From mother to son: The Jamaican values that shaped Byron Donalds’ path to Florida politics

For many immigrant families in America, the sacrifices of one generation become the expectations placed on the next. Parents who leave home in search of greater opportunity often make one thing clear to their children: work hard, take education seriously and make the sacrifice worthwhile.

That message was a constant in Meredith Patricia Brown’s household.

Born in New York City to Jamaican parents, Brown grew up with a stern emphasis on education and discipline.

“My father, may he rest in peace, he said, ‘Mary, let me tell you something. We didn’t come from Jamaica for you to skylark and fool around,’” Brown recalled in an interview with Caribbean National Weekly.

It was a lesson she would later carry into raising her own children, including Byron Donalds, now the Republican nominee for governor of Florida.

Brown became an educator and built a home in which learning extended beyond the classroom.

“Education was stressed,” she said. “While they were going to school, I was going to school, and we were all learning and growing together.”

Today, the curious Brooklyn boy raised under his mother’s watchful eye is a U.S. congressman campaigning to become Florida’s first Black governor.

For Brown, her son’s rise is tied, at least in part, to values passed through generations of their Caribbean family. Brown’s parents were Jamaican, while Donalds’ father is from Panama.

She remembers Donalds as an intensely curious child.

“He was always a very inquisitive child,” she said. “He’s a quick study. He read very early.”

Once, Donalds dismantled the clock on his mother’s bedside table with a pair of tweezers — then managed to put it back together.

“And it worked,” Brown recalled.

“This kid has a good brain,” she remembered thinking.

Learning beyond the classroom

Brown was deliberate about finding places for that curiosity to grow.

“I mean, my kids did not grow up on the street,” she said. “I kept them actively engaged.”

Before he was 10, Donalds became involved with Kids Crew at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where Brown said he was the youngest member.

“Byron, when he was 10 years old, he was explaining the exhibits to a group of parents that came in with their children at the museum,” she said.

Brown also took Donalds to staff development sessions with the Department of Education and exposed him to government and civic institutions.

Brown, who has a background in labor relations and labor law, was a Model United Nations-trained teacher and sometimes took her son to activities connected to her work.

“He was exposed to the General Assembly and the Security Council,” she said.

Those experiences were part of an upbringing in which education, government and public affairs were familiar territory.

“Education levels the playing field,” Brown said.

That belief was rooted in Brown’s own upbringing. She recalled traveling between Jamaica and the United States as a child and a period when her Jamaican accent could affect how she was perceived in American schools.

Those experiences reinforced her family’s emphasis on education and achievement.

From Brooklyn to Florida politics

Donalds eventually left New York for Florida, graduating from Florida State University with a degree in finance and marketing before working in finance, insurance and banking.

He served in the Florida House of Representatives from 2016 to 2020 and was elected to Congress in 2020, taking office the following year.

Donalds won the Republican nomination for Florida governor in August and is set to face Democrat David Jolly in the Nov. 3 general election. If elected, he would become Florida’s first Black governor.

For Brown, the ambition that carried her son from Brooklyn to state politics, Congress and now a gubernatorial campaign was visible early.

“I knew from the look that my son had in his eyes, he was looking to go further,” she said.

Her message to him was simple.

“If you study hard, you work hard and you apply yourself, you can go very far,” Brown said.

Brown has kept reminders of her son’s political journey around her home, including congressional material from his early days in Washington.

“This is number 20, Honorable Byron Donalds of Florida,” she said while pointing to one item. “I have that sitting on my wall.”

But long before the congressional elections, campaign staff and speeches, there was Brown — and before Brown, there were her Jamaican parents.

Her father’s warning about why the family had come from Jamaica reflected an outlook familiar across generations of Caribbean immigrant families: opportunity came with an obligation to make something of it.

Brown carried that expectation into her own home, where education was stressed and curiosity encouraged.

Now, one of those children is seeking to become Florida’s first Black governor.

Whether Donalds wins in November will be decided by Florida voters. But the journey that brought him to the ballot began decades earlier in a Brooklyn household shaped, in part, by the expectations of a Jamaican immigrant family.

For Brown, the formula she passed on was the same one she learned growing up: study hard, work hard and apply yourself.

And, as her father put it all those years ago, there was no time to “skylark and fool around.”