Politicians and activists of Ocoee found recognition for victims of the ‘single bloodiest day’ in modern US political history

It has been almost a century since Gladys Franks Bell’s father fled an election day race riot in Florida, clutching his little brothers and sisters and wading through swamps and woodland to safety while the Ku Klux Klan razed the family’s home town of Ocoee.

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By the end of the night his uncle July Perry was dead, lynched by a white mob and left hanging from a lamp-post next to a sign reading: “This is what we do to niggers who vote.” The murderous rampage, meanwhile, continued unchecked, claiming dozens of other black lives, according to many accounts, while hundreds of survivors were run out of what then became an all-white town for decades.

Until recently, one of the most shameful episodes of the deep south’s racist past looked destined to be forgotten forever.

But now, thanks to the efforts of local politicians, activists and the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, there is permanent recognition for the victims and their legacy, and an official expression of “regret and horror” from the city of Ocoee, near Orlando.

“It’s been so long, I never thought I’d live to see an acknowledgment that this even happened,” said Bell, who lives in the neighbouring city of Apopka.

“It stayed with me over the years, what my daddy shared with us when we were children, when we used to go into Ocoee and he showed us everything that used to be our property, and told us about his life there and everything that went on.

“Some of it makes you laugh, some makes you cry, and other parts make you downright mad. But they are the facts. It does bring all the memories back.”

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A giant step towards healing came in November 2018, when the city of Ocoee – where the census returns between the time of the massacre and 1980 recorded only white residents – adopted a proclamation steeped in symbolism. Ocoee was no longer a so-called sundown city, named for an era when the safety of any black resident could not be guaranteed after dark, the proclamation read. It was henceforth to be “the sunrise city, with the bright light of harmony, justice and prosperity shining upon all our citizens”.

The ball was set rolling to reconciliation at the start of the decade when the civil rights historian Paul Ortiz, associate professor of history at the University of Florida, published an essay looking into what he called “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history”.

Ortiz chronicled the events in Ocoee surrounding the presidential election of 2 November 1920. Perry and his friend Mose Norman, two prosperous black businessmen, had tried to register African Americans to vote, in the face of fierce opposition from city leaders, and when Norman attempted to vote himself he was turned away.

Events degenerated quickly after he returned with a shotgun and was beaten and chased off by a mob who had gathered at the polling station. They raced to Perry’s home, where they thought Norman was hiding, and radioed for reinforcements. Klan members from Orlando and Tampa rushed to the scene where Perry, fearful for his family’s safety, fired at the crowd with a shotgun, killing two men.

The mob then overran the house, wounding Perry and pursuing his fleeing family through nearby woods, and expanded their rampage to Ocoee’s northern quarter, burning dozens of homes and two churches, killing an unknown number of people, perhaps as many as 50, according to Ortiz.

Perry’s fate was sealed when he was pulled by Klan members from the county jail in Orlando, shot and strung up. In the following hours, the rioting spread to Ocoee’s southern districts, where hundreds of black residents were forced to leave permanently, with no compensation for their lost property.

The renewed interest in Ocoee’s grim history sparked a new push for reconciliation, bolstered this April when the election day riot was incorporated into the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a museum dedicated to victims of racial terror and more than 4,400 black people lynched in the south between 1877 and 1950.

And in May, Ocoee voters elected George Oliver as the city’s first African American commissioner, who joined William Maxwell, the longtime chair of the city’s human relations diversity board, as driving forces for the adoption of the proclamation.

“It’s not so much righting a wrong as an opportunity to look at ourselves, each person as an individual,” Oliver said. “You’ve got to understand where July Perry and Mose Norman were coming from. They dared to prosper in an era of white privilege, dared to leave their home in North Carolina to seek out prosperity … one generation away from slavery.”

“That part became their undoing. They wanted to live the American dream. ”

For Bell, the healing process began decades ago when her father Richard, as a teenager, carried his siblings to safety and helped them build their new life in Plymouth, Florida, 10 miles north of Ocoee, memories she records in her book Visions Through My Father’s Eyes.

“He went through all of that, he never shared any hatred against any white person and he taught us to do the same,” she said. “He’d tell us all about it and we just knew of it not holding any grudges. That’s just the type of man my father was.”