Geraldine F. Thompson

Florida House of Representatives District 44 

Representative Geraldine F. Thompson is a member of the Florida Legislature who served in the Florida House of Representatives from 2006 until 2012 when she was elected to the Florida Senate where she served from 2012 until 2016. She returned to the Florida House in 2018. As a Senator in 2014, Rep. Thompson filed legislation to clear the names of men known as the Groveland Four. Her actions led to an apology from the Florida Legislature in 2017 for the racial injustice suffered by the Groveland Four and in 2019 a pardon from the Florida Cabinet. Thompson continued to push for exoneration. She viewed a pardon as something given to someone who is guilty and the men were innocent. In November of 2021, a judge in the Fifth Judicial Circuit accepted a motion to dismiss the indictments and sentences against the Groveland Four. After the exoneration, Thompson and family members of the Groveland Four scooped sand into jars from the spot where Samuel Shepherd, one of the Groveland Four, was killed. The jars were sent to the Equal Justice Initiative Museum in Montgomery, Alabama founded by Bryan Stevenson and the Wells’Built Museum which Geraldine F. Thompson founded in 2001. Thompson passed a bill to allow any Floridian to vote by mail which ended the former absentee ballot voting process. She has brought more than $800,000 to help the town of Oakland to move from septic tanks to a sanitary sewer system.  Prior to her service in the Legislature, Rep. Thompson served as an administrator at Valencia College. Her husband, the Honorable Emerson R. Thompson, Jr., served on the Orange County Court, the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court where he was Chief Judge and the Fifth District Court of Appeal where he was Chief Judge. They have three children and four granddaughters.