the rosewood murders

The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated conflict that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Racial disturbances were common during the early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation's rapid social changes. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings in the years before the massacre, including the well-publicized Perry race riot where a black man had been burned at the stake in December 1922.

Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.

THE ROSEWOOD FLORIDA MASSACRE

Although the rioting was widely reported around the country, few official records documented the event. Survivors, their descendants, and the perpetrators remained silent about Rosewood for decades. Sixty years after the rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived in major media when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. Survivors and their descendants organized to sue the state for having failed to protect them. In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report on the events. As a result of the findings, Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate survivors and their descendants for damages incurred because of racial violence. The massacre was the subject of a 1997 film directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark.

Trayvon Martin unarmed teenager shot to death by a neighborhood watch in Florida

Settlement

Rosewood was settled in 1845, nine miles (14 km) east of Cedar Key, near the Gulf of Mexico. Local industry centered around timber; the name Rosewood refers to the reddish color of cut cedar wood. Two pencil mills were nearby in Cedar Key; several turpentine mills and a sawmill three miles (4.8 km) away in Sumner helped support local residents, as did 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. 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 they 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 Carriers were also a large family, responsible for logging in the region. By the 1920s, almost everyone in the close-knit community was distantly related to each other. The population of Rosewood peaked in 1915 at 355 people. Although residents of Rosewood probably did not vote because voter registration requirements in Florida had effectively disfranchised blacks since the start of the 20th century, 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 344 blacks and 294 whites.

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. Blacks and whites created their own community centers: in 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 "Rosewood was a town where everyone's house was painted. There were roses everywhere you walked. Lovely."

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 and continued to be used as punishment throughout the South. In 1866 Florida, as did many Southern states, passed laws called Black Codes disfranchising 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. A poll tax was imposed on Floridians in 1885, largely disfranchising poor whites and blacks alike, and further legal and political rights deteriorated in the years following. Without the right to vote, blacks 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

Elected officials in Florida did not ease race relations. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905–1909) suggested finding a location out of state for blacks to live separately. Tens of thousands of blacks 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 the 21 that occurred while he was governor. Catts ran on a platform of white supremacy and anti-Catholic sentiment and 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 then pleaded with blacks to stay. By 1940, 40,000 blacks had left Florida to find employment, but also to escape the oppression of segregation, violence, and disfranchisement

When U.S. troop training began for World War I, the idea of black soldiers receiving combat instruction alarmed many white Southerners. 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. 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 taboo subsequently combined with the arming of blacks to raise fears among whites of an impending race war in the South.

The influx of blacks into urban centers in the North and Midwest increased racial tensions. Between 1917 and 1923, racial disturbances erupted in numerous cities throughout the U.S., motivated by economic competition for industrial jobs, mostly between whites and southern blacks who were often used as strikebreakers. 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 immigrants. Further unrest occurred in Tulsa in 1921. David Colburn distinguishes two types of violence against blacks 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 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, and 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 was so common that it often did not make the front pages of newspapers. In 1920, whites removed four black men from a local jail and lynched them after they were accused of raping a white woman in Macclenny. 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 the murder of a white schoolteacher. On the day following Wright's lynching two more black men were shot and hanged; whites then burned the town's black school, Masonic lodge, church, amusement hall, and several families' homes.

Fannie Taylor's story

The Rosewood massacre was provoked when 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. They lived in Sumner, where the mill was located, 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.

On January 1, 1923, the Taylors' neighbor reported that she heard a scream while it was still dark, grabbed her revolver and ran next door to find Fannie bruised and beaten, with scuff marks across the white floor. Taylor was screaming that someone needed to get her baby. She said a black man was in her house; he had come through the back door and assaulted her. The neighbor found the baby, but no one else. Taylor's initial report stated her assailant beat her about the face but did not rape her. Rumors circulated—widely believed by whites in Sumner—that she was both raped and robbed. The charge was inflammatory in the South: the day before, the Klan had held a parade and rally of over 100 hooded Klansmen 50 miles (80 km) 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 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 beaten, but it was well after morning. Carrier's grandson and Philomena's brother, Arnett Goins, sometimes went with them and had seen the white man before. His name was John Bradley and he worked for the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Carrier told others in the black community what she had seen that day; the black community of Rosewood understood that Fannie Taylor had a white lover. They got into a fight that day and he beat her. When Bradley left Taylor's house, he went to Rosewood.

Quickly, Levy County Sheriff Robert Elias Walker raised a posse and started an investigation. When they found that Jesse Hunter, a black prisoner, had escaped from a chain gang, they began a search to question him about Taylor's attack. Men arrived from Cedar Key, Otter Creek, Chiefland, and Bronson to help with the search. Adding confusion to the series of events later recounted, as many as 400 men began to gather. Sheriff Walker deputized some of them, but was unable to initiate them all. Walker asked for dogs from a nearby convict camp, but one dog may have been used by a group of men acting without Walker's authority. Dogs led a group of about 100 to 150 men to the home of Aaron Carrier, Sarah's nephew. Aaron was taken outside, where his mother begged the men not to kill him. He was tied to a car and dragged to Sumner. Sheriff Walker put Carrier in protective custody at the county seat in Bronson to remove him from the men in the posse, many of whom were drinking and acting on their own authority. Worried that the group would quickly grow further out of control, Walker also urged black employees to stay at the turpentine mills for their own safety.

A group of 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.[note 2] The group hung Carter's mutilated body from a tree as a symbol to other black men in the area. Some in the mob took souvenirs of his clothes. Survivors suggest that John Bradley fled to Rosewood because he knew he was in trouble and had gone to the home of Aaron Carrier, a fellow veteran and Mason. Carrier and Carter, another Mason, covered Bradley in the back of a wagon. Carter took Bradley to a nearby river, let him out of the wagon, then returned home to be met by the mob who had been led to him by dogs following Bradley's scent.

After the lynching of 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. Sylvester refused, and when they left, he suggested gathering as many people as possible for protection

Despite the efforts of Sheriff Walker and mill supervisor W. H. Pillsbury to disperse them, mobs 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, which was filled with approximately 15 to 25 people seeking refuge, many of whom were children hiding upstairs under mattresses. Some of the children were in the house because they were visiting their grandmother for Christmas. They were protected by Sylvester Carrier and possibly two other men, but Sylvester may have been the only one armed. He had a reputation of being proud and independent. In Rosewood, he was a formidable character, a crack shot, expert hunter, and music teacher, who was simply called "Man". Many whites considered him arrogant and disrespectful.

Sylvester Carrier was reported in the New York Times saying that the attack on Fannie Taylor was an "example of what negroes could do without interference". Whether or not he said this is debated, but a group of 20 to 30 men, inflamed by the statement, went to the Carrier house. They also 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, 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. However, Sylvester placed her 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 whites 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.

ESCALATION

Don Cheadle and Ving Rhames play in the movie Rosewood directed by John Singelton

Death Come To Rosewood

News of the armed standoff attracted people from all over the state. 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 blacks and four whites 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" who were 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". Black newspapers covered the events from a different angle. The Afro-American in Baltimore highlighted the acts of heroism against the onslaught of "savages", but had their own exaggerations and distance from fact: "Two Negro women were attacked and raped between Rosewood and Sumner. The sexual lust of the brutal white mobbists satisfied, the women were strangled."

The white mob burned the black churches in Rosewood. Philomena Goins' cousin Lee Ruth Davis heard the bells tolling in the church as the men were inside setting it on fire. Even the white church in Rosewood was destroyed. Many black residents fled into the nearby swamps, some clothed only in their pajamas. Wilson Hall was nine years old at the time; he later recalled his mother waking him to flee into the swamps early in the morning when it was still dark; the lights from approaching cars could be seen for miles. The Hall family walked 15 miles (24 km) through swampland to the town of Gulf Hammock. The survivors recall that it was uncharacteristically cold for Florida, and people spent several nights in raised wooded areas called hammocks to evade the mob. Some took refuge with sympathetic white families. Sam Carter's 69-year-old widow hid for two days in the swamps, then was driven by a sympathetic white mail carrier, under bags of mail, to meet her family in Chiefland.

White men began surrounding houses, pouring kerosene on and lighting them, then shooting at those who emerged. Lexie Gordon, a light-skinned 50-year-old woman who was ill with typhoid fever, had sent her children into the woods. She was killed by shotgun blast to the face when she fled from hiding underneath her home, which had been set on fire by the mob. Fannie Taylor's brother-in-law claimed to be her killer. On January 5, more whites converged on the area, forming a mob of between 200 to 300 people. Some came from out of state. Mingo Williams, who was 20 miles (32 km) away near Bronson, was collecting turpentine sap by the side of the road when a car full of whites stopped and asked his name. As was custom among many residents of Levy County, both black and white, Williams used a nickname that was more prominent than his given name; he replied to the car full of men with the name everyone used, "Lord God", and they shot him dead.

Sheriff Walker pleaded with news reporters covering the violence to send a message to the Alachua County Sheriff P. G. Ramsey to send assistance. Carloads of men came from Gainesville to assist Walker; many of them had probably participated in the Klan rally earlier in the week. W. H. Pillsbury tried desperately to keep black workers in the Sumner mill, and worked with his assistant, a man named Johnson, to dissuade the white workers from joining others using extra-legal violence. Armed guards sent by Sheriff Walker turned away blacks who emerged from the swamps and tried to go home. 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 would not lend his gun to anyone. He said he did not want his "hands wet with blood".

Governor Cary Hardee was on standby, ready to order National Guard troops in to neutralize the situation. Despite his message to the sheriff of Alachua County, Walker informed Hardee by telegram that he did not fear "further disorder" and urged the governor not to intervene. The governor's office monitored the situation, in part because of intense Northern interest, but Hardee would not activate the National Guard without Walker's request. Walker insisted he could handle the situation; records show that Governor Hardee took Sheriff Walker's word and went on a hunting trip.

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 him dig his own grave, they fatally shot him.

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. Many survivors boarded the train after having been hidden by white general store owner John Wright and his wife, Mary Jo. Over the next several days, other Rosewood residents fled to Wright's house, facilitated by Sheriff Walker, who asked Wright to transport as many residents out of town as possible.

Lee Ruth Davis, her sister, and two brothers were hidden by the Wrights while their father hid in the woods. On the morning of Poly Wilkerson's funeral, the Wrights left the children alone to attend. Davis and her siblings crept out of the house to hide with relatives in the nearby town of Wylly, but they were turned back for being too dangerous. The children spent the day in the woods but decided to return to the Wrights' house. After spotting men with guns on their way back, they crept back to the Wrights, who were frantic with fear. Davis later described the experience: "I was laying that deep in water, that is where we sat all day long.... We got on our bellies and crawled. We tried to keep people from seeing us through the bushes.... We were trying to get back to Mr. Wright house. After we got all the way to his house, Mr. and Mrs. Wright were all the way out in the bushes hollering and calling us, and when we answered, they were so glad." Several other white residents of Sumner hid black residents of Rosewood and smuggled them out of town. Gainesville's black community took in many of Rosewood's refugees, waiting for them at the train station and greeting survivors as they disembarked, covered in sheets. On Sunday, January 7, a mob of 100 to 150 whites returned to burn the remaining dozen or so structures of Rosewood.