Hey everyone! I hope you are having a great week. This week has been incredibly busy, as I have had multiple ROTC events and I am finally starting my student-teaching service project for my education minor. I believe this will be a great learning experience and will help me tremendously in my teaching abilities. This week in ROTC I took the Army AFCT PT test, which was exhausting and yesterday I did land navigation, which is fun but tiring in Florida's heat.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a Lunch and Learn about Greenwood Cemetery at the Orlando Regional History Center. I also had the opportunity to explore the center's archives and learn about how historical knowledge is preserved! It was a great learning experience, and I intend to implement what I learned into this upcoming week's essay: July Perry and the Ocoee Massacre.
My next essay covers the Ocoee Massacre and the death of July Perry at the hands of white supremacists in 1920. I am attempting to tell the harrowing story of the Ocoee Massacre by focusing on July Perry and his accomplishments. My first step will be to build a Perry family tree in an attempt to understand his familial history. I aim to explore who his parents were, when they moved to Ocoee, what July Perry did for work, and his standing in the Ocoee community to start. While I have not read much yet on his accomplishments, Perry seems to be an incredibly brave man. He actively worked against disenfranchisement and sought to increase African-American voter registration in a time of extreme hostility.
From what I have read so far, the Ocoee massacre is a disgusting chapter of Orlando's history in which a white mob decimated African-American homes, schools, and businesses. They also killed roughly 30-35 African Americans, including July Perry who was taken from a jail cell by the mob (keys given by the sheriff) and was subsequently shot and lynched. Ocoee subsequently became a 'sundown town' until the 1970s as the remaining 200(roughly) African-Americans, fearing their safety, left the town.
Horrifying stories such as these serve as reminders that it was mere decades ago that African-Americans gained equal rights, and that minority groups still face great racism and violence in the modern era. When the history of Jim Crow laws and the KKK are usually taught, it is spoken in the past tense. However, much of the KKK and their beliefs adapted and persevered to this day. Modern-day groups such as the American Front and the Proud Boys stand where the KKK stood. The history of discrimination against minorities in the U.S. serve as harrowing reminders that the fight for equality is ever-lasting and we must be ever-vigilant against those seeking to dismantle it.
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