OCOEE MASSACRE: Secrets of Central Florida

Many have never heard of the devastation of the Ocoee massacre that involved.  A white lynch mob came through a black neighborhood with guns and fire to terrorize its black occupants.  It is believed the story had been whitewashed and excused over the years. To think it started over the blacks residents’ right to vote.  To keep many blacks from voting, there was a tax created to keep them from coming to the polls. It was only $1 but for blacks and many whites back then, that was a lot of money in the 1920s.

 

Back on November 2, 1920, a man named Moses Norman did not know his actions would lead to a terrorist attack in his community.  Norman was a Black labor broker and landowner in Ocoee. A broker was a person who recruited and hired workers for companies then made sure that their workers are well trained.

 

Moses Norman wanted to vote in a well-known racist precinct. He was turned away by white poll workers.  Norman returned later that afternoon to vote but was still denied this right.  This made the white residents enraged as they went on a witch hunt to find Norman but his friend Julius Perry was caught in the crossfire. The Orlando Sentinel said, Writer Zora Neale Hurston later described Norman as “the match to touch off the explosion.” 

 

Julius Perry was an activist for Black people.  Whites in Ocoee during the 1920s did not like this and were not in agreement with blacks having so many rights, like voting.  His great-niece, Sha’Ron Cooley McWhite, an Orange County teacher said, “His prosperity, civic activities, and fearlessness likely put him in the mob’s crosshairs.”

The mob intended to make an example out of Perry. The leader of the mob was Samuel T. Salisbury. He was the Orlando police chief that was educated at Westpoint. With anger leading the way Salisbury and the mobsters opened fire on the Perry household.

 

Perry ran for safety but was caught and taken to the Orange County Jail in downtown Orlando.

The white mob surrounded the jail, then stole Perry from custody to immediately torture and lynched him.  After the massacre, the mob then left his body hanging in public view near the Orlando home of federal Judge John M. Cheney who was one of the white advocates who had given counsel to Perry and Norman on voting rights.  Cheney had been previously warned KKK interfering with white supremacy would have led to trouble.

 

As noted, the story back then was presented to the public as one-sided as many were for the separation of races then fresh off the hills so slavery.  The narrative told ended up focusing on the two whites that died and not all the countless black lives lost in the booming and gunfire of blacks in the area.  The Black lives even then did not matter. The newspaper Orlando Morning Sentinel quoted a jail doctor saying, “Perry was expected to die at any moment anyway.”

 

Norman and Perry were very wealthy landowners in Ocoee with properties valued at over $8 million.  This was a huge loss for these men and their families because of the racism and jealousy of whites in the surrounding areas.  Most of the Black families sold all their properties to alleviate the concerns for more harm or death to their families.

 

Sounds so familiar to the Tulsa City massacre in Tulsa  Oklahoma, otherwise known as  “Black Wall Street” a year later in 1921.

 Nowadays many media outlets, like the Orlando Sentinel, are admitting to the skewed views of the event that for years declared the violence as a “race riot.”  The Sentinel also often implied that the Black community caused the violence instead of indeed, being the victims of it.