Melissa Fussell of William and Mary Law School has a terrific piece, "Dead Men Bring No Claims: How Takings Claims Can Provide Redress for Real Property Owning Victims of Jim Crow Race Riots," forthcoming in the William and Mary Law Review. Fussell explores a harrowing election-day riot in Ocoee, Florida in November 1920. Though much mystery surrounds the riot, it seems that violence began when some African African citizens tried to vote. July Perry, who was lynched after he shot at some deputies who had surrounded his house in search of another African American man who had attempted to vote that day, Moses Norman. Many of the African American residents of the "northern quarter" of Ocoee fled or hid. An unknown number of African Americans died as their community was burned.
Fussell follows the aftermath of the riot, in which one of the men involved in the riot becomes the administrator of an estate of a victim and then ... the administrator ends up purchasing real property from the victim's estate. This is great historical detective work, which includes work in the probate records of Orange County. This is reminder that the post-World War I violence against African American communities was widespread. Perhaps most infuriating of all of this -- and there's a lot of competition for this -- was the theme that emerged in the wake of the riot that the mob that destroyed the African American community upheld the rule of law.
Read the full story, as well as Fussell's argument about what could be tried now, at ssrn.
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