Leading up to Election Day on November 2, 1920, the Ku Klux Klan and the United Confederate Veterans held rallies and parades in Orange County to discourage African Americans from voting, while county officials arranged for the local notary public to be out of town so no one could legally affirm that voters had paid their poll taxes. On Election Day, only African Americans were challenged to prove payment. Mose Norman tried to vote at the Ocoee polling place, was refused entry, returned later, and was beaten and driven away. An armed group of white citizens then sought to arrest him and went first to the home of Julius “July” Perry, a prominent African American businessman, but Norman had already fled. When the group tried to enter Perry’s home, the family resisted, and a gunfight left two whites dead and Perry gravely injured. He was taken to the Orange County Jail in Orlando, but a white mob secured his release and lynched him near the home of Judge John M. Cheney; he was later buried in Orlando’s Greenwood Cemetery. On November 3, 1920, a white mob reported to be at least 100 persons entered Northern Quarters, one of two African American communities in the Ocoee area, and in a long house-to-house gun battle set fire to African American lodges, homes, businesses, schools, and churches. People trying to flee burning buildings were shot, and those who remained died in the fire. In the days that followed, residents of Southern Quarters were told to abandon their property or face the same fate. Based on 1920 census data, 495 African American residents in Ocoee were driven out, local authorities confiscated the abandoned property and divided it among white residents, no records of the deaths were kept, and records related to the property sales were lost. African Americans did not return to the area until the 1980s. As Ocoee later grew and diversified during a housing construction boom, the city acknowledged this past by forming Florida’s first human relations diversity advisory board in 2006 and designating part of Lakefront Park as an area of remembrance and reflection in 2019.