A tourism ad touting the Florida Keys reopening hit a nerve. It has been taken down
The Florida Keys officially reopen to tourists Monday.
But in attempt to broadcast this important milestone, the Keys’ tax-funded advertising group has drawn criticism for an electronic billboard about the return of tourism that stole a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream...” speech from 1963, delivered in Washington, D.C.
The ad, which had gone up in South Florida cities, shows a photo of three kids excitedly leaping into the sea from a boat with a tagline that is causing uproar on social media:
“Free at Last.”
King ended his landmark “I Have a Dream...” speech with that line, which came from a revered spiritual song.
It has already been taken down, Monroe County Mayor Heather Carruthers said Friday morning, but not before it made an impression on Twitter and other social media.
It’s gone but not quickly forgotten.
“I’m pissed,” said Key West City Commissioner Clayton Lopez. “The fact that they would even do something like that shows their insensitivity and their lack of knowledge about who we really are. How do we make sure they don’t do this kind of thing again? At this moment in time with what’s going on nationally, you would put that kind of a sign up?”
Carruthers said Friday morning that she sent a “strongly worded email” to the Tourist Development Council, overseen by the county and funded by resort and hotel taxes.
Most of the email calls the ad “misleading” because, she said, it implies there are no restrictions on visitors returning to the Keys.
“It is both too clever and misleading, and some may find the usurpation of a quote so intimately tied to the existential struggle for human rights to be offensive,” Carruthers wrote.
“To equate subjugation of an entire race to a few weeks of not being able to take a vacation is insensitive, to say the least,” Carruthers told a Miami Herald reporter later Friday.
Andy Newman, head of public relations for the TDC, issued an apology for the ad.
“The Monroe County Tourist Development Council sincerely apologizes to those who found the ad insensitive,” Newman said in a statement Friday afternoon. “That was not the intention.”
The ad was approved weeks ago by the TDC, Newman said.
This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 12:48 PM.
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