On Election Day, November 3, 1920, black residents in the Ocoee area who owned land and businesses sought to vote despite a terrorizing Ku Klux Klan march through Orlando three days earlier. Mose Norman and other African Americans were turned away from the polls, and after seeking advice from Orlando Judge John Cheney, Norman tried again. Armed white men at the polls assaulted him, and he reportedly fled to the home of his friend and business associate, July Perry. A mob seeking both men surrounded and burned Perry's home. Norman escaped, but Perry was severely wounded, arrested, taken to Orlando, and locked in the Orange County Jail. The next morning, a lynch mob took Perry from his cell, brutally beat him, hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney's home, and repeatedly shot his body. Over the next two days, a white mob burned 25 black homes, two black churches, and a masonic lodge in Ocoee, and estimates of the number of black Americans killed in the violence range from six to over 30. Survivors fled and never returned, and within a year Ocoee's entire black community had been driven out and forced to abandon or sell their land and homes. The Ocoee Election Day Massacre was one of the bloodiest days in American political history, and July Perry is buried in Orlando's Greenwood Cemetery. This violence took place within a broader era of racial terrorism in the United States between 1877 and 1950, when thousands of black people were victims of lynching and racial violence intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. Most prevalent in the South, lynching grew out of violent resistance to equal rights after the Civil War and an ideology of white supremacy, and white mobs often acted with impunity, sometimes with the involvement or acquiescence of law enforcement. Many victims were taken from jails, and terror lynchings often involved burning and mutilation before large crowds. Millions of black people fled the South in response to this terror, over 300 documented lynchings took place in Florida, and researchers estimate at least 33 occurred in Orange County, the most of any county in the state.
