion and end the state's 6-week ban — it goes into effect without the kind of restrictions that accompanied the 2018 amendment that restored voting rights to former felons. Nearly 65 percent of Floridians approved that measure, which was also known as Amendment 4 at the time, only to have the Republican lawmakers gutting those rights later.

“We have to make sure that the same thing does not happen, that they don't make laws that deny the right for Amendment 4 to be implemented at the will of the people,” Dukes said. “And that's any amendment, not just 4, but any amendment. That the will of the people is truly served.”

Reducing preterm births

Dukes also wants to work on reducing the rates of preterm births (born before 37 weeks) and maternal mortality. “We need to get a handle on that. We lose too many mothers during that time period in there. And we need to do a lot better than that and figure out why. And particularly here in Lake County and Orange County, we have a high rate.”

In 2022, the last year statistics were available, about 10.4 percent of live births in the U.S. were preterm, according to March of Dimes. In Florida, the rate is slightly higher at 10.6 precent, and in Orange County, it’s higher still at 10.7 percent.

Preterm birth rates are highest among Black babies (14.6 percent) and Native Americans/Alaskan Natives (12.2 percent) compared to Asian babies (9.2 percent), white babies (9.4) and Hispanic babies (10 percent).

Senate District 13 is not easy territory for a Democrat since the districts were redrawn in 2020. Baxley won 62 percent of the vote in 2022. But Dukes is unfazed.

“It means we just have to knock on that many more doors. We have to talk to just that many more people and we have to just let them know that we aren't going away. That we do not let them think that just because they lean Republican, we back out. That's what it means.

“We know the political system is one of the ways where there is power to make real change, and we intend to participate in that process.”