Silence in the Archives: Part 2

(This week's post is a continuation of my last post on the Ocoee Massacre, which you can find here.)

As I mentioned in my last post, while working on the Ocoee Massacre portion of the Bending Toward Justice exhibit, I found myself feeling increasingly frustrated by how little is known about the nameless victims of the Ocoee Massacre, and became determined to search through the Florida death records to see if I could find any new information.

Through a genealogy research guide, I learned that "statewide registration of deaths began in 1899 in Florida; however, general compliance did not begin until 1917." (1) This meant that 1920, there should--theoretically--be a complete record of the Ocoee Massacre victims hidden in the Florida Bureau of Vital Statistics records, which are available online through Family Search, but are largely unindexed and not in any particular order beyond being grouped by month and year.  I then made the (in retrospect, unwise, albeit well-intentioned) decision to doggedly plod one-by-one through the roughly 3,000 death certificates that were filed in the state of Florida during the month of November, 1920, in an effort to find previously unidentified victims.  

We already had July Perry's death certificate, which (very luckily!) had been among the few indexed death certificates.  In it, you can see that the cause of death was initially listed as "By being Hung," and later revised in different handwriting to "not by violence, caused by racial disturbance."  The death certificate was filed on November 4, one day after a mob of white vigilantes had seized Perry from the jail in Orlando and lynched him from a nearby tree.

Ultimately, after spending many increasingly miserable and emotionally fraught hours poring through thousands of death certificates, I was shocked to have only found one additional record that was clearly related to the Ocoee Massacre, which documented the death of one of the members of the white mob who were shot as they marched on the Black section of Ocoee.  

The second certificate, for Elmer McDaniel, was not filed until December 2020, at least a month after the event, and the cause of death is listed as "accidental gun shot wounds." I did not find any other records about the deaths of participants or victims.  I was particularly surprised at being unable to find a death certificate for Leo Borgard, a member of the white mob who was killed at the same time as Elmer McDaniel, and received many glowing eulogies in the local newspapers for his role in the attack.  Borgund had what one newspaper called the most well-attended funeral in memory, and the Ku Klux Klan erected a tombstone for him that featured the Klan motto and two hooded horsemen holding Confederate flags, surrounded by the words "Honor" and "Duty."  Clearly, Borgard's death was a well-known fact by many--so why couldn't I find his death certificate?  And if even the death of a celebrated white man had been kept out of the records, why was I so surprised that the deaths of an unknown number of Black victims were also missing?

I brought up my search for the death certificates in a conversation with Dr. Amelia Lyons, who is the head of the graduate history program at UCF, and she mentioned a book from her own research: Jim House and Neil MacMaster's Paris, 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory. (2)  In the book, House and MacMaster argue that when considering an event like the Ocoee massacre, or the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, we should focus on the underlying power structures that led to the atrocity, instead of getting hung up on exactly how many people died, and assigning a "level of bad" to the event based on those numbers, particularly as people may minimize the level of destruction if "only a few people" died.  

Similarly, there has been controversy at times over even calling the Ocoee Massacre a massacre, given the lack of clarity over the number of people who were killed.  A news article from 1998 captures the ongoing argument:

"Randy Freeman stands up formally to ask his question, with challenge in his voice. 'Who called it the 'Ocoee Massacre?'' he demands.  Twenty-five feet away, on a small riser in the corner of the coffee shop at Border's Books on the outskirts of Ocoee, Cathleen Armstead stammers as she explains that Zora Neale Hurston, Central Florida's most famous black writer, called it a 'riot,' but that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 'referred to it as a massacre.' She admits she is unsure who first coined the term.  'So we're using terms that we have no origin for,' Freeman states indignantly.  Armstead, a sociologist at Valencia Community College, does not budge. 'The word 'massacre' has a distinct meaning in sociology,' she says. 'An incident becomes a massacre when more than six people are killed.'" (3)

The town of Ocoee has also struggled to accept responsibility for the event, blaming it on outside instigators: 

"'There's no historical proof that a massacre occurred,' insists Freeman. 'Obviously a travesty occurred. People from Tampa came in, and from other places -- Sanford -- they were KKK members, wearing hoods. [White citizens of Ocoee] stood in front of barns with shotguns to protect black citizens!  We don't deserve to be known for this any more than Gettysburg should be blamed for the Civil War.'" (3)

These attempts to downplay the atrocity and blame violence on "outside instigators" sound eerily similar to the semantic arguments that some are using now to minimize the deaths of Black people through police violence.  To be honest, I believe that my stubborn determination to find any information I can about the Ocoee Massacre victims, and my increasingly emotional response to reading the death certificates, is closely tied to my feelings of despair, helplessness, and frustration about the mistreatment of Black people that the Black Lives Matter movement is currently protesting.  I find myself, to be frank, feeling visceral anger that we do not know who the victims of the Ocoee Massacre are.  Leo Borgard and Elmer McDaniels received glowing public elegies that were printed in the local newspapers and preserved for future generations, but we are unable to "say the names" of their victims.  I hope that one day, we will be able to do so.

The title of the painting by Kadir Nelson on the cover of this week's New Yorker is "Say Their Names."

References

1) "How to Find Florida Death Records," FamilySearch, Church of Latter Day Saints, last edited on 10 January 2018, https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/How_to_Find_Florida_Death_Records.

2) Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris, 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

3) Edward Ericson, Jr., "Dead Wrong," Orlando Weekly, October 1, 1998, https://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/dead-wrong/Content?oid=2258296.