Rosewood
By
John C Abercrombie
Today is day26 of28 and features the Rosewood Massacre. Once we see the result of uncontroled White mob violence. In this case it is due to an allegation.
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Rosewood was a quiet mostly Black town on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. The trouble started when White men from several nearby towns lynched a Black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a White woman in the nearby town of Sumner had been assaulted by a Black drifter.
We see once again that the mere accusation of an incident involving a Black man stirs up deep emotions, so strong that the accused is denied any semblance of a trial. A trial should be a source of fact and seeking of the truth, not a gang of enraged people intent on being judge and executioner of innocent people. We pretend that a person is innocent until proven guilty. The victim is denied this most basic right.
In many cases, people who are suspected of wrong doing can save their lives by claiming that a Black person did it, thereby throwing off any suspicion from them and letting a mob take care of insuring it. So enraged were these savage mobs that the White mob combed the countryside hunting for Black, any and every Black person. Blacks were forced to hide for several days in the swamps until they were evacuated to larger towns by train and car.
No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former Black and White residents; none of them ever moved back and the town ceased to exist. It is also necessary to look at the myth that Blacks could not lead themselves, yet they formed and ran towns. All Black towns but were constantly faced with these racial situations. It seems as if the Whites are the ones who can’t control themselves.
The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six Black people and two White people were killed, but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of Black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.
It is necessary to recognize that the disparity in the numbers results from the fact that history often ignores these incidents completely. Records often ignored Blacks and Whites dissected the rights of Blacks.
Although the rioting was widely reported around the United States at the time, few official records documented the event. The survivors, their descendants, and the perpetrators all remained silent about Rosewood for decades.
Sixty years after the rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived by major media outlets when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. The survivors and their descendants all organized in an attempt to sue the state for failing to protect Rosewood’s Black community. In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report on the incident. As a result of the findings, Florida compensated the survivors and their descendants for the damages which they had incurred because of racial violence. The incident was the subject of a 1997 feature film which was directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark.
Officially, the recorded death toll during the first week of January 1923 was eight (six blacks and two whites). Some survivors’ stories claim that up to 27 black residents were killed, and they also assert that newspapers did not report the total number of White deaths. Minnie Lee Langley, who was in the Carrier house when it was besieged, recalls that she stepped over many White bodies on the porch when she left the house. A newspaper article which was published in 1984 stated that estimates of up to 150 victims may have been exaggerations. Several eyewitnesses claim to have seen a mass grave which was filled with the bodies of Black people; one of them remembers seeing 26 bodies being covered with a plow which was brought from Cedar Key. However, by the time authorities investigated these claims, most of the witnesses were dead or too elderly and infirm to lead them to a site to confirm the stories.
Racial violence against Blacks was common all over the country. Attacks on entire communities were peaking in the early part of the 20th century. The cause can be attributed to the disenfranchisement of Black voters and the imposition of White supremacy. Whites used this as a way of controlling Blacks. Florida was also known to use Black Codes to disenfranchise Blacks. A poll tax was imposed in 1885 and worked against all poor voters. This allowed the exclusion of Black jurors and the ability to run for office.
Elected officials in Florida represented the voting White majority leaving the entire Black population without representation. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905–1909) even 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. Many of the causes were the lack of representation of human rights and dignity. 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. While myths portrayed Blacks as not being interested in their future, we see this is completely untrue, but it persists to this day.
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. This causes one to question the masculinity of the majority male as it seems that anything that could nullify his standing in this area is met with anger and violence because of the challenge to their masculinity.
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.”[6] 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. 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, on the other hand, 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.
In the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) reached its peak membership in the South and Midwest after a revival beginning around 1915. Its growth was due in part to tensions from rapid industrialization and social change in many growing cities; in the Midwest and West, its growth was related to the competition of waves of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. 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.
Despite Governor Catts’ change of attitude, White mob action frequently occurred in towns throughout north and central Florida and went unchecked by local law enforcement. Extrajudicial violence against Black residents was so common that it seldom was covered by newspapers. In 1920, Whites removed four Black men from jail, who were suspects accused of raping a White woman in MacClenny and lynched them. In Ocoee the same year, two Black citizens armed themselves to go to the polls during an election. A confrontation ensued and two White election officials were shot, after which a White mob destroyed Ocoee’s Black community, causing as many as 30 deaths, and destroying 25 homes, two churches, and a Masonic Lodge. Just weeks before the Rosewood massacre, the Perry Race Riot occurred on 14 and 15 December 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.
The uncontrolled rage shows how deep the divide is and shows that the end result is not justice of one person, it is out of control racial hostility killing anyone nearby. It is apparently condoned by law enforcement and no concern on the part of churches who never spoke out against it.
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Rosewood Massacre
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Ep #3: The Rosewood Massacre | Dark History Podcast
Warning: contains adult language
Hi friends, happy Thursday!
Welcome to the Dark History podcast. Today, we are going to talk about the horrifying story of The Rosewood Massacre, and how one lie led to mass death and destruction. I appreciate you for coming by, and tune in next week for more dark history.
You can find the Dark History podcast on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and every Thursday here on my Youtube for the visual side of things.
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Book
Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood
Stunning and powerful, Like Judgment Day is the hauntingly true story of the Rosewood massacre. Michael D’Orso’s compelling journalistic prose reads like the most vivid novel as he describes the earth-shattering events of January 1923 and its survivors’ patient, 70-year quest for justice.
When a black man was accused of attacking a white woman in a rural Florida town, a tinderbox of racial hatred was ignited. On New Year’s Day 1923, Rosewood, a town of hard-working, middle-class African Americans, was burned to the ground by an angry mob of whites. After hiding in frigid nearby swamps for days, the few survivors never returned. The town’s existence vanished like a mirage until 1982 when a local journalist – writing an article on weekend getaways – stumbled upon the Rosewood secret.
Narrator Richard M. Davidson’s rich voice enhances D’Orso’s masterful rendering of one of contemporary American history’s most shameful tragedies.
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Unearthing Rosewood: An Archaeology of Violence and Hope
Rosewood was a prosperous African American community hard-won from the swampy hammocks of north Florida. Although the town was destroyed in 1923, the community continued, scattered across the state of Florida and beyond. Now, nearly 100 years after this tragic event the story of Rosewood remains shrouded from public view. Those who have heard of Rosewood are rarely aware of the community’s deeper history, or its relation to other places across the state. Dr. González-Tennant will discuss the role of archaeology and geospatial sciences in unearthing Rosewood’s complex history. In addition to describing how digital technologies aid traditional archaeological methods, he’ll discuss the importance of outreach and its ability to support a public conversation on racial reconciliation.
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Book
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to the deep roots of racial violence in America.
Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the 20th century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they’d founded the county’s thriving black churches.
But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors and quietly laid claim to “abandoned” land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.
National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s.
Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the 21st century.
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Remembering Rosewood – Digital Storytelling Video (2010)
Destroyed in a 1923 race riot, Rosewood was home to a prosperous, majority African American community dating to the late 19th century. “Remembering Rosewood” is a 25 minute video about ongoing research to document the development this important African American community. This video was created in 2010 as part of Edward Gonzalez-Tennant’s dissertation research at the University of Florida. Dr. Gonzalez-Tennant’s recent book from the University of Florida Press discusses this research in greater detail (http://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813056….
watch on YouTube with this link
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Book
Rosewood: The Full Story
The Rosewood atrocity of January 1-7, 1923, destroyed the rural African American community of Rosewood, Florida, in an act of mob violence, but went officially unrecorded. Under pressure from cultural denial, it became a bizarre secret by the time it was unearthed in 1982 by journalist Gary Moore, who publicized it first in the St. Petersburg Times, where he was on staff, and then took it to “60 Minutes,” where he served as background reporter on a television segment airing in 1983. Tracing the previously uninterviewed Rosewood survivors, witnesses and other informants, Moore has become acknowledged as the authority on the Rosewood evidence, assigned as consultant in 1994 by separate investigations by the Florida Attorney General’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement during the Rosewood claims case of 1991-1994 in the Florida Legislature. He was contracted to provide a summary of the events in an inquiry by the Florida State University System, and presently receives information referrals from the Southeastern Regional Black Archives at Florida A & M University and University Press of Florida. The Rosewood case has emerged as a landmark not only in racial injustice but in mass psychology, revealing the workings of mass denial and mass media distortion. Its witness pool, whose evidence helps reveal the ways that public truth was warped, may be the largest such body of informants ever consulted in a retrospective of a rural enigma from the “Lynching Era.” The case has also produced the nation’s first governmental financial award in belated compensation for a Lynching Era atrocity (May 4, 1994: $2.1 million). Rosewood: The Full Story seeks to place the complicated body of Rosewood evidence before the public for the first time, adhering to narrative form but without violating the picture that the evidence presents. This necessarily means addressing and debunking a body of various myths that have arisen around a highly controversial subject. An informant pool of more than 100 individuals, including eyewitnesses, secondary informants and local authorities, is supplemented and tested by a large body of background documentation from the community, such as records of births, deaths, marriages, property deeds, criminal indictments and other documentation–though the “racial cleansing” of 1923 did not itself become a subject of any official record and was effectively excised from surviving governmental and law enforcement files. The result–a plethora of peripheral records, local legends and post-traumatic narratives–presents a deep challenge to the expositor attempting to bring the full picture clearly and readably to the public. Rosewood: The Full Story uses this evidence to trace a picture of the secretive mob violence that destroyed the community of Rosewood, noting the classic features of that violence, as well as patterns of false pleading and myth that have tended to obscure the reality. The fury that swelled suddenly to consume an isolated settlement had the appearance, once the evidence is known, of what might be called human weather. In journalism and as an employee of the United Nations and investigator of atrocities in the Balkans and Latin America, the author has seen the ways that such storms not only crush lives but devastate public truth as their truths hide behind illusions. This book is moved by a hope that the “storms” of mass violence may be more systematically understood.
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The Rosewood Massacre
one the most tragic events in black history — the Rosewood massacre — the result of rape accusations made by a white woman against a black man, which led to violent riots and the murder of several innocent African-Americans in January of 1923.
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Book
Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution
MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal thinks that Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time. Now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.
“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand – quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer….” (Michael Harriot, The Root)
Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm listeners with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of 18th-century White men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.
You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “Whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can listen to this book to understand that the Constitution is trash but doesn’t have to be.
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TBE S1, Ep 2:THE ROSEWOOD MASSACRE
S1, Episode 2, Rosewood, of Through Black Eyes: Unfiltered is about an all black town, in North Florida, not too far from Gainesville that was burned down in January of 1923, when a white mob attacked, killing several blacks and two whites.
This story, told by Dr. Marvin Dunn, is rich in historical events of what happened back then, when white women falsely accused black men, the Klan, and more.
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Trace, document, record, and write your family’s history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide.
Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family’s past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
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While the story of Rosewood is hard to take, imagine living with threats like this everyday of your life. There is no escape from it since it is set in motion by people who do not exercise what is considered civilized thought.
While the threat alone is terrifying enough, the fact that it can become real and lead to mayhem. No trial or seeking truth. Innocence is not going to save you. Any reason I s enough for mobs of blood thirsty goons willing to sacrifice anyone, man, woman, or child. Nothing except slaughter and human suffering will cure the insatiable thirst.
Help put an end to this and suffer a moment of discomfort, a bit of learning and settle down and help solve the shame of America, least it spread to yet another generation.