Helen Gordon Davis, an early victim of racial gerrymandering in Florida
The obituaries for Helen Gordon Davis correctly recounted what one called her “trailblazing” career in the Florida Legislature, where in 1974 she became one of very few women – the first from Hillsborough County – in what a colleague famously called “the land of the Bubbas.” She weathered the sexism and condescension and compiled a luminous record in what some refer to wistfully as the “Golden Age” of Florida politics. What the tributes didn’t mention, after her death May 18,…