Mass racial violence in the United States
Orlando, Orange County, Florida
Marker Inscription
Racial Violence in America Thousands of black people were the victims of lynching and racial violence in the United States between 1877 and 1950. The lynching of African Americans during this era was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. Lynching was most prevalent in the South. After the Civil War, there was violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to violent abuse of racial minorities and decades of political, social, and economic exploitation. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of terror and subordination. White mobs were usually permitted to engage in racial terror and brutal violence with impunity. Many black people were pulled out of jails or given over to mobs by law enforcement officials who were legally required to protect them. Terror lynchings often included burnings and mutilation, sometimes in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. Many of the names of lynching victims were not recorded and will never be known, but over 300 300 documented lynchings took place in Florida alone. Researchers estimate at least thirty-three in Orange County - the most lynchings of any county in the state.
Erected by The Equal Justice Initiative
The Story
Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black Americans were murdered by lynching, a form of racial terror meant to enforce white supremacy and segregation after the Civil War. Most lynchings occurred in the South, often with the complicity of officials sworn to protect the victims, sometimes before crowds in the thousands. Florida recorded more than 300 documented lynchings, with at least thirty-three in Orange County—the most of any county in the state.
Why it matters
The marker confronts a long era of racial terrorism, insisting that the nation remember victims whose names were too often never recorded.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ocoee massacre and John Moses Cheney
Orlando, FL · est. 2019
On Election Day 1920, Black residents of Ocoee who owned land and businesses sought to vote and were turned away; after Mose Norman persisted, white mobs unleashed days of terror. They surrounded and burned July Perry's home, and the next morning a lynch mob took the wounded Perry from the Orange County Jail and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney's home. Mobs burned some two dozen Black homes, two churches, and a lodge, and within a year Ocoee's entire Black community was driven out.
Fredrick Douglas
Lake Worth Beach, FL
This memorial honors Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved man who became the 19th century's most commanding abolitionist orator, writer, and statesman. The line it carries — that no class or color should be the country's exclusive rulers — distills the argument for equal citizenship he pressed from the antislavery struggle through Reconstruction. By 1883 Douglass was warning that the promises of emancipation were being rolled back across the South.
Civil Rights Movement
Valdosta, GA
This marker tells the story of the spark that lit the modern Civil Rights Movement: in December 1955, seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat, and Black community leaders answered with a boycott of the city's segregated buses. What began as a single day of protest stretched into a 381-day campaign coordinated by the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, whose young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as its voice. The cost was steep — organizers were arrested and King's own home was bombed — but the boycott's discipline and endurance proved that nonviolent mass action could break the machinery of segregation.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
Kendall, FL
This plaque honors the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), the Baptist minister who became the defining voice of the American civil rights movement. From the Montgomery bus boycott through the March on Washington and the campaigns that helped secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King preached nonviolent resistance to segregation and injustice until his assassination in Memphis in April 1968. Markers like this one, dedicated to his commitment to human rights, have been placed in communities across the country, including here in the Miami area.