Ocoee 1920

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which the Nineteenth Amendment's guarantee of women's suffrage applied. In Florida, Black women registering to vote joined Black men in what white supremacists understood as an organized political awakening. The statewide NAACP had been running voter-registration drives. The Ku Klux Klan responded with a massive public march through Orlando on October 30, 1920, three days before Election Day, with the explicit purpose of warning Black residents not to vote.

In Ocoee, Mose Norman,a middle-aged Black citrus farmer who owned considerable property,was a well-known advocate for Black voting rights. On the morning of November 2, he arrived at the Ocoee polling place with his poll-tax receipt in hand. He was turned away on a technicality. He consulted with white Republican attorney John Cheney in Orlando, who instructed him to return to the polls with his documentation and vote. He did. He was turned away again.

That evening, a white posse formed to find Norman. They went first to Norman's home, where they did not find him. They then went to the home of Julius "July" Perry, a respected Black community leader who had helped organize the voter drive. The mob demanded that Perry surrender Norman. Perry refused.

The mob opened fire on Perry's home. Perry, his son Charley Perry, and other Black men inside the home returned fire. Two white attackers,Leo Borgard and Elmer McDaniels,were killed. Perry's daughter Coretha was shot through the leg. Eventually the mob broke through. Perry was captured, beaten, and dragged alive to Orlando, where he was hanged from a telephone pole near the courthouse. His body remained there for most of the following day as a warning.

As Perry was being killed, a larger mob descended on Ocoee's Black neighborhood, known as Northern Quarters. They set fire to every Black-owned home. They burned the two Black churches. They burned the school. They burned the Masonic Lodge. Black residents fled into the orange groves and the swamps. Some were shot as they ran. Witnesses later described bodies left in the groves for days.

The final death toll is disputed. The contemporary white press reported six dead. Black newspapers and later investigations placed the count between 30 and 80. An NAACP investigation led by Walter White estimated 30 to 35 killed. The Zora Neale Hurston investigation of 1937 suggested higher numbers. The exact figure cannot be established because bodies were buried in unmarked graves or burned with the structures.

Black-owned property in Ocoee,including Mose Norman's citrus groves and July Perry's homestead,was seized by white residents in the months that followed. Tax sales and fraudulent deed transfers moved land out of Black ownership. By 1925, every Black-owned property in Ocoee had passed into white hands.

The city of Ocoee was effectively a sundown town for the next sixty years. Black residents were not allowed to live in Ocoee. In some periods Black workers were not allowed to be in the city limits after dark. The 1930 census recorded only two Black residents. The 1970 census recorded none.

The massacre was effectively erased from Florida history for most of the twentieth century. The first scholarly account did not appear until the late 1990s. The Orange County School District did not include the massacre in its curriculum until 2019, when a new state law required it.

A lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of descendants,seeking restitution for seized property,was dismissed in 2023 on statute-of-limitations grounds. The case is being appealed.