The Massacre at Rosewood, Fl

On New Year’s Day 1923, a 22-year-old white woman from Sumner, Florida named Fannie Taylor, screamed loudly from inside her home. Nearby residents raced to her aid and found her bruised and beaten, falsely claiming a black man had entered her home and assaulted her. This was the match that lit a festering fire in the culture of racism that permeated the South after the Civil War. The resulting conflagration led to the destruction of an entirely self-sufficient black community called Rosewood, resulting in the recorded deaths of eight people, two white and six black. A mass grave of lynched blacks, its existence sworn to by survivors, has never been found.  Rosewood’s only white resident, train owner John Wright risked his life helping women and children escape. His house stands today, the only remaining structure that did not burn to the ground. Such horrible racist incidents had been occurring long before Rosewood. Two years previously, a major massacre ensued in Ocooee because black men attempted to vote; instances of lynching were not uncommon throughout the state and continued across the South until Jim Crow laws died in the late 1960s. Mysterious, hidden, gone by a single dawn’s day light, Rosewood remains an especially vivid portrayal of how lies, racism, and confirmation bias destroyed a community; the ensuing silence destroyed the very future of a generation. Traumatized, those who escaped never returned, afraid to even discuss their past.  Ignored for decades, the story came to light in the 1980’s when the media finally came looking in the middle of nowhere for the town where a Florida road sign declared ROSEWOOD.