Rosewood massacre

Settlement was an integral part of local industry. Rosewood was settled in 1847, east of Cedar Key, near the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the local economy drew on the timber industry; the name Rosewood refers to the reddish color of cut cedar wood. Two pencil mills were founded nearby in Cedar Key; local residents also worked in several turpentine mills and a sawmill away in Sumner, in addition to farming of citrus and cotton. The hamlet grew enough to warrant the construction of a post office and train depot on the Florida Railroad in 1870, but it was never incorporated as a town. Two Black families in Rosewood named Goins and Carrier were the most powerful. The Goins family brought the turpentine industry to the area, and in the years preceding the attacks were the second largest landowners in Levy County. To avoid lawsuits from white competitors, the Goins brothers moved to Gainesville, and the population of Rosewood decreased slightly. The population of Rosewood peaked in 1915 at 355 people. Florida had effectively disenfranchised Black voters since the start of the 20th century by high requirements for voter registration; both Sumner and Rosewood were part of a single voting precinct counted by the U.S. census. In 1920, the combined population of both towns was 638 (344 Black and 294 White). As was common in the late 19th century South, Florida had imposed legal racial segregation under Jim Crow laws requiring separate Black and White public facilities and transportation. Black and White residents created their own community centers: by 1920, the residents of Rosewood were mostly self-sufficient. They had three churches, a school, a large Masonic Hall, a turpentine mill, a sugarcane mill, a baseball team named the Rosewood Stars, and two general stores, one of which was White-owned. The village had about a dozen two-story wooden plank homes, other small two-room houses, and several small unoccupied plank farm and storage structures. Racial tensions in Florida Racial violence at the time was common throughout the nation, manifested as individual incidents of extra-legal actions, or attacks on entire communities. Lynchings reached a peak around the start of the 20th century as southern states were disenfranchising black voters and imposing white supremacy; white supremacists used it as a means of social control throughout the South. In 1866 Florida, as did many Southern states, passed laws called Black Codes disenfranchising Black citizens. Although these were quickly overturned, and black citizens enjoyed a brief period of improved social standing, by the late 19th century Black political influence was virtually nil. The white Democratic-dominated legislature passed a poll tax in 1885, which largely served to disenfranchise all poor voters. Losing political power, Black voters suffered a deterioration of their legal and political rights in the years following. Without the right to vote, they were excluded as jurors and could not run for office, effectively excluding them from the political process. The United States as a whole was experiencing rapid social changes: an influx of European immigrants, industrialization and the growth of cities, and political experimentation in the North. In the South, Black Americans grew increasingly dissatisfied with their lack of economic opportunity and status as second-class citizens. workers were encouraged to stay in Florida only after they became scarce. Elected officials in Florida represented the voting White majority. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905–1909) suggested finding a location out of state for Black people to live separately. Tens of thousands of people moved to the North during and after World War I in the Great Migration, unsettling labor markets and introducing more rapid changes into cities. They were recruited by many expanding northern industries, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, the steel industry, and meatpacking. Florida governors Park Trammell (1913–1917) and Sidney Catts (1917–1921) generally ignored the emigration of Blacks to the North and its causes. While Trammell was state attorney general, none of the 29 lynchings committed during his term were prosecuted, nor were any of the 21 that occurred while he was governor. Catts ran on a platform of white supremacy and anti-Catholic sentiment; he openly criticized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) when they complained he did nothing to investigate two lynchings in Florida. Catts changed his message when the turpentine and lumber industries claimed labor was scarce; he began to plead with Black workers to stay in the state. When U.S. troop training began for World War I, many White Southerners were alarmed at the thought of arming Black soldiers. A confrontation regarding the rights of black soldiers culminated in the Houston Riot of 1917. German propaganda encouraged Black soldiers to turn against their "real" enemies: American Whites. Rumors reached the U.S. that French women had been sexually active with Black American soldiers, which University of Florida historian David Colburn argues struck at the heart of Southern fears about power and miscegenation. Further unrest occurred in Tulsa in 1921, when Whites attacked the black Greenwood community. David Colburn distinguishes two types of violence against Black people up to 1923: Northern violence was generally spontaneous mob action against entire communities. Southern violence, in contrast, took the form of individual incidents of lynchings and other extrajudicial actions. The Rosewood massacre, according to Colburn, resembled violence more commonly perpetrated in the North in those years. The KKK was strong in the Florida cities of Jacksonville and Tampa; Miami's chapter was influential enough to hold initiations at the Miami Country Club. The Klan also flourished in smaller towns of the South where racial violence had a long tradition dating back to the Reconstruction era. An editor of The Gainesville Daily Sun admitted that he was a member of the Klan in 1922, and praised the organization in print. Just weeks before the Rosewood massacre, the Perry Race Riot occurred on December 14 and 15, 1922, in which Whites burned Charles Wright at the stake and attacked the Black community of Perry, Florida after a White schoolteacher was murdered. On the day following Wright's lynching, Whites shot and hanged two more Black men in Perry; next they burned the town's Black school, Masonic lodge, church, amusement hall, and several families' homes. == Events in Rosewood ==

Fannie Taylor's story The Rosewood massacre occurred after a White woman in Sumner claimed she had been assaulted by a black man. Frances "Fannie" Taylor was 22 years old in 1923 and married to James, a 30-year-old millwright employed by Cummer & Sons in Sumner. They lived there with their two young children. James' job required him to leave each day during the darkness of early morning. Neighbors remembered Fannie Taylor as "very peculiar": she was meticulously clean, scrubbing her cedar floors with bleach so that they shone white. Other women attested that Taylor was aloof; no one knew her very well. The charge of rape of a White woman by a Black man was inflammatory in the South: the day before, the Klan had held a parade and rally of over 100 hooded Klansmen away in Gainesville under a burning cross and a banner reading, "First and Always Protect Womanhood". The neighbor also reported the absence that day of Taylor's laundress, Sarah Carrier, whom the White women in Sumner called "Aunt Sarah". Philomena Goins, Carrier's granddaughter, told a different story about Fannie Taylor many years later. She joined her grandmother Carrier at Taylor's home as usual that morning. They watched a white man leave by the back door later in the morning before noon. She said Taylor did emerge from her home showing evidence of having been beaten, but it was well after morning. When the man left Taylor's house, he went to Rosewood. A group of White vigilantes, who had become a mob by this time, seized Sam Carter, a local blacksmith and teamster who worked in a turpentine still. They tortured Carter into admitting that he had hidden the escaped chain gang prisoner. Carter led the group to the spot in the woods where he said he had taken Hunter, but the dogs were unable to pick up a scent. To the surprise of many witnesses, someone fatally shot Carter in the face. The group hung Carter's mutilated body from a tree as a symbol to other Black men in the area. After lynching Sam Carter, the mob met Sylvester Carrier—Aaron's cousin and Sarah's son—on a road and told him to get out of town. Carrier refused, and when the mob moved on, he suggested gathering as many people as possible for protection. Escalation Despite the efforts of Sheriff Walker and mill supervisor W. H. Pillsbury to disperse the mobs, white men continued to gather. On the evening of January 4, a mob of armed white men went to Rosewood and surrounded the house of Sarah Carrier. It was filled with approximately 15 to 25 people seeking refuge, including many children hiding upstairs under mattresses. Some of the children were in the house because they were visiting their grandmother for Christmas. Whether or not he said this is debated, but a group of 20 to 30 white men, inflamed by the reported statement, went to the Carrier house. They believed that the Black community in Rosewood was hiding escaped prisoner Jesse Hunter. Reports conflict about who shot first, but after two members of the mob approached the house, someone opened fire. Sarah Carrier was shot in the head. Her nine-year-old niece at the house, Minnie Lee Langley, had witnessed Aaron Carrier taken from his house three days earlier. When Langley heard someone had been shot, she went downstairs to find her grandmother, Emma Carrier. Sylvester placed Minnie Lee in a firewood closet in front of him as he watched the front door, using the closet for cover: "He got behind me in the wood [bin], and he put the gun on my shoulder, and them crackers was still shooting and going on. He put his gun on my shoulder ... told me to lean this way, and then Poly Wilkerson, he kicked the door down. When he kicked the door down, Cuz' Syl let him have it." Several shots were exchanged: the house was riddled with bullets, but the Whites did not capture it. The standoff lasted long into the next morning, when Sarah and Sylvester Carrier were found dead inside the house; several others were wounded, including a child who had been shot in the eye. Two white men, C. P. "Poly" Wilkerson and Henry Andrews, were killed; Wilkerson had kicked in the front door, and Andrews was behind him. At least four White men were wounded, one possibly fatally. The remaining children in the Carrier house were spirited out the back door into the woods. They crossed dirt roads one at a time, then hid under brush until they had all gathered away from Rosewood. Razing Rosewood News of the armed standoff at the Carrier house attracted white men from all over the state to take part. Reports were carried in the St. Petersburg Independent, the Florida Times-Union, the Miami Herald, and The Miami Metropolis, in versions of competing facts and overstatement. The Miami Metropolis listed 20 black people and four white people dead and characterized the event as a "race war". National newspapers also put the incident on the front page. The Washington Post and St. Louis Dispatch described a band of "heavily armed Negroes" and a "negro desperado" as being involved. Most of the information came from discreet messages from Sheriff Walker, mob rumors, and other embellishments to part-time reporters who wired their stories to the Associated Press. Details about the armed standoff were particularly explosive. According to historian Thomas Dye, "The idea that blacks in Rosewood had taken up arms against the white race was unthinkable in the Deep South". W. H. Pillsbury's wife secretly helped smuggle people out of the area. Several White men declined to join the mobs, including the town barber who also refused to lend his gun to anyone. He said he did not want his "hands wet with blood". James Carrier, Sylvester's brother and Sarah's son, had previously suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. He left the swamps and returned to Rosewood. He asked W. H. Pillsbury, the white turpentine mill supervisor, for protection; Pillsbury locked him in a house but the mob found Carrier, and tortured him to find out if he had aided Jesse Hunter, the escaped convict. After they made Carrier dig his own grave, they fatally shot him. Evacuation On January 6, White train conductors John and William Bryce managed the evacuation of some Black residents to Gainesville. The brothers were independently wealthy Cedar Key residents who had an affinity for trains. They knew the people in Rosewood and had traded with them regularly. As they passed the area, the Bryces slowed their train and blew the horn, picking up women and children. Fearing reprisals from mobs, they refused to pick up any Black men. Response Courthouse in Bronson, where the governor's grand jury met and found no one to prosecute Many people were alarmed by the violence, and state leaders feared negative effects on the state's tourist industry. Governor Cary Hardee appointed a special grand jury and special prosecuting attorney to investigate the outbreak in Rosewood and other incidents in Levy County. In February 1923, the all-White grand jury convened in Bronson. Over several days, they heard 25 witnesses, eight of whom were Black, but found insufficient evidence to prosecute any perpetrators. The judge presiding over the case deplored the actions of the mob. A few editorials appeared in Florida newspapers summarizing the event. The Gainesville Daily Sun justified the actions of White people involved, writing "Let it be understood now and forever that he, whether white or black, who brutally assaults an innocent and helpless woman, shall die the death of a dog." The Tampa Tribune, in a rare comment on the excesses of whites in the area, called it "a foul and lasting blot on the people of Levy County". Northern publications were more willing to note the breakdown of law, but many attributed it to the backward mindset in the South. The New York Call, a socialist newspaper, remarked "how astonishingly little cultural progress has been made in some parts of the world", while the Nashville Banner compared the events in Rosewood to recent race riots in Northern cities, but characterized the entire event as "deplorable". A three-day conference in Atlanta organized by the Southern Methodist Church released a statement that similarly condemned the chaotic week in Rosewood. It concluded, "No family and no race rises higher than womanhood. Hence, the intelligence of women must be cultivated and the purity and dignity of womanhood must be protected by the maintenance of a single standard of morals for both races." Jesse Hunter, the escaped convict, was never found. Many survivors fled in different directions to other cities, and a few changed their names from fear that White people would track them down. None ever returned to live in Rosewood. Fannie Taylor and her husband moved to another mill town. She was "very nervous" in her later years, until she succumbed to cancer. John Wright's house was the only structure left standing in Rosewood. He lived in it and acted as an emissary between the county and the survivors. After they left the town, almost all of their land was sold for taxes. The sawmill in Sumner burned down in 1925, and the owners moved the operation to Lacoochee in Pasco County. Some survivors as well as participants in the mob action went to Lacoochee to work in the mill there. W. H. Pillsbury was among them, and he was taunted by former Sumner residents. No longer having any supervisory authority, Pillsbury was retired early by the company. He moved to Jacksonville and died in 1926. == Culture of silence ==

Despite nationwide news coverage in both White and Black newspapers, the incident, and the small abandoned village, slipped into oblivion. Most of the survivors scattered around Florida cities and started over with nothing. Many, including children, took on odd jobs to make ends meet. Education had to be sacrificed to earn an income. As a result, most of the Rosewood survivors took on manual labor jobs, working as maids, shoe shiners, or in citrus factories or lumber mills. In 1982, an investigative reporter named Gary Moore from the St. Petersburg Times drove from the Tampa area to Cedar Key looking for a story. When he commented to a local on the "gloomy atmosphere" of Cedar Key, and questioned why a Southern town was all-white when at the start of the 20th century it had been nearly half black, the local woman replied, "I know what you're digging for. You're trying to get me to talk about that massacre." Moore was hooked. He was able to convince Arnett Doctor to join him on a visit to the site, which he did without telling his mother. Moore addressed the disappearance of the incident from written or spoken history: "After a week of sensation, the weeks of January 1923 seem to have dropped completely from Florida's consciousness, like some unmentionable skeleton in the family closet". When Philomena Goins Doctor found out what her son had done, she became enraged and threatened to disown him, shook him, then slapped him. A psychologist at the University of Florida later testified in state hearings that the survivors of Rosewood showed signs of posttraumatic stress disorder, made worse by the secrecy. Many years after the incident, they exhibited fear, denial, and hypervigilance about socializing with whites—which they expressed specifically regarding their children, interspersed with bouts of apathy. Robie Mortin described her past this way: "I knew that something went very wrong in my life because it took a lot away from me. But I wasn't angry or anything." University of Florida historian David Colburn stated, "There is a pattern of denial with the residents and their relatives about what took place, and in fact they said to us on several occasions they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to identify anyone involved, and there's also a tendency to say that those who were involved were from elsewhere." In 1993, a Black couple retired to Rosewood from Washington D.C. They told The Washington Post, "When we used to have Black friends down from Chiefland, they always wanted to leave before it got dark. They didn't want to be in Rosewood after dark. We always asked, but folks wouldn't say why." == Seeking justice ==

History includes Rosewood Philomena Goins Doctor died in 1991. Her son Arnett was, by that time, "obsessed" with the events in Rosewood. Although he was originally excluded from the Rosewood claims case, he was included after this was revealed by publicity. By that point, the case had been taken on a pro bono basis by one of Florida's largest legal firms Holland & Knight. In 1993, the firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of Arnett Goins, Minnie Lee Langley, and other survivors against the state government for its failure to protect them and their families. Arnett Doctor told the story of Rosewood to print and television reporters from all over the world. He raised the number of historic residents in Rosewood, as well as the number who died at the Carrier house siege; he exaggerated the town's contemporary importance by comparing it to Atlanta, Georgia as a cultural center. Doctor wanted to keep Rosewood in the news; his accounts were printed with few changes. According to historian Thomas Dye, Doctor's "forceful addresses to groups across the state, including the NAACP, together with his many articulate and heart-rending television appearances, placed intense pressure on the legislature ... to do something about Rosewood". The lawsuit missed the filing deadline of January 1, 1993. The speaker of the Florida House of Representatives commissioned a group to research and provide a report by which the equitable claim bill could be evaluated. It took them nearly a year to do the research, including interviews, and writing. On December 22, 1993, historians from Florida State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Florida delivered a 100-page report (with 400 pages of attached documentation) on the Rosewood massacre. It was based on available primary documents, and interviews mostly with Black survivors of the incident. Due to the media attention received by residents of Cedar Key and Sumner following filing of the claim by survivors, White participants were discouraged from offering interviews to the historians. The report used a taped description of the events by Jason McElveen, a Cedar Key resident who had since died, and an interview with Ernest Parham, who was in high school in 1923 and happened upon the lynching of Sam Carter. Parham said he had never spoken of the incident because he was never asked. The report was titled "Documented History of the Incident which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923". Gary Moore, the investigative journalist who wrote the 1982 story in The St. Petersburg Times that reopened the Rosewood case, criticized demonstrable errors in the report. The commissioned group retracted the most serious of these, without public discussion. They delivered the final report to the Florida Board of Regents and it became part of the legislative record. James Peters, who represented the State of Florida, argued that the statute of limitations applied because the law enforcement officials named in the lawsuit—Sheriff Walker and Governor Hardee—had died many years before. Ernest Parham also testified about what he saw. When asked specifically when he was contacted by law enforcement regarding the death of Sam Carter, Parham replied that he had been contacted for the first time on Carter's death two weeks before testifying. The coroner's inquest for Sam Carter had taken place the day after he was shot in January 1923; he concluded that Carter had been killed "by Unknown Party". After hearing all the evidence, the Special Master Richard Hixson, who presided over the testimony for the Florida Legislature, declared that the state had a "moral obligation" to make restitution to the former residents of Rosewood. He said, "I truly don't think they cared about compensation. I think they simply wanted the truth to be known about what happened to them ... whether they got fifty cents or a hundred and fifty million dollars. It didn't matter." Black and Hispanic legislators in Florida took on the Rosewood compensation bill as a cause, and refused to support Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles' healthcare plan until he put pressure on the Democrat controlled state assembly to vote in favor of the bill. Chiles was offended, as he had supported the compensation bill from its early days, and the legislative caucuses had previously promised their support for his healthcare plan. The four survivors who testified automatically qualified; four others had to apply. More than 400 applications were received from around the world. Robie Mortin came forward as a survivor during this period; she was the only one added to the list who could prove that she had lived in Rosewood in 1923, totaling nine survivors who were compensated. Gaining compensation changed some families, whose members began to fight among themselves. Some descendants refused it, while others went into hiding in order to avoid the press or friends and relatives who asked them for handouts. Some descendants, after dividing the funds among their siblings, received not much more than $100 each. Later, the Florida Department of Education set up the Rosewood Family Scholarship Fund for Rosewood descendants and ethnic minorities. ==Rosewood remembered ==

Representation in other media The Rosewood massacre, the ensuing silence, and the compensation hearing were the subject of the 1996 book titled Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood by Mike D'Orso. It was a New York Times bestseller and won the Lillian Smith Book Award, bestowed by the University of Georgia Libraries and the Southern Regional Council to authors who highlight racial and social inequality in their works. The dramatic feature film Rosewood (1997), directed by John Singleton, was based on these historic events. Minnie Lee Langley served as a source for the set designers, and Arnett Doctor was hired as a consultant. Recreated forms of the towns of Rosewood and Sumner were built in Central Florida, far away from Levy County. The film version, written by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, created a character named Mann, who enters Rosewood as a type of reluctant Western-style hero. Composites of historic figures were used as characters, and the film offers the possibility of a happy ending. In The New York Times E.R. Shipp suggests that Singleton's youth and his background in California contributed to his willingness to take on the story of Rosewood. She notes Singleton's rejection of the image of black people as victims and the portrayal of "an idyllic past in which black families are intact, loving and prosperous, and a black superhero who changes the course of history when he escapes the noose, takes on the mob with double-barreled ferocity and saves many women and children from death". Reception of the film was mixed. Shipp commented on Singleton's creating a fictional account of Rosewood events, saying that the film "assumes a lot and then makes up a lot more". The film version alludes to many more deaths than the highest counts by eyewitnesses. Gary Moore believes that creating an outside character who inspires the citizens of Rosewood to fight back condescends to survivors, and he criticized the inflated death toll specifically, saying the film was "an interesting experience in illusion". In contrast, in 2001 Stanley Crouch of The New York Times described Rosewood as Singleton's finest work, writing, "Never in the history of American film had Southern racist hysteria been shown so clearly. Color, class and sex were woven together on a level that Faulkner would have appreciated." Legacy The State of Florida declared Rosewood a Florida Heritage Landmark in 2004 and subsequently erected a historical marker on State Road 24 that names the victims and describes the community's destruction. Lizzie Jenkins, executive director of the Real Rosewood Foundation and niece of the Rosewood schoolteacher, explained her interest in keeping Rosewood's legacy current: {{blockquote|It has been a struggle telling this story over the years, because a lot of people don't want to hear about this kind of history. People don't relate to it, or just don't want to hear about it. But Mama told me to keep it alive, so I keep telling it ... It's a sad story, but it's one I think everyone needs to hear. == See also ==