Moonlight tour to reveal racial injustice
Ocoee ‘riot’ victim in Greenwood Cemetery
Thumbing through a ledger of people buried recently at Orlando’s Greenwood Cemetery, graveyard caretaker Don Price stopped on a page of burial records from 1920.
His finger scrolled down the handwritten notations in a column identifying what had ended the lives of those laid to rest in the cemetery 98 years ago — tuberculosis, pneumonia and other common killers of the era. Years ago, when he first discovered the cause-of-death entry for July Perry in the ledger, even Price — who works around death for a living — was startled.
“It’s the only one in the book,” he said pointing out the word. It reads: “lynched.”
Price will lead a special walk through the 86-acre cemetery at 7 tonight focusing primarily on Perry, who was killed in what was called the Ocoee “riot” or “massacre,” and others connected to him among Greenwood’s 70,000 dead.
The free, two-hour tour also will touch on recent Orlando history — the relocation of a Confederate monument known to some as “Johnny Reb” from Lake Eola Park to Greenwood. The statue,
relocated and refurbished at a cost of $227,167.50 — a bill paid by Orlando taxpayers — was moved last year just before a national debate erupted over Confederate monuments.
“There’s an old saying: Everybody dies twice. You die once when you take your last breath and you die again when your name is mentioned for the last time,” Price said. “We need to keep telling stories like his. … It keeps the history alive.”
The Peace and Justice Institute at Valencia College, which organized Price’s special presentation amid the crypts and gravesites, has held a series of community forums to discuss the century-old incident of racial terror in Ocoee and its impact in Central Florida. The final program is scheduled for 7 p.m. May 24 in the concert hall at Seminole State College in Sanford.
“These conversations are an important part of recognition and reconciliation,” said Rachel Allen, the institute’s director. “We can be part of the healing process.”
She said the lynching of Perry, who had helped register blacks to vote during the 1920 campaign season, followed a notorious armed clash in Ocoee on Election Day 1920 between whites and blacks. Allen called it a massacre, although the exact number of black casualties is a matter of debate.
Though many accounts say at least six blacks were killed, a legal advocacy group that built the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., links 32 racial-terror deaths to Ocoee on a monument that remembers Perry by name.
Newspapers at the time reported the deaths of two white men, including one buried in a grave in Oakland’s white cemetery marked by a monument with a carving of Klansmen riding rearing horses. The same accounts say an unknown number of blacks perished.
Perry’s body, riddled with bullets, was discovered Nov. 3, 1920, hanging from a tree in Orlando. No one was ever prosecuted or charged with the lynching.
The raid on Perry’s home was led by Samuel Salisbury, whose grave in Greenwood is part of Price’s tour.
Salisbury, who formerly served as Orlando police chief and later as Ocoee mayor, was not involved in the lynching. He was shot in the right hand and arm outside Perry’s house and crippled for life.
According to an account of the incident, written half a century later by Salisbury’s grandson, James Fleming, Salisbury had left his wife in labor with their fourth child to lead the white posse to Perry’s home. He thought Perry’s friend and business associate, Mose Norman, was hiding there. Norman was accused by white poll workers of bringing a shotgun to the voting precinct.
In his version, Fleming said his grandmother often reminded his grandfather of his choice that night: “If you had been home where you belonged, you would not have been shot.”
Perry laid in an unmarked grave in Greenwood for 82 years until a volunteer group studying the Ocoee incident paid to install a marker for Perry in 2002. Fresh flowers often are left at the grave site, which is unusual for a plot as old as his.
The Orlando cemetery also was unusual for the South, Price said.
Many communities in Central Florida had separate burial grounds for blacks and for whites.
“In Greenwood, people of different races shared the same fence line,” said Price, who also leads monthly moonlight walks to tell visitors about the lives of milk magnate T.G.Lee, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson Francis Eppes, victims of the Pulse massacre and other historical figures.
Nonetheless Jim Crow laws mandated separate sections by race.
Greenwood integrated in the mid-1960s after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, prohibiting racial segregation in public accommodations from schools and pools to cemeteries.