Ocoee Massacre
2-3 November 1920Northern Ocoee, Orange County, FL
Mose Norman tried to vote on election day 1920. By the next morning July Perry had been lynched, Black Ocoee was burning, and every Black resident had been driven out of the town for decades.
Ocoee, in the citrus country west of Orlando, had a prosperous Black community of landowners and grove workers. On election day, 2 November 1920, Mose Norman - a Black landowner active in a voter registration drive - went to vote and was turned away. He went back a second time and was beaten.
That night a mob of more than a hundred white men went looking for Norman at the home of Julius “July” Perry, another prominent Black landowner. Perry defended his house and two of the men trying to force the back door were killed. White men from across the county, Ku Klux Klan members from Orlando among them, then descended on the northern quarter of Ocoee, burning some 25 homes, two churches and a masonic lodge and shooting at those who fled the fires. July Perry was taken from jail in Orlando, lynched, and his body hung by a road as a warning. Estimates of the Black dead range from six to more than thirty; no count was made.
Every surviving Black resident was gone within a year, forced to abandon or sell land and houses they owned. Ocoee had essentially no Black population for the next half-century, and the survivors' land passed to white owners. In 2020 Florida made the teaching of the Ocoee massacre a requirement in its public schools.
The town's entire Black population - several hundred people - was driven out permanently. Deaths were never counted.
Sources
- November 2, 1920: White Mobs Destroy Black Community of Ocoee, FloridaA History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiativecalendar.eji.org
- Ocoee Massacre (1920)BlackPast.orgblackpast.org