I'm Sean Braswell. Welcome to Flashback.

We're doing something a little different in this episode.

We're running a special series about the worst incident of election violence in American history,

an event that is almost forgotten today.

It happened a century ago on Election Day, 1920, and the

town of Acogee, Florida. The victims were hundreds of black residents. The perpetrators

were their white neighbors. And the reason was that black citizens had gone to the polls

and tried to vote.

100 years ago, in the center of Florida, just a few miles from where Disney World stands today, there was an exodus.

Hundreds of black families piled their children into wagons. They trudged all night along roads and railroad tracks and through sugarcane fields.

They barely escaped with their lives.

Dozens of their loved ones did not.

They were lynched, shot,

burned to death in the wreckage of their own homes.

Today, this is forgotten,

largely missing from history books

handed down only as a secret memory

between generations of the families who escaped.

But in 1920, that November night, the town of Ocoi, Florida, wasn't a secret.

It made headlines around the world.

There was a grand jury investigation, even a hearing before Congress, and Americans black and white,

knew exactly why it had happened.

...