Rosewood massacre

Rosewood massacre
Part of mass racial violence in the United States and the nadir of American race relations
The remains of Sarah Carrier's house, where two black and two white people were killed in Rosewood, Florida in January 1923
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Coordinates	29°14′0″N 82°56′0″W / 29.23333°N 82.93333°W / 29.23333; -82.93333
Date	January 1–7, 1923
Target	African Americans
Deaths	6 black and 2 white people (official figure) 27 to 150 in some reports[1]
Injured	Unknown

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 were killed, but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. In addition, 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 an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre,^[2] 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. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter. A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. 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 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.

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.^[3] A newspaper article published in 1984 stated that estimates of up to 150 victims might have been exaggerations.^[4] 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.^[5]