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He Tried to Vote Twice. By Morning, His Town Was Burning | Ocoee 1920 · Both Things Are True Crime

• July Perry I Voted (edited): November 2018, Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando. There's a headstone that reads 1868 to 1920, and the man buried under it was named Julius Perry. But everybody caught him July. That November people came to his grave and they left something on it. And it wasn't flowers, it was stickers. Little ones they hand you after you vote that say I voted. And by the end this episode, you're going to know exactly why somebody would put an I voted sticker. On the grave of a man who had been dead for almost a hundred years. And we're gonna come back to this grave when we get there. So here's the hardest fact first. On November 2nd, 1920, election day, a black man to Koey Florida tried to vote, got turned away, and went back and tried again. And by the next morning, July Perry had been lynched in Orlando. The black part of Koei was burning, and the people who lived there were running. Nobody knows how many of them were killed and nobody in the mob or the posse was ever charged with any of it. And a Koi is in Orange County and I live in Orange County, so this happened in my county. I always say that when I talk about Southern Orlando. And it happened because people wanted to vote. So let's talk about it. July Perry was about 50 years old in 1920. The census puts his birth around 1870, and his head stone says 19 redo. And his head stone says 1868. So I'm gonna say about 50 and let both of them be right. Well, he was a labor broker and a grove foreman, which means he was the person who put the crew together for the people who needed the work done. And in a KOE in 1920, the work was citrus. And he was a deacon in his church and a labor leader and a lodge member, and he owned his own home. And he had a wife named Estelle. And a grown daughter named Karita. And you're gonna hear both of their names again because they were in that house that night. But here's what a Koei looked like back then. The 1920 census counted 255 black residents, and the Orange County Regional History Center counted 26 black landowners in a Koei before the massacre, holding more than 368 acres between them, which the history center puts at more than $9 million in today's money. And one of those landowners was Moyse. Norman. He was born in South Carolina around 1871 and he had a hundred-acre grove and he was one of the first people in a Koei to own a car. And hold on to his name because he is the man who goes to the polls. And here's the part about July Perry. I want you to carry through the whole episode. So Florida charged people money to vote, and it was called a poll tax. And I'll show you exactly how that worked in a minute, but July Perry paid it for black voters who couldn't afford it. other people's poll taxes he paid out of his own pocket. So picture him, if you will. A man about fifty, a deacon, the person who finds you work, a man who owns his own house and the person who will pay so you can vote. And in 2019, when the Equal Justice Initiative put up a market for him, his great grandson, Pastor Stefan Noonan, said it simply, he was a man of courage. And me personally, I believe him. Because a man who pays other people's way to the ballot Knows exactly what he's doing and exactly who's watching him do it. So the road to Election Day 1920, it actually starts years before. We're gonna go there, okay? So in 1916, James Weldon Johnson, a field secretary for the NAACP, came back to Florida to build voter registration. And after the first world war, a statewide drive picked up. One of the people leading it was Dr. W. S. Stevens of the Florida Knights of Pisces, which is a black fraternal lodge, and the role for members were simple. You pay your poll tax. And you register, or you're out. And the historian Paul Ortiz put it this way: it wasn't just a fraternal organization, it was your insurance policy. And by the way, the women, black women, they weren't waiting on anybody. Artha MM White ran registration workshops. Mary McCloyd Bethune was in it too. And like Ortiz says, black women leadership is paramount. So here's the first piece of law. And I want you to hear the actual words because they're short. The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And that was ratified in 1870. So by Election Day 1920, it was about 50 years old. Fifty years of it being the law that a black man in Florida could vote. So how do you stop people from doing something? The Constitution says they can do. Well, you don't write a law that says black people can't vote because that law will die the minute it hits the court. And because of the words I just read, you write a law, however, that never says race at all. Florida's eighteen eighty-five constitution, Article 6, Section 8. The legislator shall have power to make the payment of the capitation tax a prerequisite for voting. And a capitation tax is a tax per head. A poll tax in 1889, the legislator used that power and set a two-dollar poll tax. As a requirement to vote. And Florida also made you register. So now let's read that again and let's look for the word race, right? Because it's not there. But that's the whole design. The 15th Amendment bans denying the vote on account of race, but a tax isn't an account on anything. It's just a receipt. You either have or you don't. And who decides whether your receipt is good enough is whoever happens to be standing at the poll. And that's why July Perry paying other people's poll tax matters so much because he was paying down the exact wall, the law was built. To put up. So then in August 1920, the ground moves again. The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18th, 1920. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any account of sex. So that November was the first presidential election after women who won the vote nationally. And Florida, for the record, didn't get around to ratifying until 1969. And that was impossible. So the University of Central Florida's history of a Koei says that women added to the roles in those last months made people feel like this could be a pivotal election. Black women in Orange County registered and Walter White, who you'll meet later, wrote about one who registered in this part of Florida. Before she had been away from the place for very long, a warrant for perjury had been sworn out against her. A black woman registered to vote, and the answer was the criminal charge for lying. And not everybody pushing registration in Orange County was black. Two white lawyers, Republican, and Orlando, W.R. O'Neill and Judge John Cheney, were working to register black voters. And Cheney was actually running for the United States Senate that year as a Republican. And on September 20th, 1920, the Klan sent a letter to O'Neill that also targeted Cheney. And here's a line from it exactly as it was written. We shall always enjoy white supremacy in this country, and he who interferes must face the consequences. Cheney reported that the Klan in Oei said there would be some serious trouble, and on October the thirtieth, three days before the election, Klansmen marched in Orlando. The Orlando Evening Star reported more than five hundred of them, and now that number has been argued about ever since, but what nobody argues about is that they marched. And that everybody in Orange County knew an election was coming. Now, historians do disagree about whether the Klan as an organization took part in what happened on Election Day. One historian writing in the Florida Historical Quarterly said the evidence doesn't point to the Klan, and others, or Ts included, tie it in. The letters and the march are on paper. Who was writing on November the second isn't. So November the second, nineteen twenty, election day in a COE. Walter White. The NAACP investigator who came to Orange County three days later, he wrote that black people in a coe been warned not to vote. And then he wrote two sentences I really can't stop reading. One colored man disregarded the warning. He, Mose Norman, attempted to vote. Now, Mose Norman went to the polls at precinct, right? And he was turned away. And the reason they gave was the poll tax. And there it is, the receipt, the wall I just told y'all about, doing exactly what it was built to do to a man. Redo. Who owned a hundred acres of grove. And so White wrote that the press report said afterwards that Norman had not paid his poll tax, nor had he registered. And that's what the paper said. But White also quoted a white man in a Kowie who said the opposite, that the county records, if they had not been doctored since, would show Norman paid his tax. And now I can't show you the receipt, so I'm just gonna leave it right there. But that was the reason they gave, and it was disputed at the time. And here's what Mo's Norman did next, which is the thing I want you to remember about him. He didn't go home. No. He went to Orlando to Judge John Cheney, the same Republican lawyer who had been getting the Klan's letters. And Cheney's advice, according to UCF's history, was to write down the names of the black people being denied the vote and the name of the poll workers. Now I really do think that's a lawyer's answer, right? Like if you can't win the polling place, build a record so you can win somewhere else later. And then Morris Norman went back to a Koei and tries to vote again. And he was turned away again. And what happens next depends on who you read. He was beaten, and some accounts say a shotgun was taken from him. Some say a shotgun was found in his car. Some say something else. And since the accounts don't agree, redo, I'm not gonna pick one and tell you to tell you like it was on tape. You know, what every account agrees, however, is on is that he got away, Mose Norman. That night survived. And records later place him living in New York City, and he never got his vote counted in a Koei. And now, real quick. This is just me. I keep thinking about him heading back to Okoi that second time. He already been told no once, and he had a lawyer telling him to keep a list. He knew what those letters said, and he went back anyway. And I think that whatever else is true about that day, that took more nerve than most of us will ever be asked for. So after Mo's Norman was beaten, he went to July Perry's house. And that evening, a potsy was deputized. One account says Deputy Clyde Pounds did it, and another says Sheriff Frank Gordon. And deputizing just means a lawman hands ordinary men, the authority of the law for the night. And so this posse was led by Sam Salisbury, a former Orlando police chief, and UCF's history puts it at about nine o'clock, and about 10 men and they went to July Perry's house. Now, I want you to hold the people inside that house because they're the story. July Perry. His wife Estelle and his daughter Caritha. There was a shooting. Two white men from the posse, Elmer McDaniels and Leo Bogard, were killed as they tried to get into the house from the back. July Perry was wounded, Caritha was wounded, and Sam Salisbury was wounded, and UCF's history says Caritha pointed a rifle at Salisbury. July and Estelle got out of the house and he was found in a cane patch after the sheriff, Frank Gordon, got there. And he was taken into custody wounded. And now this is where I'm gonna slow down here because I think this is where the story usually gets told backwards, right? Florida's own law, as late as 2020, still calls this the Okoi Election Day riots. And when you tell it as a riot, those two white men are where the story starts. But what's actually in front of you is our men coming to a black family's home at night on election day after a man who tried to vote ran there, reduced two of them dying going. In the back way, and two people in the family getting shot. And now those two men had names and I said them. Nobody's ever been convicted of their deaths. And the only people jailed over that house were July Perry's wife and daughter. And the grand jury cleared them. Everything else about that house went into the same grand jury room as everything else. And I'll get to what came out of it. But what happened next didn't stay at one house. The part of Black Akoe that burned that night. is called the Northern Quarter in the State's Report, also the Methodist Quarter. And the fires went on all night. The Florida's legislator owned research office in a report it put out in 2019 says houses were still being burned as late as four forty five in the morning on November the third. More than twenty houses, two churches in the lodge hall of Kowie Lodge 66. And the people who lived there Had a choice that wasn't a choice. And spam Schwartz, she's a curate. And Pam Schwartz, a curator at the Orange County Regional History Center, said it in 11 words. The options were leave and get shot or stay and burn. And they left. One of them was a boy named Armstrong Hightower, 12 or 13, depending on the source. And he lived. And his words came down through Francina Boykin, who shared them with U W USF. That night was the night. The devil got loose in a Koei. So here are the numbers I have, all of them. An undertaker's records say that three people were burned in one home and buried together in one grave. Walter White wrote that the figures generally given varied from 32 to 35. And he also wrote, whatever the number, two of those known to have died were a colored mother and her two-week-old infant. And he reported that one white man bragged, I killed 17 myself. A federal agents report that December counted five dead total. Two black women, one black man, two white men. The state's 2019 report gives a range from three counting July Perry to close to 60. The Equal Justice Initiative says six to more than thirty, and the History Center says at least two white men in an unknown number of black residents. So three, thirty, three, five, thirty, sixty. I'm not gonna pick one because the only people counting that night were. were the people who did it and the officials who came after and wanted it smaller. And the people who could have told you who was missing had already run. And if you're asking me, when the number's that unknowable, the number is part of the crime. Because somebody made sure nobody would ever be able to write those names down. And I think the range is the record. But July Perry was in custody, wounded and in the hands of the law. And early in the morning On November the third, nineteen twenty. He was taken out of that custody by a mob and lynched in Orlando. The Eagle Justice Initiatives marker says where? Within sight of Judge John Cheney's home. So sit with that for a second. Judge Cheney is a lawyer who got the Klan's letter. The lawyer most Norman went to on election day, the one who said write down the names and hold on to that because I'm coming back to it at the end. But the most interesting Anybody wrote down about what was done to him is on his death certificate. Cause of death by being hung. And then in different handwriting, someone added a line not by violence caused by racial disturbance. So a man gets taken into custody by a mob the morning after a town burned, and the official record of his death has a note added to it saying this has nothing to do with race. That's not a cause of death. Somebody arguing with history in the margin of a freaking form. But a black undertaker named Stone, he takes July Perry's body and he buries him in Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando in an unmarked grave. And Estelle and Carita were arrested and taken to the jail in Tampa. His wife, who'd helped him get out of the house and his daughter, who'd been shot, and they set in jail until November the 30th, when they were cleared and let go. Nobody from that posse was ever charged with anything. So now the law has to do something, right? Because three named people are dead. The northern quarter is ash, and a man was taken out of custody lynched in the county seat. And the first step is a coroner's inquest held November the third and the fourth. And a coroner's inquest decides how somebody died, but it doesn't decide who's to blame in a way that sends anybody to prison. The second step was the grand jury. And this is the moment a grand jury's matter. So here's what it is: a grand jury isn't on a trial, nobody's on trial. It's a group of citizens who hear evidence in private and decide one question: Is there enough here to charge somebody with a crime? And if they say yes. There's an indictment and a case. If they say no, there's nothing. No trial, no verdict, no record of anybody's guilt, the door just closes. So the grand jury is the gate, right? And whoever controls what walks through that gate controls whether there's a case at all. Well, the Orange County grand jury met with Judge Charles O. Andrews presiding that November. And it heard from 20 white witnesses and one black witness, a man named R.P. Nelly, one after the black residents of the Northern Quarter have been burnt out and run off. And here's what it found in its own words. No evidence against any one group. Or one of individuals as to who perpetuated the fatila perpetuated the fatilities. No evidence against anyone. The same grand jury recommended that Estelle and Caritha Perry be released, and it praised the local American Legion Post, Orlando Post Number Nine. And now for like a minute, the federal government looked too. The attorney general asked a bureau investigation, which is what the FBI was called then. To look into it. An agent named A. V. French filed his report on December 4th, 1920. He counted five deaths, found no clan branch in a Koei, which is hilarious. Not like hilarious, but it's hilarious. We know that there's even been ties of the Klan to a Koei this decade. So yeah, okay, bruh. But concluded that this entire trouble was due to the labor situation. And a federal prosecutor, Herbert S. Phillips, found no attempt to intimidate any Negroes. In the casting of their ballots. Now, here's the other side as strongest, okay? The official account in 1920 was that this wasn't about voting, it was about labor, a dispute in the groves, armed black men and two white men killed at a house. And under the account, the grand jury looked at a chaotic night with no reliable witnesses and couldn't tie any one death to any one man. So what is the grand jury supposed to say when it can't? A Florida congressman named Sears would later tell a committee in Washington the violence had nothing to do at all with the election. But sitting right next to that account in print at the same time, the Orlando Reporter Star writes, and the O'Cala evening star reprints it on November 6th that it shows the determined attitude of the white people of this community to keep it a white man section. And the paper said the quiet part out loud within four days of the election. It wasn't about labor. It was about who got to live there. And eight months later, in July 1921, a man named George Betsy was taken from two Orlando police officers by 15 men and found chained to a light post. And the sentinel's explanation was that he had talked too much about the trouble at Okoe. Then there's one more thing because this I think it's kind of like the both things of this part. In September 1921, two men, William Moore and Frank Saunders, were convicted for diamating, like with that like with that dynamite. A black family's home near a Koei. That was a separate tack, which means the court could convict men for violence against a black home in that same year. So it wasn't the system that couldn't do it. It's that for election day, it didn't. And then on November the fifth, three days after the election, a man named Walter White got to Orlando. Now he worked for the NAACP and he was a black man who was light enough to pass as white. And that's exactly what he did. He came to Orange County posing as a white man, looking to buy land, and white men talked to him like he was one of them. And that is where the I killed 17 myself comes from. Cause they thought they were with one on their own. And that's where the 32 to 35 comes from. He wrote it all up, and in January 1921, it ran in the crisis, the NAACP's magazine under the title Election Day in Florida. And now Walter White did not stop at a magazine. He took it to Congress. And this is where the second piece of law comes in. And it's the one I think almost nobody knows about. And it's honestly the one that makes me the angriest. But the 14th Amendment, section two, is slong. So here's where what it does: if a state denies or cuts down the right of eligible men to vote, that state's seat in the House of Representatives shall be reduced in the proportion of the people it shut out. So, like, read it like a deal, right? You can stop people from voting, but if you do, you lose power in Congress to match. And the Constitution wrote that penalty back in 1868. And so after the 1920 election, a Massachusetts congressman named George Holden Tinkham tried to use it. And in December 1920, he introduced a resolution acts in the House Census Committee to look at how much the vote was being denied in the South. And the committee held hearings at the end of December and into January 1921. Walter White testified, the NAAC brought evidence, hundreds of names of black people turned away in in Jacksonville. Photographs of the lines and the killing of upwards of 30 people at Okoe. And Walter White said this to the United States Congress: White supremacy is not threatened by a fair federal election in the southern United States. It went nowhere. Congressmen from Texas, Georgia, Louisiana objected to Florida. Congressman mocked the NAACP. Tingham tried again in 1921, and in May of that year, he called Southern disfranchisement in the Congress go record. The most colossal electoral fraud the world has ever known. And almost nobody joined him. Congress never used Section Two against Florida and Congress didn't even do the reappropriation the House after the 1920 census at all. But the I guess the census I want you to carry out this episode into every other voting case you may hear about would be like, listen, the 15th Amendment gave most Norman the right. The Fourteenth Amendment wrote the penalty for taking it. And I don't think that anyone ever made Florida pay it. And a right with the penalty nobody collects, it's not just a like a right on paper. Y'all get I'm saying? And Conquers have a more chance. The dire anti-lynching bill would have made lynching a federal crime when the states wouldn't act. And it passed the House on January twenty sixth, nineteen twenty-two. And then the Sut Southern senators threatened to filibuster and the Senate dropped it. So in nineteen twenty, there was no federal crime called lynching. And hold on to that because it's going to come back. So now let's go follow the land, okay? Because the land tells you what that night was for. Okay. So July Perry owned his home. And after he was killed, a man named Blueford Sims was made the administrator of his estate, which means the court put Sims in charge of what Perry left behind, and Perry's land was sold off. And the deed got a new line. Word for word. The hearing named property cannot be sold to or otherwise conveyed to. A Negro. They wrote July Perry's own land written so no black person could ever own it again. And it wasn't only his one black family, the high tower, sold almost 40 acres for way less than it was worth, right? And the history center's court count is 26 black landowners, more than 368 acres. I'm about to get mad. I'm sorry, you guys, but more than 9 million dollars in today's money, gone. A survivor named Annie Hamminer, she wrote a letter that's now in the Library of Congress, and she called it one of the most wickedest things. Happening of a lifetime. And historians record that black residents were told they'd be shot or burned if they didn't sell or leave. And you know what? This part's mine real quick, okay? Because the Orlando paper said it was to keep this a white man's section. And the deed said no black person could ever own July Perry's land again. And those are the same sentence, right, y'all? Written two different ways. And here's the sentence in 1920, 255. Black residents in a Koei in 1930. Two. For decades after that, Akoe was what people called a sundown town. A place where black people knew not to be after dark. And you know what? Actually, pause. Pause. Okay. Because if you guys don't know my personal life, I work for a remote call center company, basically. And I take calls for like hundreds of different companies. And I got this one call recently where A black man told me over the phone that he bought property he didn't realize was in the sun downtown. This conversation happened last week. I forgot to I meant to because we have a way where we can save our connection ID from our calls from our job and go back to them later. And I meant to save it, but I think it was really hectic at that time for cause. I meant to save it because I wanted to go back and see where he lived. I wasn't I wouldn't tell you guys because that would be in violation of my job. But I'm just like, where did he live? I don't remember, but He did not realize that he moved into a sundowntown. And he was calling, the company he was calling is like this company that buys your homes for like a cheap price. and like you don't have to pay any closing costs and stuff like that. So it's like one of those companies. And so he was looking for a company that like a company like I was taking the calls for in order to basically go ahead and sell this house so he can go ahead and get on out. and who can blame him? But I I just couldn't believe it. I was so surprised. Or not supposed like talk to people personally on the phone or whatever, unless they say it first. Well son I said sundowntown. I said, excuse He said, Yeah, I said. I said, they still exist. We had a whole conversation. and I did tell him about the podcast. So if you're here, hi. if you're here, hi, comment and tell us in the comment section down below your crazy ass experience, okay? Because that is insane. And I feel so bad for him for buying a home in a sundowntown and not knowing. But like I said, for decades after that, Okoi was what people call the Sundowntown. Basically a place where black people knew don't you be here about the dark. And black families didn't want to come live there until the nineteen seventies or eighties, depending on which official source you read, when the city finally said something about it. It was in 2018. And it used that exact word sundown. And I'm gonna read you the line in a second. But for a long time officially, there was nothing. In eight nineteen eighty-nine, a group of local people formed the West Orange Reconciliation Task Force and started saying it out loud, and it still took the city almost 30 more years. And on November 20th, 2018, the Khowe City Commission read and signed a proclamation acknowledging what happened. And here's the line I promised you. Let it be known that Akowi shall no longer be the sundown city, but the sunrise city. Okay. And that same November, people went to Greenwood Cemetery and left I voted stickers on July Perry's grave. And in June 2019, the Equal Justice Initiative put up a marker for July Perry in Heritage Square in downtown Orlando with his descendants there. I'm gonna have to go find that. Pastor Nunn said that day, I wonder actually, you what, I'm curious actually like where they worship. Because I wouldn't be opposed to visiting. I'm wondering if he preaches, so anyway, Pastor Nunn He said that day, I believe it's always a step in the right direction when truth is being revealed. If anyone listens to this and and you know the family I'm talking about and you know where they worship, if you wouldn't mind letting me know somewhere, like in one of the comment sections, I would really like to know actually. I'm religious and spiritual. I am. I am, but I've spent so much of my life thinking about it that like I've kind of turned it off for a little bit, like thinking about it so heavily and intense and stuff. so yeah, anyway, I digress. So in November 2019, the Florida's legislator-owned research office, OPPA-G A, put out a full report on what happened. The same report I've been quoting this whole episode. So the state also wrote down its own history. And then came 2020, the 100th anniversary, and the legislator passed a law. And this is the last piece of Florida law in this episode. And I need you to listen to exactly what it says because the headlines kind of say something bigger. But it was House Bill 1213. And once it was signed on June 23rd, 2020, it became chapter 2020. Dash eighty-eight laws of Florida. And here's how to read that. Every year, the Florida legislator passes a stack of new laws, and each one gets a chapter number, the year, and then a number. And the laws of Florida are that stack. So the Florida statutes are something different. They're the organized code, the books of rules that stay on the books. A new law can change the statutes, and it can also say things that never get written into them at all. And that's what happened here. So chapter 2020-88 directs the state's African American History Task Force to examine ways in which the history of the 1920 O'Coli election day riots will be included in instruction on African American history. And it directs the Secretary of State to work out how the Museum of Florida history and other state museums will cover it in exhibits. And it tells the state to pick a state part or part of one to be named for a victim. And it says school boards are encouraged to consider naming school facilities for the victims. Examine ways, encourage, those words are doing a lot of work. And the word A Koe never made it in the section of the Florida statutes that list the schools, what they have to teach. And in the 2024 version of that section, a Koei isn't there. It lives in the session law, but not in the code. And there was no money for the families. Bills that year would have created a compensation form, redo, compensation fund for descendants up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per victim. And they died when the session ended in March 2020. So now let's compare that to Rosewood, another Florida town, okay? It burned in 1923. And in 1994, Florida passed chapter 94 359 and it paid survivors, paid property claims, created a scholarship for descendants, and ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to look at whether anybody could still be prosecuted. So excuse me, Florida knows how to write that law and it's done it before. And for a COE, it wrote a law that says examine ways. And in 2021, the state did put money in the budget: $305,000 a year for 50 ACOE scholarships of $6,100 each for black students in a Koei and descendants. But that's a budget line, not a law. And bills to make it permanent died in 2023 and again in 2024. And now the city kept going further than the state did. On November the 8th, 2020, ACOE unveiled his own historical marker. And Mayor Rusty Johnson did a formal apology. offering our deepest apology for each and every atrocity that was committed against those individuals. And on November the second, 2024, Akoe unveiled a memorial wall in Unity Park with the names of 263 black residents, not just July Perry, the people who actually live there. In November 2025, around the 105th remembrance, the descendants said what they've been saying for years. Sharon Cooley McWhite, Who calls July Perry, her great uncle, said no compensation has ever been offered for the land, the businesses, and the future that was taken. Bridget Felder, whose family goes back to Amni, Annie Hamiter, said, We are still broken because property, land was stolen. And Kenneth Thompson, whose grandparents owned land in a Kowie, said it in four words. We are owed something. And one more law before we go back to the grave. Remember. In 1920, there was no federal crime called lynching. The Dyer bill died in 1922, and others after it died too. And on March 29, 2020, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed and it added a new piece to the federal hate crimes law at the U.S. Code Section 249A5. So the quick way to read that once is USC is the United States Code, the organized book of the federal law. Title 18 is the title for crimes, 249 is a section, the federal hate crimes law. And the A and the Five in parentheses are smaller pieces inside of it. So what a five, A five does is it makes it up to 30 years in federal prison and people conspire to commit a federal hate crime and somebody dies or seriously hurt. And the reading on that paragraph is one word lynching. That is the heading on that paragraph. 101 years after July period was lynched. The word finally made it into a federal law. All right. So this part is me. Okay, this part is mine. Y'all can skip if y'all want to listen to Just y'all be able to grow on, all right? There's no new facts in this part. It's just what I think and what I've been sitting on. Some of the whole episodes. Let me go ahead and get it out, all right? The thing I cannot get past is that the law was right. Read the 15th Amendment again. It's not vague, it's not complicated. It says the vote shall not be denied on account of race, and it has said that for 50 years. Most Norman wasn't asking anything new. Okay. He was just asking for something that had Been his since before even he was born. And it didn't matter, not because the law was wrong, but because a right doesn't walk itself to the polling place, right? Somebody has to stand behind it. And in a collie in 1920, the people whose job it was to stand behind it were whoever deputized the posse, the sheriff who showed up with that cane patch, the grand jury that heard one black witness and a federal agent who decided it was about labor. And I told you I come back to Judge Sheeney, right? July Perry was lynched within the sight of his home, the lawyer who got the clan letters, the lawyer most Norman went to on election day, the one who told him to write down the names. And I don't believe that location was an accident. I think it was a message. So white lawyers in Orange County who had been helping black people get on the rolls. The exact people who were standing behind the right. Now, nobody wrote that down as a reason. So it stays my reading. But you heard the letter. He who interferes is. must face the consequences. And I also keep coming back to July Perry, paying off other people's poll tax. That's a kind of person, right? Who when he gets a little bit of land and a little bit of standing, spends it making sure the people around him get some too. And that's who July Perry was. That's a real man. Okay? Y'all really hear me say stuff like that. But that is a real man. All right. And there's a kind of person Who looks at a man like that and sees him as the most dangerous man in town. And I'm not naming anybody, I'm describing a type. And that type has been around a lot longer than 1920 and it ain't gone, okay? And in 1920, both kinds of people lived in Orange County. And one of them got buried in an unmarked grave. And the other kind got a grand jury that found no evidence against anybody. And I want y'all to really hear those words. No evidence against anybody in a county where eight months later a man got chained to a light post. For talking too much about a Kowie. That was the area Orange County that year. So why don't y'all ask y'all stuff how many people were ever gonna walk into a grand jury room and talk? No evidence doesn't mean nothing happened. It means nobody who saw it was gonna say it out loud. In the house. I haven't posted it yet, but I did a whole episode on what the law says about your front door and who gets to stand behind it. And in 1920, in Orange County, the answer for July Perry and his daughter was nobody. Armed men came to his house. At night on election day, and a black man defending his house the way it's described didn't get to be a man defending his house. He got to be the reason for everything that came after. And as late of 2020, Florida's own law was still calling it a riot. And the part that's personal, I'm a black woman, if y'all didn't know. You should know. And I live in Orange County. I can go to the history center downtown and stand in a building that used to be the county courthouse. I can go to Greenwood Cemetery. I can drop through Kohlee. And none of that is a hundred years away from me. It's a drive. I think a lot of us got taught this kind of history like it happened somewhere else to somebody else a long time ago. And it happened here over a vote. And nobody who did it was ever a charge. And the land just I'm pissed. I'm pissed. I'm really pissed, okay? Because the Audacity of them to lynch this man, kill this man, and then for them to fix their lips, take their little hands, and write on a piece of paper that no black person shall ever own his land again is it's really messed up. It's really twisted. The land changed hands and the town just went on. Every marker and every apologized since then is just sitting on top of that. So that's what I want you to know, all of it before we go back to the grave, okay? Like My blood pressure probably up. Sorry, you guys, I always get so heated because I care. Okay. I care and I hate stuff like this. And I went like I want to be like a magical fairy. Go back in time and like just like change a lot of this stuff and these results. Cause like some of these words are just so right. Y'all get what I'm saying? Like the damage that was done is just unfathomable. Decades of generations that y'all stopped from doing what they could have done. And instead added tragedy to their lives and then still as of 2020 had it on record that it was a rot. Like it's just so twisted and messed up. Y'all get what I'm saying? But let's get back to where we started so I can close this out, okay? So we're back where we started. Greenwood Cemetery, November 2018, a headstone that reads 1868 to 1920, and people leaving I voted stickers on it. And now you know why. July Perry paid other people's way to the ballot box. Mose Norman went to the polls twice. A town burned for it. A man with lynch. And the people who lived through it got run off their own land. So when I voted sticker on his grave, it says something really simple. We did the thing you were killed over, and you weren't wrong. And I think that's the best thing anybody's ever left on a grave. And I'm not gonna lie to you, I really kind of want to take my voted sticker when I get it tomorrow. I really kind of want to take in a couple. I really kind of want to take it if we're in his grave. But there's something about me that like, It feels like for JKL that that feels like that would be disrespectful a little bit. for me, I'm not saying the other people did it were disrespectful at all. I'm saying it feels like that for me. But maybe I'll make like a little like vinyl design or something. Cause I am thinking about creating something where everybody that I talk about, all the victims, I wanna do something where I can like consistently see their names or just something like that. So maybe I'll do something like that and then put like the eye go to sticker on his portion of it. But I definitely am gonna go find some of these markers that are in Orlando when I get a chance. But yeah. So here are my two things. I'm gonna say them back to back. In November 1920, the Constitution of the United States said in plain words and said it for 50 years that most Norman could vote. And that was the law. And in November 1920, the law in Orange County looked at a burnt-out town, a lynched man, and an unknown number of dead, and found no evidence against anyone. And that was the law too. Both of those are the law, and I'm not making one of them smaller so the other one gets to go down easier. And here's the second pair. For right now, O'Coley has apologized and put up a marker. The Equal Justice Initiative put up one downtown Orlando and the state wrote a report, passed the law, and started funding scholars from 2021. Now that's real and the descendants have said it matters. And no law has ever paid a single family for the land. And in his family's own words, no compensation. Has ever been added. Both of those are true today. And I want the last words before mine to belong to his family. In 2020, about the states bill, Sharon, and I apologize I'm not saying her name correctly, because it's S H A Sharon, S H A apostrophe R O N, Cooley McWhite said, This bill validates my great uncle, Julius July Perry, one of a Koe's unsung heroes. And she's so right, he is so unsung, but he is a hero. Rido, and his great grandson, Pastor Stefan, none, said it in six words. He was a man of courage. And for everybody nobody wrote down, the mother and her two week old baby, Walter White wrote about the three people buried in one grave, the people who ran and never came back to a Kobe and the two hundred and sixty three people whose names were finally on that wall in Unity Park. I can't say your names because nobody let them be kept, but you were there. And you were counted by somebody who loved you even if the county never did. Anyway, as always, I love you guys. Hold on. And say his name by Perry.