Despite the threats, a handful of Black residents in Ocoee, both men and women, showed up to the polls on Election Day. In the morning, they cast their ballots without incident, according to two accounts. But in the late afternoon, a Black labor broker named Moses Norman showed up to vote. Election officials told Norman that he hadn’t paid his poll tax. He said he had, but he was turned away. Norman sought help from Cheney, the White judge, who advised him to try again. Again, he was turned away.
It is unclear exactly how or why, but that was the spark that lighted a racist inferno that burned Black Ocoee to the ground.
By the evening, a White mob had arrived from Orlando. A rumor spread that Norman was hiding out in the home of July Perry, a Black landowner and community leader in his early 50s who had been involved in the voter registration drive.
His house was surrounded by the mob. At some point, two White men were shot and killed — perhaps by Perry’s teenage daughter, perhaps by one another as they fired their weapons at the house. Then it went up in flames. So did a nearby AME church, where Norman and Perry were trustees, and at least two dozen other homes.
“Basically the options were leave and get shot, or stay and burn,” Schwartz said.
It may never be known exactly how many Black residents were killed that night. Newspaper accounts said six. Witnesses remembered many more, perhaps 30 or even 60. One person claimed two and a half “wagonloads” of Black bodies were dumped in a trench near a lake.
Research is ongoing, but Schwartz and her team have been able to confirm four. Three were unidentified burned bodies buried by a funeral home, which probably recorded the deaths only to seek compensation for the caskets. The other was July Perry.
Amazingly, the Perrys made it out of the house alive. His wife and daughter were taken to a jail in Tampa. Perry, shot in the leg, was taken to a jail in Orlando. Within hours, a lynch mob pulled Perry from his cell, and he was brutalized and killed. His body was left hanging in front of Cheney’s Orlando home.
No one was ever held responsible for any of the deadly violence. Agents for the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) showed up a few weeks later, but they made it clear they weren’t investigating murder, arson or assault. They were interested only in election fraud.
The leader of the mob later became the mayor of Ocoee.