Hello everyone! I hope your week is going well. This week has been incredibly eventful for me. I started my ROTC sticks lanes, which is battle tactics practice for Advanced Camp this summer. I also began my student-teaching for my education minor. I will be volunteering at University High in a world history classroom. I look forward to learning much in my time and becoming a better student.
During this week, I have nearly completed my essay on July Perry and the Ocoee Massacre, and I was horrified to learn what happened there on November 2, 1920. Perry was heavily involved in African-American voter registration, alongside Judge Cheney and Mose Norman. On November 1, the Klu Klux Klan held a rally, not only in Orlando but across the South, with bypassers describing the amount of Klansmen as “endless”, in an attempt to intimidate African Americans from voting. On November 2, Mose Norman attempted to vote, and the poll workers subsequently turned him away, claiming Norman did not pay his poll tax. Norman subsequently drove to meet Judge Cheney, who told Norman to return to the polls and demand the right to vote. Turned away for a second time, accounts vary on what happened next.
Some accounts claim Norman carried a shotgun to the polls, others say it was in his car, but either way, an altercation broke out and Norman fled to the home of his friend, July Perry. Later that evening, a white mob led by Orlando’s chief of police, Sam Salisbury, surrounded Perry’s home. It is disputed who fired the first shot, but a gunfight broke out, leaving two white men dead and Perry severely injured. Late that night, lasting into the morning of November 3, a mob of nearly two hundred and fifty white residents of Central Florida, many of them Klan members, set fire to the African-American sections of Occoe, burning homes, businesses, and churches and killing roughly thirty African-Americans. Nearly all African Americans had fled Ocoee within days, not to return for over six decades.
Perry had been found early in the morning on November 3, and imprisoned by the white mob alongside his family. The sheriff of the jail gave his keys to the mob, they took July from his cell,” tied him to the back of a car... and left his body swinging to a telephone post beside the highway.” July's body was left hanging for a day for fear of reprisal, and it would be an entire month until his family was released from jail. Newspaper reports at the time shifted blame for these horrid deeds onto the African Americans for attempting to exercise their constitutional rights.
However, many attempts have recently occurred to right the wrongs on November 2, 1920. July Perry's grave was given a new headstone in 2002, and in 2018, the city of Ocoee erected a historical marker for the Ocoee Massacre. July's work continues to influence people to this day, as many put their 'I voted' stickers on his gravestone in honor of July Perry. Stories like July's are so important because they serve as a reminder of the horrors minority groups have experienced, and they also serve to remind us that those horrors were mere decades ago, and we must strive to be better than those before us.
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