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Michael McLeod
Dave: Here you go. I think you will like the ending.
My sweetheart teaches at a public montessori school in ocoee, which is about a half hour's drive from orlando.
By Michael McLeod of The Sentinel Staff
Orlando Sentinel
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Mar 11, 2001 at 12:00 am
Ed Brown is a panelist on Wall Street Week and CEO of his own money-management firm. He has wealth, success, respect. But what he really wants is 40 acres and a mule.
Brown's grandfather was among scores of black residents who fled forever from the west Orange community of Ocoee in November 1920, when a race riot forced the area's black population -- listed as 263 people in that year's census -- to seek safety in neighboring towns.
Some were paid for what they left behind. Most were not. Now Brown is among a handful of descendants ready to broach a hot-button issue: reparations. Someone, they say, needs to pay.
"This is not about revenge. It's about ethics," says Brown, owner of Brown Capital Management in Baltimore. "It's about an unpaid debt, long overdue -- 40 acres and a mule, and all that." Nineteenth-century abolitionists promised the acreage and the animal to each liberated slave. Nothing ever came of the rhetoric. Tracking down what was lost in Ocoee may prove just as elusive.
For the past three years, two independent, volunteer study groups have been studying historical documents and collecting oral histories to uncover what happened during the riot. As a spinoff of the groups' efforts, several descendants of Ocoee riot victims are expressing an interest in the possibility of the Florida Legislature creating a fund to compensate them for the tragedy.
But records are spotty. Historical accounts conflict. There is even a scarcity of family stories about what was lost: Because people involved in the riot were loath to share the ugliness of what happened with their children, the truth skipped a generation among many Ocoee families. Brown is a prime example.
His parents never spoke of the riots. Neither did his grandparents. Not until a year ago, in a chance discussion with Apopka historian Mildred Board, was he told that when his family members fled, they left behind a home and an orange grove of about 100 acres. Brown, who grew up in Apopka, has yet to find records of family ownership.
That's not unusual, especially for farmland in that era. "People were not real careful about change of title in those days," says Emmett Taylor, supervisor of property assessment for Orange County. "Frequently people would just start living on a piece of land and start paying the property taxes and establish ownership that way."
LONE SURVIVOR
The Ocoee riot has but one known, living black survivor: Armstrong Hightower, 93, a thin, bespectacled man who lives in a two-room apartment in Fort Lauderdale. He was 13 on the night of the Election Day riot, when a gun battle between blacks and whites resulted in the deaths of two white men, the lynching of a black citrus farmer and the killing of at least seven other black people. Some of them burned to death in their own homes when a mob descended on a black Ocoee neighborhood called the Northern Quarters, near what is now the intersection of Apopka-Ocoee and Silver Star roads. The mob burned down about 20 structures.
Hightower spent that night high in the limbs of an orange tree, fearful of wildcats and the Ku Klux Klan, hiding with his family in a grove before fleeing to Apopka. He says the family left behind a home and at least two plots of land. Orange County property records show that a 37-acre plot was purchased for $55 in 1909 by his father, Valentine Hightower, who planned to use the tract to produce turpentine. His plot, near what is now Wurst and Clarcona-Ocoee roads, became a residential subdivision in the mid-1980s. About 50 homes now occupy land once thick with pine trees.
Hightower thinks his father was paid $25 for one of the pieces of land he owned, perhaps the turpentine grove. But he says no amount of money can pay for the lakes he fished as a boy; the family garden where he helped his father grow tomatoes; the one-room, makeshift schoolhouse -- actually a converted Baptist church in the Northern Quarters -- where he learned to read. "I lost my childhood," he says. "What you think, they oughtn't to pay me for that?"
After the 1920 riot, a committee of white citizens was set up to help blacks sell the land they left behind. But there are few details about how many of the scattered black citizens were contacted, which properties were sold and for what price.
ONE WHO GOT AWAY
Ocoee was a farming community, and most blacks worked in groves and fields. They picked oranges, had kitchen gardens and lived off the land when they could, fishing and hunting. Many were able to buy land and parlay hard work into a prosperity that rivaled, and sometimes surpassed, that of their white neighbors. That success could bring danger, as two of Ocoee's more prosperous black residents would discover.
Moses Norman was one of them: a 59-year-old farmer who owned a house, an orange grove and a beautiful car -- a six-cylinder Columbia with white sidewall tires, silver spokes, and elegant "storm curtains" instead of side windows. Norman was turned away from the polls on Election Day and was involved in a skirmish with poll officials. By some accounts he was belligerent and armed. By others, he was simply an unwitting victim of white efforts, marshaled in part by what was then a flourishing KKK, to keep down the black vote.
In her account of the riot, the celebrated black writer Zora Neale Hurston leaves open the ominous possibility that Norman, who was never seen in Ocoee after that Election Day incident, was killed. The Rev. Fred Maxwell says he knows better.
Maxwell, 93, has been a minister for half a century and still conducts Sunday services for his congregation at St. John Missionary Baptist Church on Central Avenue in Orlando. In 1920, he was a teenager living in the small west Lake County community of Stuckey. Maxwell says that on the night of the riot, a breathless, frightened, puzzled Moses Norman pulled up at the Maxwells' door in the sleek black Columbia, having fled the burning town.
"I remember very clearly: He told my father he didn't understand why he'd had such trouble voting, because he had voted in 1916 with no problem," Maxwell said. "I remember my father told him, 'Mose, do the next best thing.' That meant, go on, be safe, find a new life.' "
Apparently, Norman did. Property records show that he was paid $1,600 for a house and a large orange grove in 1921.
WHAT USED TO BE THEIRS
Other descendants of blacks involved in the riot say their parents and grandparents were not as fortunate.
Gladys Bell, 62, says her late father, Richard Franks, was 18 when he had to flee his family home in Ocoee, carrying an ill brother on his back. The family settled in Plymouth. When outings in their car would take them past Ocoee, her father, pointing to a stretch of roadside orange groves, would say: "All that used to be ours."
"It must have hurt him, but he was not one that would say so," she recalls. "He loved everybody, black, white, blue, green. I think, yes, restitution would do some justice. I just wish there was a way to get it back for him when he was alive."
Jack Hamiter, a retired civil engineer who worked in Philadelphia most of his life, says his grandparents, Jack and Annie Hamiter, owned a sizable orange grove in Ocoee. As recently as 25 years ago, he could still find the old cypress clapboard house where they lived.
ROSEWOOD PRECEDENT
The Ocoee riot has been compared with Rosewood, a black community in northern Florida that was burned down by a white mob in 1923. In 1994, after lawyers showed that law-enforcement officials of the time had failed to protect the property rights of the black citizens of that town, Florida legislators in 1994 agreed to pay $150,000 each to nine survivors.
Three years ago, a biracial, Apopka-based volunteer group called the Democracy Forum, organized to promote racial sensitivity, began digging into the history of the Ocoee riot. Soon an Ocoee-based group, the West Orange Reconciliation Committee, formed to compile a definitive history of the riot.
One group member is Harold Maguire, a former mayor of Ocoee. He says his father, Fred Maguire, took 23 blacks into his home to protect them from the mob violence. He also says he can remember, years after the riot, visiting a cucumber farm whose state-of-the-art irrigation system had been one of the hard-fought accomplishments of a man named July Perry.
RIOT'S MARTYR
Perry was a church deacon and a powerful black "straw boss" who supervised orange-picking crews in Ocoee. He may have been working with Moses Norman to coax other blacks in Ocoee to vote. If so, he paid dearly for his efforts.
On the day of the riot, Sam Salisbury, an Ocoee military veteran who had spent six months as Orlando police chief, led several armed men to the home of July Perry.
The best source for what happened then, from Salisbury's point of view, is his grandson, James Fleming, who peppered him for years with questions about what happened that day. Fleming, a former Orlando firefighter, says he asked Salisbury more than once whether he'd been a member of the KKK. It was the only question the old man never answered.
He did give Fleming this account:
When Perry opened the front door of his home, Salisbury grabbed him to make sure he wouldn't run. Someone -- probably Perry's daughter, Coretha -- pushed a rifle into his stomach. When he brushed the gun aside, it went off, wounding him in the right arm. People began shooting. Salisbury rolled to the ground to escape the line of fire. Perry was wounded. Two men in Salisbury's party were killed.
Later that day, according to historical accounts, Perry was arrested and taken to Orlando -- where, late that night or early the next morning, he was released from custody and lynched.
The story is an old one, retold countless times, too many times, for Salisbury's daughter, Betty Hagar, 78. Hagar is one of the members of the West Orange Reconciliation Task Force. Like many among Ocoee's old guard, she wishes people would simply forget the riot. But it's a bad-penny memory: it keeps coming back. She joined the task force, she says, to help tell the truth as she sees it -- about the riot, about her father, about the town she's lived in all her life.
"Anything to put this to rest," she says.
Anything, that is, besides the recent suggestion by acting City Manager Jim Gleason that a new park and elementary-school complex be named after July Perry to commemorate the riot.
To Hagar's way of thinking, Perry wasn't the only victim of the violence. Her father suffered, too, crippled for the rest of his life with an arm mangled from the gunshot wound.
Maguire also objected to the idea. The notion of using the complex as a memorial was dropped.
In truth, there is already a memorial, of sorts, to the Ocoee riot. You just have to know where to look.
Salisbury, who was a gun enthusiast all his life, died in 1974 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound -- caused, Betty Hagar says, when he stumbled on a rug. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando.
As it happens, his grave is just a few yards from an old portion of the cemetery once reserved for blacks.
It's there, in a pauper's grave no more than 20 yards away, within easy hailing distance of his old adversary, that July Perry is buried.
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