Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice

14 Memorializing Racist Massacres: Faith versus Feminism in Florida

Chapter 14 Memorializing Racist Massacres Faith versus Feminism in Florida Cathleen L. Armstead This essay examines the Democracy Forum, a small multiracial, faith-based social activist group that was committed to “challenging multiple oppressions .”1 Democracy Forum, in which I was a participant, was organized in the late 1990s in Apopka, a small town in central Florida in the U.S. South. I focus on lessons for feminist antiracists that can be learned from the first project of Democracy Forum, an effort to involve the local community in developing a more accurate history of a racial massacre that occurred in the community of Ocoee, about six miles from Apopka, in 1920. Through this project, we hoped to encourage reflection on how history shapes our dayto -day circumstances and to initiate a public discussion about contemporary forms of oppression. We hoped to create a memorial to the massacre modeled after Holocaust memorials or a permanent exhibit at the Orange County Regional Historical Museum, or to have this history included in the Orange County public school curriculum. In this essay, I reflect on why these hopes were not realized and what this suggests for feminist antiracist organizing. I first review the history of Ocoee to delineate the problems of researching and educating communities about a “hidden” massacre. I then analyze the role of Democracy Forum and discuss the possibilities and limitations of faith-based organizations for progressive political work. The Ocoee Context Ocoee, a small rural town in central Florida, was the site of one of the worst eruptions of racial violence in the United States. In 1920, Ocoee 313 was an unincorporated city of approximately eleven hundred people. Almost half its citizens were black, residentially segregated into the town’s Northern and Southern quarters. There are multiple versions of what happened on November 2, election night, but what is uncontested is that blacks had attempted to vote. One in particular, Mose Norman, was refused the right to vote. A struggle ensued, he was beaten, and disappeared . At dusk, a mob of whites went to the home of another prominent black, July Perry, where rifle shots were exchanged and two white men died. There was a call to Orlando, the county seat, for reinforcements and over two hundred white men with army-issued rifles descended upon Ocoee. Perry was captured and lynched that night and the black Northern quarters, including twenty-six homes, two churches, and a community lodge, was incinerated. The NAACP’s research indicated that between thirty and sixty blacks were killed that night. Shortly thereafter, the citizens of the Southern quarters fled Ocoee. Between November 3 and 28, 1920, over 496 black citizens had disappeared from Ocoee. The massacre in Ocoee sent very powerful messages to blacks, warning against being too prosperous or exercising citizenship rights. Mose Norman , who was attacked at the polls, owned his own farm, while July Perry, who was lynched, was the overseer of a large citrus grove. A federal report concluded that neither the lynching of July Perry nor the destruction of the town would “constitute a violation of rights secured to the Negroes under the federal constitution or laws as distinguished from the constitution and laws of the state involved.”2 For seventeen years after the massacre , no blacks voted in Orange County, Florida.3 During the Civil War (1861–65), slavery was abolished by President Lincoln. On April 9, 1866, the Civil Rights Act was enacted in defiance of a veto by President Andrew Johnson (Republican) and was based on the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution. This Act was aimed against the “Black Codes” being enacted by former slave states such as Florida, which sought to restrict the liberties of former slaves. The Black Codes were designed to reestablish white supremacy and resegregate public life by rolling back the political, economic, and social gains made by black people as a consequence of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. In Florida, as elsewhere in the southern United States, white supremacy was reestablished by racial terrorism. In 1877 federal troops were withdrawn from the former slave states, leaving black Americans unprotected in the face of white racial terrorism. The violence in Ocoee mirrored the racial violence across the United 314 c at h l e e n l . a r m s t e a d States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Race riots and...