South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Story of Ocoee Massacre being told, 100 years later
Allen Franks was just 18when he led five siblings hand-in-hand and carried a sixth, his disabled brother, on his back through swampy woods out of Ocoee, away from a mob of white men firing rifles and burning Black homes 100 years ago on Election Night.
The kids followed the getaway plan their parents made in the wake of Ku Klux Klan marches just weeks earlier in Orlando, Winter Garden and Ocoee as a warning to Blacks thinking of
voting in that year’s presidential election, said Gladys Franks Bell, Allen’s daughter.
“They knew trouble was coming,” said Bell, now 81, and living in Plymouth.
That same night, Nov. 2, 1920, J. Carl Devine’s grandparents, John and RoxieWilliams, escaped the violenceby horseandbuggy. John held the reins up front whileRoxie, lighter-skinned than her husband, sat in the back, their childrenclinging to her.
If anyone stopped them, Devine, now77, said, “in the dark, they’d think shewas a whitewoman” and let them on theirway.
“You had to be clever to survive,” he said.
It’s taken a century, but family tales of the massacre, passed down by survivors through at least three generations, are at lastshaping the official narrative of the terror that for decades was obscured or excused by awhitewashing of facts.
Public officials, as well as the Orlando Sentinel and other accounts, for years referred to the violence as a “race riot,” often implying that the Black community itself caused the violence rather thanwere the victims of it.
By the time the flames died out and the shooting stopped, the Black neighborhood was a “gruesome cremation scene,” according to the OrlandoMorning Sentinel, which reported two white deaths and an unknown number of Black residents dead or missing.
Today what happened in Central Florida 100 years agoismore frequently called whatitwas: amassacreinstigated by a white mob who wanted tosend amessageto Black voters.
Historians say the deputized mob and white volunteers burned 25 Black homes, two churches and a fraternal lodge. The total number dead is still unknown.
The lynching of Julius “July” Perry, 50, made him the best-known victim of one of the worst episodes of Election Day violence in the nation’s history. Hewas a farmer and labor broker who dared register fellow Blacks to vote.
Hisprosperity, civic activities and fearlessness likely put him in the mob’s crosshairs, said Sha’Ron Cooley McWhite, an Orange County teacher and greatniece to Perry whom she honoredduring early voting in Orlando by wearing a T-shirt bearing his image to the polls.
“He was lynched not because he had done anythingwrong, butbecause he had done everything right,” she said.
Even Perry’s death certificate attempted to conceal the role of race in his murder, noting the cause was “by being hung not by violence caused by racial disturbance.”
While some facts remain in dispute — lost to time, poor record- keeping or intentional obfuscation — the story ofhowhundreds of Black families were driven from awest Orange County community is now viewed as so unjust and horrific that it’s become the subject of a formal letter of apology from the city of Ocoee to be offered to descendants and a historic marker planned for the city’s popular park at Starke Lake. This year the Florida Legislature ordered thetragedytobewritten into the textbooks of schoolchildren. Andthemostin-depth exhibit ever curated on the tragedy is on display nowat theOrangeCountyRegional History Center.
Bell, who told of her father’s escape from the massacre in a book titled, “Visions Through My Father’s Eyes,” said he was a religious man who lived after the massacre in the Plymouth area in northwest Orange County without malice foranyone, Black or white.
“Regardless of what happened in Ocoee, he told us, ‘Don’t hold hate in your heart, no good comes from it,’ “she said.
Most research suggests the white attack on the neighborhood was sparked by a Black man’s determination to vote and the angry response of some whites, fearful of losing ground financially and politically to an emancipated people
Two voter registration ledgers and a ballot box fromthe early 19th century are among artifacts on display at theOcoeeMassacre exhibit at theOrangeCountyRegional HistoryCenter.
enslaved a half- century earlier.
“It’s white erasure. They just wanted it to go away like itnever happened.”Pam Schwartz, curator of the Orange County Regional History Center, speaking about the OcoeeMassacre
An exact account of what happened in the community 13 mileswest ofOrlando may be impossible to tell today because of scarce and contradictory sources and distinctly separate perspectives: one white and one Black, said Claire Strom, a Rollins College history professor who co-authored an examination of the ugly episode published in 2014in theFlorida HistoricalQuarterly.
Kenneth Thompson, a descendant of a Black Ocoee family that escaped the violence by hiding in a white neighbor’s barn, said tongue-in- cheek that he believes intwoversions, too: “A fabricated one and the truth. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is which.”
For the past three years, Pam Schwartz, chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center, and her staff have probed the tragedy, piecing together land records, tracing genealogies, recording oral histories and culling published accounts. Theirworkmakes upanexhibit called, “Ocoee: Yesterday, ThisWasHome.”
Schwartz concluded local authorities, all white at the time, tried to hide the truth and managed to do so for decades.
“It’s white erasure,” she said. “They just wanted it to go away like it never happened.”
It all started on Nov. 2,
1920, whenMosesNorman, a Black labor broker, attempted to vote at a precinct inwhatwould just five years later become the cityofOcoee. Hewas turned away by white poll workers. They said he had not paid his $1 poll tax, a voting obstacle that wouldn’t be outlawed until 1964 by the
24th Amendment. He returned later in a car but was turned away again. Therewas a gun in his vehicle, according to reports at the time.
After the polls closed, a group of armed white men went into a Black neighborhood to the home of Perry, Norman’s friend, possibly to look for Norman. Writer Zora Neale Hurston later described Norman as “the matchtotouchoffthe explosion.”
The deputized mob was led by Samuel T. Salisbury, who studied atWest Point and served briefly as Orlando police chief and, later, two terms as Ocoee mayor in the 1950s. Salisbury, who had left a pregnant wife in labor at home, was shot in thearmwhenhe shoved aside a rifle held by Perry’s teen daughter, Coretha, whothenwaswounded in an exchange of gunfire.
More shooting erupted and, soon, somehouseswere on fire. Two posse members were shot to death. Also severely wounded, Perry was capturedin a sugar cane patch and brought to a cell at theOrangeCounty Jail in downtown Orlando.
According to a coroner’s inquest, a white mob overpowered the jailer, took Perry from custody, brutalized and lynched him, then left his body hanging in public view near the Orlando home of federal Judge JohnM. Cheney. The judgehadadvisedPerryand Normanonvoting rights. He resided near Lake Concord onWest Colonial Drive, an area today where Interstate 4 passes over Colo
Sha’ronCooleyMcWhite, an OrangeCounty teacherand great-niece toJuliusPerry
nial. Two months earlier, the KKK sent a copy of a letter to Cheney warning that interfering with white supremacy would have “consequences.”
Perrywasburied inOrlando’s Greenwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave. Norman fled. He was later documented as living in NewYork City.
Newspaper ads then summoned the region’s World War I veterans to come to Ocoee to prevent more violence and, in effect, blocked Black residents who survived the terrorfilled night from returning tohomestheyowned. Many fled, never to return.
Those who came back were eventually driven away again by violence that included dynamite thrown into their homes, Schwartz said, citing newspaper accounts.
By late November, a dinner at the San Juan Hotel indowntownOrlando honored the white ex-servicemen who helped law enforcement restore order in Ocoee “after the brief outburst of passion over the killing of two white men.”
Perry’s lynching was shrugged off.
The Orlando Morning Sentinel quoted a jail doctor saying, “Perrywas expected to die at any moment anyway.”
Schwartz said the antiBlack terror in the region didn’t stop after election night.
About eight months after Perry’s lynching, his brother- in- law George Betsey, who had moved to Parramore, was taken into custody by Orlando police for alleged bootlegging, but was snatched fromtwo arresting officers by a mob of 15 armed men. A 1921 newspaper account said he wasfoundthenextday alive, but chained to a light post, painted from the waist up with red and white stripes, his head tied in a sack.
The account said he had “talked too much about the trouble at Ocoee.”
The aftermath
According to the 1920U.S. Census, 560 whites and 255 Blacks lived in Ocoee.
Schwartz said History Center research shows 24 Blacks owned land there with 42 properties among them. She said some Black residents had been in the region since the 1880s and had accumulated enviable wealth, including both PerryandNorman, owner of a productive grove.
The combined value of those Black-owned properties today is estimated at $9 million, she said.
“EveryBlackpersonliving inOcoeelost somethingthat night,” Schwartz said of the
25homes, twochurchesand a fraternal lodge destroyed by mob fires. “What took nearly 40 years to build was lost over a span of just six years in the wake of the massacre.”
Census takers counted two Blacks remaining in Ocoee in 1930 and none
from1940 to 1970. The1980
PamSchwartz, chief curator at theOrangeCounty Regional HistoryCenter
census counted 29.
Most Black property owners abandoned or sold their holdings after the massacre, many at high discounts.
Among officials who helped to wrest land from Black owners was Bluford M. Sims, a Confederate veteran considered an Ocoee founder and credited with naming it. He was appointed to oversee the land transactions and had placed an ad in the paper that read, “SPECIAL BARGAINS: Several beautiful little groves belonging to the Negroes that just left Ocoee. Must be sold - See B.M. Sims, Ocoee.”
Lester J. Dabbs Jr., who penned a thesis about the massacre in 1969 to earn a master’s degree in educa
tion from Stetson University and also later served as Ocoee mayor, noted that a signnear thecity limitsonce warned “Negroes and dogs” were unwelcome.
“We’d all heard little bits and pieces about Ocoee growing up,” said Francina Boykin, now 70, a Black woman who cofounded the multiracial Democracy Forum and was a member of ApopkaMemorial High School’s second integrated graduating class.
“What I thought I knew was bad, very bad,” she said. “But when I learned the actual truth, it was worse, farworse.”
The city today boasts a DiversityBoardandinvested
$45,000 to plan aweeklong
“100 Year Remembrance” during the first week of November with hopes of providing descendants with formal letters of apology. City leaders also intend to unveil onNov. 8 a permanent historical marker at Starke Lake, its most popular gathering place.
Among Blacks, Ocoee has served as a cautionary tale for half a century, said OrangeCountyMayorJerry Demings.
Demings, who is Black and also the first person to hold all three roles of Orlandopolice chief, Orange County sheriff and now, countymayor, said his father moved to Central Florida from Alabama in the 1930s and advised his children to be careful about venturing into Ocoee.
“It had a history that was they didn’t like Blacks,” Demings remembered his father saying. “You could find trouble there.”
But today, the mayor’s twin brother, Terry, lives in Ocoee and owns a business there.
Paul Ortiz, a professor of history at the University of Florida, said the attack on Ocoee’s Blacks occurred midway through a series of assaults on Black communities by whites between
1917 and 1923 aimed at reinforcing white supremacy. The six-year span of terror included “Red Summer,” a phrase coinedby civil-rights activistJamesWeldonJohnson to describe the wave of violence, which killed hundreds of Blacks across the U.S. South, including Tulsa, Elaine, Arkansas, and Rosewood, Florida.
In recent years, discussions in Central Florida of the tragedy have more accurately reflected the role racism played, said Rachel Allen, director of the Peace and Justice Institute at Valencia College, which in
2018 hosted “1920 Ocoee and Beyond: Paths to Truth andReconciliation.”
“Whites called it a riot because their perception was Blacks were violent, dangerous, needing to be controlledandthey started a riot, of course, noneofwhich the historical records show was true,” she said. “The Black perception is it was a massacre, a violent attack on a prospering neighborhood. Whites fromOrlando andWinter Garden, many with Klanties, camewith an intent to disrupt and intimidate and frankly terrorize Black leaders who had gained power and standing, and they did just that.”
But sheseesnewhopefor Ocoee now.
“They’ve takenthe essential first step, whichisadmitting the truth,” she said. “From there everything’s possible.”