But when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in the years following 1915, its strongest and most violent branch was in Florida. On the day of the 1920 presidential election, just a few months after Young bought the land for Hollywood, the KKK in Ocoee, Florida, murdered almost 60 African Americans. Ocoee’s surviving black community hid in the marshes, while Julius “July” Perry hung from a telephone pole, next to a sign: “This is what we do to niggers who try to vote.” Floridians lynched at least 161 blacks between 1890 and 1920—a rate three times higher than Alabama, and twice as high as Mississippi,
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