Schools begin classes in two weeks, and it will be the first time students across Florida will learn about the worst-ever Election Day violence in American history, which happened right here in Orange County.
However, teaching the facts of the Ocoee Massacre, sparked in 1920 by a Black man trying to vote without paying a poll tax, is not enough.
Consider that this important moment in Florida history dragged on for 100 years before it was taught statewide, thanks to the efforts of state Sen. Randolph Bracy. The Ocoee Democrat originally introduced a bill to teach it last year, and fought for its successful passage through a separate bill.
Good thing the bill passed last year. Given today’s climate we could see cynics arguing that teaching students about the racial divisiveness of the 1920s would just create more hate and possibly hurt the feelings of white kids.
They’re dead wrong, of course — if the message is taught properly.
What divides the various peoples of this nation is when one group pooh-poohs the bad things that happened to another as a young nation struggled to find its way. Of course, such hurt festers until bad feelings erupt into society.
That’s why Bracy has more work to do. The adage attributed to writer and philosopher George Santayana rings more uncomfortably true today than it ever has: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The path starts as students learn that Mose Norman tried to vote on that fateful November day in 1920 and was turned away because he hadn’t paid a poll tax. When he insisted on voting, a group of white men turned on him and Norman ran to the home of July Perry, a well-to-do Black landowner.
The pair ran, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office organized a posse to go after them. Perry was later captured and while in custody of the sheriff, was seized by a mob and lynched. The mob set fire to the section of Ocoee where Blacks lived, destroying homes and churches and killing between three and 60 of the 225 residents of color.
By the 1930 census, only two African Americans were living in Ocoee.
Students who can’t begin to imagine such violence being an accepted part of society will be shocked, but the goal isn’t merely to jolt them out of their privileged reality. It’s to give them a fuller, deeper understanding of such a massacre, which they can’t have without teaching the context of the time.
They need to learn of the disharmony and discrimination, its causes and its widespread acceptance, its reverberation into the present. If they don’t know what life was like more than a century ago in the community where they now live, they can’t examine what aspects have changed and which have been kept throughout the years — and they can’t properly evaluate what remains to be done.
This kind of knowledge is particularly important now, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement and a nationwide surge to examine persistent racial issues.
To understand why racism persists, Florida students need to learn of the 1923 attack on the Black town of Rosewood, a settlement near Cedar Key that was torched by a white mob, many from a 500-person Ku Klux Klan meeting in nearby Gainesville. They should also learn of the Legislature’s creation of a scholarship fund for the Rosewood victims’ descendants and a fund to pay for lost property.
Students need to see how Jim Crow laws across the South made possible played into Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall’s 28-year reign of terror to repress the civil rights of anyone who didn’t have fair skin. They should also learn why whites who opposed McCall kept silent about his deliberate frame and torture of the four Groveland youths for the supposed rape of a white woman. But get this — the Groveland Four injustice isn’t even taught in Lake County’s schools unless a teacher decides independently to do so. And only a handful have, a district official said.
Students should learn that while the Ocoee Massacre was horrific — think of your grandparents’ homes being burned after dark by men with torches — it was no isolated incident. Lynchings and wholesale destruction of Black communities went on throughout the late 1800s and mid-1900’s, and it happened here, in Central Florida. In fact, Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynchings in the nation from 1900 to 1930.
We owe students the opportunity to understand why and how such things came about and the ways they still echo in the present. When students are fully informed, they can make their own decisions about how society should move forward.
It all begins with education.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book by Gilbert King, “Devil in the Grove,” should be required reading for Florida high-schoolers, for a start. It is a disturbing tale that weaves the violence and repression in Sheriff McCall’s Lake County into the context of the wider civil rights fight going on across Central Florida and the nation.
Bracy and his colleagues in the Legislature should take an excellent second step by requiring this book to be part of the curriculum across the state.
King’s chilling account would allow students to understand history at a new level and apply what they learn. It would help them understand that the Civil Rights struggle is not “Black history” that should be learned only in that month the country acknowledges Martin Luther King’s birthday.
Civil Rights is our history — it belongs to each and every citizen. After all, accepted injustice to one person or race is a threat to America’s foundation.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
