Rosewood Massacre
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Rosewood was a small community of 25 to 30 mostly black families in Levy County in central Florida, USA. It was a "whistle stop" on the Seaboard Air Line Railway, located on the north side of State Road 24 half a mile east of the intersection with Levy County Road 345. Today it is best known for the racially driven attack on African Americans by whites in January 1923, known as the Rosewood Massacre.
Rosewood was invaded and burned down by a white mob after a white woman named Fannie Taylor claimed a black man had raped her. The majority of the black inhabitants — men, women, and children alike — were dispossessed in the violence. Six blacks and two whites are known to have been killed. Some other estimates of fatalities were as high as 150, but these cannot be confirmed. Many lives were spared by the heroic efforts of train conductors John and William Bryce, and a black war veteran named Phillip Mann, who planned to settle in the town. John Wright, the general store owner, also helped several of the inhabitants. However, the entire community was burned down, never to be rebuilt. After Rosewood was destroyed, it was discovered that Taylor had been beaten, but not raped, by a white man. A few days before the Rosewood incident the KKK held a parade and rally of over 100 hooded klansmen in nearby Gainesville, Florida under a burning cross and a banner reading, “First and Always Protect Womanhood." The technique of using lurid and disturbing sexual imagery and often false accusations of sexual offenses was a key element of the WKKK.
The incident, as well as the town itself, subsequently slipped into oblivion, but it was rediscovered in the 1990s. The Florida legislature awarded compensation to the victims in 1994.[1]
The murders and arson in Rosewood were the subject of the 1996 book Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood by Michael D'Orso, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award. In 1997 it was also the subject of the film Rosewood.
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[edit] Notes
- ^ Jones, Daryl L.. "Address to the Black Reparations & Self-Determination Conference" Washington, DC (1999-06-11). Retrieved on 2006-11-22
- "Ku Klux Klan in Gainesville Gave New Year Parade", Florida Times Union, 3 January 1923
[edit] Books
- Schumacher, Aileen (2002). Rosewood's Ashes. ISBN 0-373-26419-4.
- D'Orso, Michael (1996). Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood. Grosset/Putnam. ISBN 1-57297-256-4.
[edit] See Also
[edit] External links
- Remembering Rosewood, by Displays for Schools, Inc.
- The Rosewood Report, commissioned by the Florida House of Representatives to determine the basis for reparations; includes a chronology
- Rosewood Victims vs State of Florida, the final disposition of the reparations case
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