• Subscribe to the Magazine
  • Read the Magazine
  • The Best of Fort Lauderdale
  • DINE Fort Lauderdale
Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • Features
  • Fashion
  • City Life
    • Business
    • Community
    • Culture
    • Development
    • Profile
  • Good Life
    • Casa Chic
    • Health
    • Motors
    • Outdoors
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Guide
    • Entertainment
    • Restaurant Guide
    • Snapshots
  • Food & Drink
    • Chef’s Corner
    • Grazings
    • Light Bites
    • Restaurant Guide
  • From the Publisher
  • Around Town
  • Goods
  • Old Lauderdale
  • The List
  • Subscribe
  • Events
  • Restaurant Guide
  • Read the Magazine
0
Subscribe

Read the current issue

Fort Lauderdale Magazine
Fort Lauderdale Magazine
  • Features
  • Fashion
  • City Life
    • Business
    • Community
    • Culture
    • Development
    • Profile
  • Good Life
    • Casa Chic
    • Health
    • Motors
    • Outdoors
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Guide
    • Entertainment
    • Events
    • Restaurant Guide
    • Snapshots
  • Food & Drink
    • Chef’s Corner
    • Grazings
    • Light Bites
    • Restaurant Guide
  • From the Publisher
  • Around Town
  • Goods
  • Old Lauderdale
  • The List
  • The Best of Fort Lauderdale
  • DINE Fort Lauderdale
  • Old Lauderdale

Ocoee’s Survivor

  • January 2, 2020
  • FLMag Staff
Julius “July” Perry is among the lynching victims memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Photography: Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures.
For more than 80 years, Armstrong Hightower built a life in Fort Lauderdale. But it was one Central Florida town’s most terror-filled day that helped bring him here.

When Armstrong Hightower died in 2002 at the age of 94, he had lived for more than 80 years in Fort Lauderdale. But he wasn’t born here. He came when still a child, driven out of his hometown by one of the most violent events in Jim Crow-era Florida.

Armstrong Hightower’s father, Valentine Hightower, first came to Ocoee, a town west of Orlando near the eastern bank of Lake Apopka, with a man named Julius Perry. Known as “July,” Perry would be at the center of what happened on Election Day, 1920.

To understand what would become known as the Ocoee Massacre, historians point to the time leading up to Election Day. Women – including African-American women – had recently been given the right to vote. Across the South, there were concerted efforts to register blacks to vote in the face of Jim Crow laws. Black soldiers returning from World War 1 were more vocal about no longer tolerating the second-class status imposed on them at home.

July Perry was a former soldier. According to Marvin Dunn’s excellent book A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes, he was also a successful businessman who owned property around Ocoee. His friend, Mose Norman, was a successful farmer. The pair also worked for voting rights for blacks in Central Florida. That mixture of success and activism undoubtedly made them targets.

There are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened on Election Day, but it’s generally agreed that it started when Norman was turned away at his polling place. Other African-Americans also reported being turned away.

According to one account, Norman returned later with a shotgun but was beaten up and the shotgun taken. Another account has him and Perry driving to see a sympathetic judge in Orlando, who told them to go back and get the names of the poll workers who blocked Norman. What is clear is that a rumor spread among whites that armed blacks were gathering at the Perry home and planning to march to the polling station.

A group of whites surrounded the Perry home. A gun battle ensued, and two white men were killed. According to Dunn, the reports of the funeral home that received the men’s bodies stated, based on information received by the sheriff, that they were killed by other whites firing wildly into the Perry home. But that fact wouldn’t matter.

Perry eventually escaped from the house but was tracked down nearby. “Upon his arrest by Sheriff Frank Gordon,” Dunn writes, “Perry was taken to Orlando where he was jailed. Sometime after 3AM a mob dragged him out of the Orlando jail and lynched him.”

Meanwhile there was terror in northern Ocoee, as buildings in the black neighborhood were set alight and people shot. Every black resident was eventually either killed or driven from northern Ocoee. Blacks on the south side were not directly affected, but it was made clear to them that they now had to leave. Shortly after the massacre, there were no black residents left in Ocoee. Mose Norman managed to escape and lived the rest of his life in New York.

There were few witnesses to the atrocity but 81 years later a journalist found one, Armstrong Hightower, in a two-bedroom Fort Lauderdale apartment. In an interview just a year before his death, he told how his family had been Perry’s neighbors; he remembered seeing Perry’s barn go up in flames. He also remembered the shouts of the men who surrounded the house. “It sounded like they were whooping it up,” he said. “Having a great time.”

The Hightowers fled to Fort Lauderdale, where Armstrong lived the rest of his life. According to his Sun-Sentinel obituary, he for many years ran Hightower’s Grocery on NW Fourth Avenue at Fifth Street. For more than 60 years he was a member of the First Baptist Church Piney Grove.

And until a journalist took him back in 2001, he never returned to Ocoee.

Previous Article
  • Old Lauderdale

Forged in Fire

  • December 10, 2019
  • John Dolen
View Post
Next Article
  • Old Lauderdale

Leading From the Front

  • February 12, 2020
  • John Dolen
View Post
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

The Legacy of Elks Rest

  • June 26, 2025
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

Landmark Reimagined

  • May 29, 2025
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

Next Stop, New River

  • April 24, 2025
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

Tale of Three Towns

  • March 27, 2025
  • FLMag Staff
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

Popping Up All Over

  • February 27, 2025
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

Tracing the Lauderdale Origin Name

  • January 30, 2025
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

As Seen on the Screen

  • December 26, 2024
  • John Dolen
View Post
  • Old Lauderdale

The City With No High-Rises

  • December 2, 2024
  • John Dolen
1 comment
  1. Octavious Peterson says:
    November 17, 2020 at 3:33 am

    that was my great great uncle armstrong that was my grandma uncle my great grandma and Armstrong was brother and sisters either do my great uncle Armstrong and his siblings my people is in a better place and I hope that the Senate and the City of Ocoee FL to conversate the family that lost a land in 1920 doing election

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a thing!

Fort Lauderdale Magazine
  • Contact Us
  • Media Kit
  • Careers
  • Advertise With Us
© PD Strategic Media. All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of PD Strategic Media. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our privacy policy.

Input your search keywords and press Enter.

By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and cookie policy.Accept