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Ask Andrew Gillum about when he caught the political bug, and it’s more likely than not the Tallahassee mayor will talk about his early days at Florida A&M University, when he led protests in the state Capitol just blocks away and was eventually elected student body president.
But the Democratic nominee for governor, who later served a decade on the city commission before being elected mayor, has long hinged his political identity on his humble roots far from the state’s capital city. How did Gillum, as the son of a school bus driver and construction worker growing up in Richmond Heights, end up in politics competing at the state’s highest level?
The answer lies 150 miles southeast of Tallahassee, in Gillum’s teenage years after his family moved to Gainesville. There, as one of only two African-American male students in his AP-level classes in high school, he met and befriended the son of a state legislator who — long before Gillum went to college — helped open some of Gillum’s first doors to Tallahassee politics.
“I hadn’t to that point known anybody so close to government,” Gillum said recently. “I definitely don’t think I would have been as receptive to the idea that it was accessible to me, because I hadn’t to that point known anybody so close to government.”
Gillum’s family moved to Gainesville in 1992, Gillum has said, to be closer to his ill grandfather.
Gillum, who turned 13 that summer, quickly stepped up at Westwood Middle School, where he pushed for more snacks in the vending machines as homeroom representative from 6th to 8th grade, he told the Gainesville Sun.
“At that time it seemed something major to have Skittles, Snickers and real Doritos, not generic taco chips, in the vending machines,” Gillum told the paper in 2003. “We got some diversity — Skittles and Snickers, but not the Doritos.”
But it wasn’t until he entered Gainesville High School in the fall of 1994 that he would meet and befriend Christopher Chestnut, the son of two local politicians. His mother, Rep. Cynthia Chestnut, had been a city commissioner and mayor before she became a state lawmaker in 1990, while his father, Charles Chestnut III, sat on the Alachua County Commission.
Andrew and Christopher eventually became best friends but were an odd pair in Gainesville, by Chestnut’s own admission.
“He was the teacher’s favorite — all the teachers loved him,” he said. Gillum — in penny loafers, khakis and his…
