Ocoee 1920

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which the Nineteenth Amendment's guarantee of women's suffrage applied[1]. In Florida, Black women registering to vote joined Black men in what white supremacists understood as an organized political awakening. The statewide NAACP, under the field leadership of Mary Talbert and with chapters in Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Pensacola, had been running voter-registration drives through the summer and fall[6]. In Orange County alone the Black registration roll had grown by several hundred names between July and October, a scale of change that plantation and citrus interests had not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

The Ku Klux Klan responded with a massive public march through Orlando on October 30, 1920, three days before Election Day[2]. Hundreds of robed Klansmen carried torches through the city's downtown and past the homes of known Black organizers, including Perry's home in Ocoee. The march was explicitly framed as a warning to Black residents not to vote. Walter White's subsequent New Republic dispatch reported that the Orlando Sentinel-Reporter had printed a blunt warning in its Sunday edition: any Black man or woman who tried to cast a ballot on November 2 would not be protected by law enforcement.

In Ocoee, Mose Norman, a middle-aged Black citrus farmer who owned considerable property[1], 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[4], who had been advising Black voters across Orange County and who instructed him to return to the polls with his documentation and vote. He did. He was turned away again. This time one of the poll workers, an off-duty deputy named Sam Salisbury, struck Norman and took down his name[1]. Within the hour Salisbury had read Norman's name into a growing list of Black men Orange County whites considered "troublemakers," and the list was circulating in Ocoee's saloons.

That evening, a white posse estimated at more than one hundred men formed to find Norman. They went first to Norman's home, where they did not find him. Norman had fled on foot toward the woods. They then went to the home of Julius "July" Perry, a respected Black community leader who had helped organize the voter drive and who was widely believed by the white posse to be sheltering Norman[1]. The mob demanded that Perry surrender Norman. Perry refused. Inside the Perry home at the time were Perry, his wife Estelle, his son Charley, his daughter Coretha, several of their extended relatives, and at least three other Black men.

The mob opened fire on Perry's home. Perry, Charley Perry, and other Black men inside the home returned fire through the shutters and the walls. The gun battle lasted more than an hour. Two white attackers, Leo Borgard and Elmer McDaniels, were killed[1]. A third, Sam Salisbury, took the shot that would retire him from law enforcement. Perry's daughter Coretha was shot through the leg. Eventually the mob, reinforced by men who had driven in from Orlando and from the surrounding citrus towns, broke through. Perry was captured, beaten, and dragged alive to Orlando, where he was hanged from a telephone pole near the Orange County courthouse[7]. His body remained there for most of the following day as a warning visible from the railroad depot.

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, one Methodist and one AME. They burned the school. They burned the Masonic Lodge where Perry had been a member[2]. They burned Mose Norman's house and, over the next two days, his packing shed and his citrus grove. Black residents fled into the orange groves and the cypress swamps to the north and west of town. Some were shot as they ran. Witnesses later described bodies left in the groves for days; a handful were eventually buried in unmarked graves at Zellwood and at Lake Jessamine.

A small evacuation was organized over the following thirty-six hours by Black railroad workers at the Orlando Atlantic Coast Line depot, who arranged for survivors to board northbound trains without fares[1]. Those who could reach the depot fled north to Jacksonville, to Savannah, and to Harlem. Mose Norman reached Orlando that night and then New York within the week; he never returned to Florida. July Perry's widow Estelle and Coretha eventually relocated to Tampa. Of the 255 Black residents of Ocoee on November 1, 1920, none were living in the town on November 10.

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[1]. An NAACP investigation led by Walter White, who traveled to central Florida in January 1921, estimated 30 to 35 killed[2]. The Zora Neale Hurston investigation of 1937, carried out as part of her Federal Writers' Project assignment and shaped by her deep familiarity with neighboring Eatonville, suggested higher numbers from eyewitness interviews she conducted quietly inside Ocoee without official sanction[3]. The exact figure cannot be established because bodies were buried in unmarked graves or burned with the structures. No coroner's investigation was conducted.

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. The mechanism was systematic. Tax collectors refused to receive payments on behalf of exiled Black owners; the properties went to tax sale. Deeds were produced bearing Black residents' names and their purported signatures transferring title to white neighbors for nominal sums; none of those deeds were ever authenticated in any contested proceeding. By 1925, every Black-owned property in Ocoee had passed into white hands[1]. A substantial share of the town's modern citrus-era prosperity was built on land taken during that five-year window.

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 brought in for citrus-picking shifts were not allowed to be in the city limits after dark, and the town posted informal signs to that effect on the major approaches. The 1930 census recorded only two Black residents[4]. The 1940, 1950, and 1960 censuses recorded fewer than ten each. The 1970 census recorded none. Orlando grew into Florida's tourism capital within sixty miles of Ocoee without Black Ocoee residents re-establishing a presence.

The massacre was effectively erased from Florida history for most of the twentieth century. The first substantial 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[5]. The 2019 law, HB 1213, directed the Florida Department of Education to add the Ocoee Massacre, among other topics, to the required African American history instruction for all public school students.

A lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of descendants, seeking restitution for seized property, was dismissed in 2023 on statute-of-limitations grounds[4]. The case is being appealed. The City of Ocoee, over the 2020 to 2022 period, issued a formal apology for the massacre and designated funds for a memorial park on Bluford Avenue, the site of the former Perry homestead. Descendants of the displaced families have continued to press for both property restitution and for a formal state reparations scheme of the sort Florida passed in 1994 for Rosewood.