Silence in the Archives: Part 1

One of the most difficult aspects of my internship has been working on the section of the upcoming Bending Toward Justice digital exhibit that focuses on the Ocoee Massacre, which I have found challenging in many ways.  I've been particularly frustrated at how much is still unknown about the Ocoee Massacre--even such seemingly basic facts as how many people died.  While we know that at there were at least three deaths, estimates of the total number range as high as 300.  This was mind-boggling to me: how, in this age of online research and text-searchable databases and millions of records available at the click of a mouse, do we simply not know?

The lack of concrete information is especially striking when one considers how small the town of Ocoee, Florida was in 1920.  The 1920 United States Federal Census counted 815 residents of Ocoee, including 257 Black and 558 white residents.  (After the exodus of Black citizens from Ocoee following the Massacre, the 1930 census counted only two Black residents in 1930.  It would be half a century before any Black families returned.)  

At first, it seemed unfathomable that there could be so much uncertainty about an event that caused as many as 300 deaths in such a small community, even if there had been strenuous efforts to keep the facts shrouded in secrecy.  I kept thinking about how impossible it had been to keep anything under wraps for long on the campus of my boarding high school, which had roughly 850 students.  How could a town the same size maintain that level of secrecy about something so enormous for so long?  And even if the individual townspeople remained tight-lipped, why weren't the official government records about the event more revealing?

As an archivist, while I know that there are absences in the records, it is hard to remember that there are intentional absences.  Yes, courthouses burn, and shortsighted clerical decisions doom invaluable records to the dumpster.  Yet the omission is also, at times, no mistake.  My introduction to this concept was through a fascinating lecture given by an archivist named Audrey Collins at the UK National Archives that was uploaded to the Archives' podcast series, which I first listened to over a decade ago, and has stuck with me ever since, called "Sex, Lies, and Civil Registration".  (I highly recommend the whole podcast series, by the way!)  In the lecture, Ms. Collins discussed why and how people falsified or fudged the information on birth, death, and marriage certificates at various points in history.  

Still, it's one thing to claim that a twenty-pound infant is a newborn in order to avoid paying a delayed birth registration fee, and entirely another for record keeping officials to willfully suppress the details of a mass murder.  The longer I worked on the exhibit, the angrier I felt that the victims of the Massacre remained nameless, and set out to comb the records for anything I could find.  I will discuss those efforts further in my next post.