A Florida Republican has left his job after a photo of him, allegedly in a Ku Klux Klan costume, made the rounds online.
Gadsden County Commissioner Jeffery Moore, a Republican appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in July, resigned from the five-person county board of commissioners on Friday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
The photo reportedly shows Moore at a Halloween party wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe, according to the newspaper.
Moore, the one white person on the board with four Black commissioners, lives in a county where 55% of the residents are Black, according to U.S. census data. Gadsden County is on the Georgia border, just west of Tallahassee.
Tracey Stallworth, a pastor in Gadsden County, told the Tallahassee Democrat there’d be a news conference on Wednesday calling on Moore and the governor to weigh in on the photo.
“It’s a very sad day in our history and a sad time for this county ... the blackest county in the state, this is not OK,” Stallworth said.
Moore, who didn’t elaborate on why he was resigning in his letter, also reportedly stopped his campaign to continue as county commissioner in November.
“Thank you for the opportunity to have served in the position, however for personal reasons I am no longer able to continue,” Moore wrote to DeSantis’ office.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that Moore wrote he was “in the middle of hurricane preparations” and would contact them on Tuesday or Wednesday. Hurricane Ian is expected to strike Florida this week.
HuffPost has reached out to both Moore and DeSantis for comment.
The racist costume controversy comes over three years after another DeSantis-appointed official, Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, resigned when a photo emerged of him in blackface and dressed as a “Hurricane Katrina victim.”
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