A Florida community official attempted to disavow slavery after allegedly making racist comments at a city commission meeting and on Facebook.
Cindy Falco-DiCorrado was asked by the Boynton Beach vice mayor to resign from the Community Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board after she was accused of racially charged comments during a public discussion about sanctuary cities, reported WPEC-TV.
A city commissioner, Christina Romelus, urged other officials to designate Boynton Beach a sanctuary city and refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in deporting undocumented immigrants.
The measure ultimately failed, but resident Mathi Mulligan accused DiCorrado of telling him to speak "better English" and other witnesses say she told black residents they were "lucky we brought you over as slaves or else you’d be deported, too.”
Mulligan thinks DiCorrado should be fired for "white supremacist views," and vice mayor Justin Katz called on her to step down.
“While you and every other American have a right to hold certain views, now matter how offensive," Katz said in an email to DiCorrado, "you do not have a right to serve on a city advisory board and espouse patently racist and prejudicial comments to other residents at meetings."
Katz said it's impossible to prove the claims against DiCorrado, but he said her social media posts show similar views.
In one Facebook post, DiCorrado agreed with Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s statement that America was last great during slavery.
“Yes it was hard," DiCorrado wrote. "But it helped people in the long run."
She insisted she'd done nothing wrong at the city commission meeting and won't resign, and she told the TV reporter her social media posts had been misinterpreted.
“I am so sorry that I misconstrued in reading that because I am not a racist and I am not for slavery and I am not for people owning anybody,” DiCorrado said.
Her social media activity has left some residents wondering about the vetting process for volunteer citizen boards.
“We usually just ask for a resume or a curriculum vitae and see what their background looks like in terms of that, and if they seem like a person who is willing to and volunteering to help be a part of empowering and bettering the city, then we take them on board,” Romelus said.
DiCorrado told The Palm Beach Post that her remarks at the city commission meeting were misunderstood, saying she also told her husband and adopted son -- who speak with Italian and Spanish accents, respectively -- to speak better English.
She insisted in an email to Katz that she did not support slavery, and told the newspaper "out of hardships you can rebuild again and there are blessings."
"I do NOT believe in Slavery as my ancestries like yours were the first slaves for over 400 years at the hand of many Pharaoh’s. in Egypt,” she told Katz, in oddly punctuated email. “I stand with Moses Let MY PEOPLE GO!!! I stand with Martin Luther King :I have a dream. That dream I believe was for all mankind to realize that we are created in the image of God and that we are all from the same race, yes , The Human Race. How this got misconstrued and blown out of proportion is beyond me."
