The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of Black people and the destruction of a Black town during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida. By the official death toll, at least six Black people were killed, but eyewitness accounts suggested 27 or more deaths. In addition, at least two White people were killed in self-defense by one of the victims. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had especially frequent lynchings of Black men in the years before the massacre, including the lynching of Charles Strong and the Perry massacre in 1922. Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily Black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. The rioting began when White men from several nearby towns lynched a Black Rosewood man after accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a Black drifter. Subsequently, a mob of several hundred White men combed the countryside hunting for Black people and descended on Rosewood, burning almost every structure. For several days, survivors from the town hid in nearby swamps until they were evacuated to larger towns by train and car. No arrests were made for the murders, assaults, and arson. The town was abandoned by its former Black and White residents and ceased to exist.
Although the rioting was widely reported around the United States at the time, few official records documented it. The survivors, their descendants, and the perpetrators all remained silent for decades. Sixty years later, the story of Rosewood was revived by major media when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. Survivors and their descendants organized to sue the state for failing to protect Rosewood's Black community. In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report whose findings led to the state compensating survivors and descendants for the damages of racial violence. The incident was the subject of a 1997 feature film directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark.
The officially recorded death toll during the first week of January 1923 was eight: six Black and two White. Survivors' stories claim up to 27 Black residents were killed, and they also assert that newspapers did not report all deaths of Whites. Minnie Lee Langley, who was in the besieged Carrier house, recalls stepping over many White bodies on the porch when she left. A 1984 newspaper article was skeptical of estimates of up to 150 victims. Several eyewitnesses claim to have seen a mass grave filled with the bodies of Black victims; one witness remembers seeing 26 bodies being covered with a plow brought from Cedar Key. However, by the time authorities investigated these claims, most of the witnesses had died or were too infirm to identify the mass burial site.D'Orso, pp. 324–325.
Background
Settlement
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.
Initially, Rosewood had both Black and White settlers. When most of the cedar trees in the area had been cut by 1890, the pencil mills closed, and many White residents moved to Sumner. By 1900, the population in Rosewood had become predominantly Black. The village of Sumner was predominantly White, and relations between the two communities were relatively amicable.Colburn, David R. (Fall 1997) "Rosewood and America in the Early Twentieth Century", The Florida Historical Quarterly, 76 (2), pp. 175–192. 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.Jones, et al. "Appendices", p. 135. To avoid lawsuits from white competitors, the Goins brothers moved to Gainesville, and the population of Rosewood decreased slightly. The Carriers were also a large family, primarily working at logging in the region. By the 1920s, almost everyone in the close-knit community was distantly related to each other.Jones, et al. "Appendices", p. 163. 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).Jones et al., p. 20.
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.Pildes, Richard H. "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary (2000), 17, p 12–13. 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. Some families owned pianos, organs, and other symbols of middle-class prosperity. Survivors of Rosewood remember it as a happy place. In 1995, survivor Robie Mortin recalled at age 79 that when she was a child there, that "Rosewood was a town where everyone's house was painted. There were roses everywhere you walked. Lovely."Jerome, Richard (January 16, 1995). "A Measure of Justice", People, 43 (2), pp. 46–49
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.Richardson, Joe (April 1969). "Florida Black Codes", The Florida Historical Quarterly 47 (4), pp. 366–380. 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.Gannon, p. 275–276. 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.Tebeau, pp. 243–244.
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. By 1940, 40,000 black people had left Florida to find employment, but also to escape the oppression of segregation, underfunded education and facilities, violence, and disenfranchisement.
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. Colburn connects growing concerns of sexual intimacy between the races to what occurred in Rosewood: "Southern culture had been constructed around a set of mores and values which places White women at its center and in which the purity of their conduct and their manners represented the refinement of that culture. An attack on women not only represented a violation of the South's foremost taboo, but it also threatened to dismantle the very nature of southern society." The transgression of sexual taboos subsequently combined with the arming of black citizens to raise fears among Whites of an impending race war in the South.
The influx of Black people into urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest increased racial tensions in those cities. Between 1917 and 1923, racial disturbances erupted in numerous cities throughout the U.S., motivated by economic competition between different racial groups for industrial jobs. One of the first and most violent instances was a riot in East St. Louis, sparked in 1917. In the Red Summer of 1919, racially motivated mob violence erupted in 23 cities—including Chicago, Omaha, and Washington, D.C.—caused by competition for jobs and housing by returning World War I veterans of both races, and the arrival of waves of new European immigrants.D'Orso, pp. 51–56. 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.