The Ocoee Massacre of 1920 was a brutal riot that was brought about through a mixture of racist agendas by White Southerners and optimistic beliefs from African Americans living in Ocoee, Florida. The Jim Crow South was a hot bed of racist attitudes toward African Americans from White Southerners, culminating in public lynchings, beatings, and the formation of White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Due to the ever present threat of racial violence many African Americans in the South usually kept to themselves and avoided stepping over the lines created by their White neighbors, but attitudes began changing in the years leading up to the Ocoee Massacre however with the prospect of a Republican senator of Florida. Fear and panic of …show more content…
By the time the group arrived Normand was long gone, but that did not stop Salisbury from entering in through Perrys front door and demanding that he come with him. From here Salisbury grabbed Perry and preceded to wrestle with him until Perrys daughter Coretha ended the tussle by putting a rifle in Salisburys stomach. Salisbury moved the weapon away from himself when it fired, shooting him in the right arm. The gunshot startled the mob outside and they opened fire on the house, injuring Perry in his arm only after he and his family were able to shot and kill two members of the mob, Elmer McDaniels and Leo Borgard. The firefight briefly ended when members of the mob left to go get more men from neighboring towns, the Perry family used this moment to their advantage and hid all over the estate grounds with July himself hiding in a sugar can patch. Julys efforts were for naught however and he was eventually found by the returning mob and brought to a prison in Orlando and treated for his injury. A lynch mob soon surrounded the prison and either broke in by force or were given the keys to Perrys cell from the sheriff Frank Gordon. The men wasted no time beating Perry and eventually stringing him up on a telephone