Maxwell Frost
*Maxwell Frost was born on this date in 1997. He is an Afro Cuban American activist and politician.
From Miami, Florida, Maxwell Alejandro Frost is the son of a Puerto Rican woman of Lebanese descent and a Haitian man. His biological mother had several children and had been experiencing violence. He was adopted as an infant; his adoptive mother is a special education teacher who migrated to the United States from Cuba on the Freedom Flights. His adoptive father is a musician from Kansas. Frost reconnected with his birth mother in June 2021.
Frost attended Osceola County School for the Arts in Orlando. As of June 2022, he is enrolled as a student at Valencia College. Frost has been organizing since around 2012 when he was active in Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. He also volunteered with the Newtown Action Alliance, an organization created in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Frost speaks Spanish and English. He is a jazz drummer and plays the timbales. His nine-member high school band Seguro Que Sí performed in the parade during Obama's second inauguration in 2013.
He has identified Occupy Wall Street, the Columbine High School massacre, the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the Orlando nightclub shooting as events that affected his thinking. He later worked for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Good. Frost survived an incident of gun violence at a Halloween event in Downtown Orlando in 2016. He was an organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union and worked to support Florida's 2018 Amendment 4 and to pressure Joe Biden to stop supporting the Hyde Amendment in 2019. He was the national organizing director for March for Our Lives. In November 2021, Frost was arrested at a voting rights rally in Lafayette Square.
Frost was formerly a pro-Palestine activist and held pro-Palestinian beliefs before reversing his foreign policy position in 2022. He is the Representative-elect for Florida's 10th congressional district, having won the 2022 election as the Democratic nominee. He was previously the national organizing director for March for Our Lives.
