One hundred years ago, in the center of Florida, just a few miles from where Disney World stands today, there was an exodus. Hundreds of black families piled their children into wagons. They trudged all night along roads and railroad tracks and through sugarcane fields. They barely escaped with their lives. Dozens of their loved ones did not. They were lynched, shot, burned to death in the wreckage of their own homes.
Today this is forgotten, largely missing from history books, handed down only as a secret memory between generations of the families who escaped. But in nineteen that November nine, the town of Ocoee, Florida, wasn't a secret. It made headlines around the world. There was a grand jury investigation, even a hearing before Congress, and Americans, black and white, new exactly why it had happened. They knew what it meant. This exodus was a warning danny black citizen who dared
to try to vote. I'm Eugene S. Robinson and this is the election day massacre from Assie media. In two thousand and twelve, Randolph Bracy became the first representative from a new state House district in central Florida. Less than one sixth of the members of the Florida House were black. I I was looking for office space after I won my election and I had recently moved to Koe, and I decided to put my office in Koe. Koe is just a dozen miles from Disney World, but it still
has the feel of a small town. It's a pretty lake, splash park for the kids, beloved ice cream stand, the perfect place to live and work. And I remember it was an African American woman, older woman, and she almost lost it when I told her I was moving my office to Koe. But she was from the age where she the era where she remembered that it was a sundown town where you couldn't be in Okoe unless you
had some business and you had to be going before dark. Bracy, now a Florida State Senator, was shocked, but many people who live in the area longer are not. Historian Marvin Dunn is professor emeritus at Florida International University. He grew up in Central Florida. My father told us told me and my brothers about picking oranges in in Okoe when they would leave to come back to the land. So driver of the white drive at Lndriage until almost dark. They would walk out of Oki rather than be caught
after dark. A Koe is a diverse community today, and it had a thriving black population long ago. But for half a century a Coe had almost no black residents. But this was in the ninety late nineties, and they told me, please, don't tell anyone that you're coming here, that we've invited you here, that we're showing you where the black communities used to be. Paul Ortiz is a professor of history at the University of Florida. Don't tell anyone because it could put your life in jeopardy. It
could put us in jeopardy. There are good reasons why no black person wants to live there for so many years. A Coe resident and community historian pam La Grady, you can see that's what happened there. You can feel that energy there. It's still it's still alive and well. What happened in a Koe a century ago remains the worst incident of election day violence in US history. What happened in a Koe was not an altercation. It was more
than a eaching or shooting or riot. What happened in the Koe was a massacre and what happened is all too relevant today. Florida is still actively involved and vota suppression. I didn't even get why she was so scared for me, and then I kind of learned the history, and I think it's so appropriate to talk about it in this year election because it is still to this date of bloody is day in American political history have an on a presidential election. One hundred years ago, African Americans in
Florida were preparing for a historic election. Soldiers had come home after serving their country in World War One, the local economy was booming, women had earned the right to vote. The promise of America seemed closer than ever before. And then in the night of speakable violence, everything changed. There was no question who was in charge in central Florida a century ago. Often at the time, many of law enforcement and local politicians here were also members of the
Ku Klux Klan. Pamela Schwartz is the chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando, Florida. One prominent white citizen at the time estimated that about nine of law enforcement officers, judges, and lawyers, and their Coe area were clan members. There's a new rise in the Ku Klux Klan um. There's a resurgence of white supremacy. Uh, there's an active movement for white supremacists to try to
disenfranchise black voters. In the days leading up to the election in November ninety the k k k was especially active. There are marches throughout the state of Florida, Jacksonville, Daytona, Orlando of Ku Klux Klan sending that same message of do you not get out to vote if you're black or else? In Orlando, around five hundred hooded men paraded behind three figures on horseback. They used megaphones to get
their message out. Pol Or tease Is, the author of Emancipation, betrayed the hidden history of black organizing a white violence in Florida from reconstruction to the bloody election of ninety.
In Daytona, the night before election day, they marched through Mary McCloy Bethoon's campus, you know, and the municipal authority controlling the electricity actually cut electricity, you know, to Daytona Industrial World School so that the clan could march through with their torches and terror tactics and and accurately scary. It's just all of this stuff is boiling and boiling, and the events of November two and third send it
over the top. This was an event hundreds of years in the making, from the first enslavement here up through black holes and Jim Crow laws, and the suppression of women, the suppression of black voters, the suppression in all these different ways leading up to something like this event erupting. Five hundred years ago, Florida was under Spanish rule. It was a sanctuary if the slaves were able to escape
the British colonies. But after Florida came under the control of the United States in eighteen nineteen, President Thomas Jefferson sent American troops to help capture former slaves and returned them to their chains. Slavery ended with the Civil War, but segregation and ideas of white supremacy remained strong. Canta Florida was especially attractive to former Confederates. Marvin Dunn is the author of a History of Florida Through Black Eyes.
Santa Florida was a was a magnet for people who had lost the Civil War because keep Amy Florida was on us by the war uh and sent to Florida was out of the cattle got to said the Confederate Army. So businessman and sent to Florida made money during the war while other parts of the South were being destimated by the war. By ninety Florida's economy was booming. The citrus industry was exploding. So a lot of black people were chanted into Center Florida for that reason to work.
The town of a Koe, with its lush orange groves and farms nestled along Stark Lake, was especially attractive. A number of black people, black men in particular, had managed to get property orange rose on their own. There's a man by the name of Moses Norman. Now Moses Norman had lived in this community for some thirty years. He was not just some you know, young guy. He was a well established individual, well known in town. He had his own car. He was known to be a labor broker.
Most Norman at the time was driving around in a car that was worth about semi five to her thousand dollars. Pamela Grady is the executive director of the July Perry Foundation. That's a Mercedes, that's a Jaguar, you know, That's what he was driving around in at a time when nobody even had cars. There was only maybe one or two other cars in the whole town of a Koe, you know, and here's this black guy driving through the town, this
nice car. You know. They had to infuriate them. The foundation is named for Most Norman's good friend, another prominent Bleaxis and of a Koe, Julius July Perry. Nothing really happened in ol Koe without him. Florida State Senator Randolph Bracy. He was kind of like a broker or even white businessman who wanted to come in and do some farming transactions of what have you. He ran the town. July Perry and most Norman were pillars of the Koe community.
His story and Paul artis, they were successful individuals. They're very hard workers, they were they're very good family men. Um. They were highly respected. And the reason I mentioned m highly respected. And this is the most important element I think about Most Norman and life arean Why why they represent such a threat to white supremacy, Because these two exceptionally respected men were involved in an exceptionally threatening activity
helping black citizens vote. In the wake at World War One, black Fluoridians had organized a remarkable statewide voter registration movement, and the movement really crested and built momentum as African American soldiers returned from from Europe. A lot of Black lessons came back to the South and the third in Europe, and they were not blando commodate themselves to the racism that was in there in that community, and most Norman latter in particular, were among those who came back with
that attitude. The two veterans joined hundreds of other Fluoridians who were mobilizing to combat white supremacy. In nineteen twenty, there is a shoot black voter registration drive that's supported not only by the black community, but also by white Republicans, not all of them, most of them. This was at a time when most African Americans were members of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party. In many places in the South, blacks
could not even join the Democratic Party. And thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment, women would be voting for president for the first time in nineteen twenty. This is a whole new voting block and that includes black women. And what it's doing is it's causing a lot of tension. People don't always accept change. Uh. And so with this you also see sort of a resurgence and an ongoing rise with white supremacy in the ku Klux Klan clan members were not the only white supremacists trying to hold back
the new wave of black voters. Once the white you know, white white elites and white media and white leaders realized this is happening, they use their off ed space, their their banner headlines. White women, it's to you to save the republic. This is the greatest crisis in our nation's history. And a typical op ed will say, h white ladies, do you want your Negro washer woman to lord over you, to take control? Do you want that Negro custodian to
marry your daughter? The threats heated up as the election approached. White supremacies in a crisis, they're much more honest and races today because they're very blunt about it. They're like, white supremacy is our way of life as an American. Some white Republicans in Orlando, including a local judge named John Cheney, helped July Perry and Most Norman organized black
voters about a month before the echoing massacre. They receive a letter from the Florida ku Klux Klan signed by the ku Klux Klan that basically says stop or else, sir, while stopping in your beautiful little city this week, I was informed that you are in the habit of going out among the negroes of Orlando and delivering lectures explaining
to them how to assert their rights. The grand Master of the Florida ku Klux Klan reminded them what happened when white people tried to help black voters during reconstruction. You will remember that these things forced the loyal citizens of the South to organize clans of determined men who pledge themselves to maintain white supremacy and to safeguard our women and children. We shall always enjoy white supremacy in this country, and he who interferes must face the consequences.
So there is a threat, there is and this is a this is a primary Schurich. We have the original in our museum collection that that that states this. Just days before were the Echoe massacre. There are marches throughout the state of Florida. If you ask a black person to register about Florida, you're asking them to take the risk. They're asking them to risk their lives. You're asking them to risk their livelihoods, You're asking them to risk their
physical safety. On the morning of November, two black citizens of a Koe, Florida, made a heroic decision. They ignored the clan marches, the torches, the letters, and the threats. They prepared to exercise their most fundamental democratic right to vote. They knew it would be challenging, but they had no idea of the horrors that awaited them. You can hear the election Day massacre miniseries just search for flashback wherever you find your podcasts.