The Ocoee Massacre, Election Day, Nineteen Twenty

On the morning of November second, nineteen twenty, Election Day, a prosperous Black landowner named July Perry drove to the polls in Ocoee, a citrus town roughly ten miles west of Orlando. Perry was a respected man in the community, a land owner, a farmer, a man who had built something in a county where the structures of Jim Crow were designed to prevent exactly that. He intended to vote.

He was turned away. What happened next unfolded through the day and into the night. The precise sequence is disputed, and the records that survived were written by the people who did the killing.

What is documented: a white mob, eventually numbering in the hundreds, converged on Ocoee's Black neighborhood. July Perry was seized, wounded, and lynched. Two white men were killed during the attack, which prompted further violence against Black residents who were entirely uninvolved.

Somewhere between thirty and sixty Black men, women, and children were killed over that night and the following days, though some estimates run higher, and the full count has never been established. Every Black-owned home, church, and business in Ocoee was burned to the ground. The Black community of Ocoee, which had existed for decades, was effectively erased.

Its residents fled. Many never returned. Florida Governor Sidney Catts launched no serious investigation.

No one was prosecuted for the killings. Ocoee remained an all-white town for decades. The massacre was barely spoken of publicly until the nineteen nineties, when journalists and historians began recovering the record from court documents, contemporary newspaper accounts, and the testimony of survivors and their descendants.

In two thousand nineteen, the Florida Legislature passed a resolution acknowledging the massacre and directing a study of reparations. The resolution named July Perry by name. It was a measure, however belated, of recognition for a man who drove to the polls on a November morning and was answered with fire.