Why the HELL am I just learning about this NOW?!?
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Why the HELL am I just learning about this NOW?!?
Why am I JUST NOW learning about this?!??
In the early 1900’s Judge John Moses Cheney (a Republican running for Florida Senate) started a voter registration campaign to register more Black people. Norman and Perry led the drive to register Black people in Orange County (florida). Their efforts were so successful that according to the 1920 Census, 68% of Ocoee’s Black community registered.
On November 2, Election Day, despite warnings from the Klan that no Black folks would be allowed to vote in Ocoee, Norman and Perry went to the courthouse to vote. A few of the town’s white residents turned them away on their first visit to the polls and pistol-whipped them on their second.
That night, members of the Klan showed up at Perry’s home, in search of Norman. A shoot-out ensued in which they shot Perry in the arm, and two whites were killed.
The mob returned with backup. Norman escaped, but Perry was subdued and then dragged behind a car.
Thus began the massacre that lasted well into the pre-dawn hours of the next day.
The white mob burned at least twenty-five homes and two churches, as well as the groves of Black residents, and killed an estimated sixty people attempting to flee the fires.
Those not murdered escaped to the nearby towns of Apopka and Winter Garden with only the clothes on their backs. Perry wasn’t seen again until his body appeared hanging from a tree (some sources say light post) outside Judge Cheney’s well-to-do enclave.
No Black residents lived in Ocoee for fifty years. Voting records state that the number of Black registered voters in Ocoee dropped from 68% to 11%. The people who murdered, burned out, and assumed possession of Black property were never brought to trial.
Judge Cheney was never elected to the Florida Senate. https://mastodon.world/@clayrivers/113484241248169621
