Rosewood 1923

Rosewood in 1922 was small but stable. Roughly 150 to 200 residents, nearly all Black, lived in the town[1]. Most families owned their homes. The Carrier and Bradley families owned much of the property[2]. Sarah Carrier worked as a laundress in Sumner. Sam Carter ran a small business. Aaron Carrier was a Mason at the local lodge. The town had its own school and its own pastor.

The economic base was the cedar that still stood in the hammocks along the Gulf coast. A.P. Perry's mill in Rosewood cut the cedar into the thin strips used to make pencils, a trade that had made the town prosperous enough in the 1890s that three white families also settled in Rosewood's general neighborhood and lived alongside their Black neighbors without conflict[2]. By the 1920s the cedar stands had been worked out, and many Rosewood men had shifted to wage work at the larger sawmill in Sumner three miles away. Others farmed, raised hogs, ran the general store, or held positions as carpenters and turpentine workers. A Rosewood family typically owned the house it lived in, the lot it stood on, and some share of the tools the family used to earn a living. That was the condition Fannie Taylor's claim was about to reach.

On the morning of January 1, 1923, Fannie Taylor claimed she had been assaulted in her home in Sumner[1], a sawmill town three miles from Rosewood. She said the assailant was a Black man. Contemporary Black witnesses, including Taylor's laundress, Sarah Carrier, later said Taylor had been assaulted by a white man, and had invented the Black assailant to hide the affair from her husband[5]. The truth was never litigated because the consequences began immediately. A party of white men was assembled in Sumner within the hour. Dogs were brought in to track a suspect from Taylor's back door into the woods that ran toward Rosewood. By late afternoon the party had grown large enough that the Levy County sheriff, Robert Elias Walker, arrived and began deputizing additional men on the spot[1].

A white mob formed in Sumner and moved toward Rosewood. Over the next seven days, the mob grew. KKK members from Gainesville and surrounding counties traveled to Levy County to join[2]; a Klan rally held in Gainesville on New Year's Day supplied many of the men who came south. Sam Carter, a local blacksmith who was believed to have helped hide a suspect, was tortured and shot first[1]. Aaron Carrier was beaten and taken into the sheriff's custody, which is what saved his life. On the night of January 4, a crowd of roughly twenty to twenty-five armed men surrounded the home of Sylvester Carrier, where at least fifteen women and children had gathered for safety[2]. Carrier, a music teacher and a marksman, held the attackers off through a night-long firefight. At least two of the white attackers, Henry Andrews and C.P. "Poly" Wilkerson, were killed at the Carrier house[1]. Carrier and his mother Sarah were killed defending the home[1]. The attackers, enraged by the resistance, returned at dawn with larger numbers and the intent to burn the town to the ground.

Across January 5 and 6 the mob swelled to an estimated 200 to 500 men, moving building by building through Rosewood with torches and kerosene[1]. The Methodist church burned first. Then the AME church. Then the school. Then the Masonic lodge where Aaron Carrier had been a member. The residences followed. By January 7, every structure in Rosewood had been burned[1]. Two churches, the school, the Masonic lodge, the sugar mill, and every residence. Only the home and general store of John Wright, a white man who had openly defied the mob to shelter Black women and children, was spared[2]. The survivors, mostly women and children, had hidden for days in the swamps that surrounded the town through a cold January night with temperatures near freezing.

The evacuation that saved most of the survivors was organized in secret by two white brothers. John and William Bryce, who operated the Seaboard Air Line passenger train on the route that passed through Rosewood, slowed their train to a near-stop outside the town on the morning of January 6 and let the women and children who had been hiding in the swamps board without paying fares[2]. The train then ran through to Gainesville. Dozens of Rosewood residents reached Gainesville that way. Other survivors made their way on foot over several days to Chiefland, Otter Creek, and further north. By the end of the week the Black population of Rosewood was scattered across three counties; most never returned to Levy County in their lifetimes.

No arrests were made. A grand jury in Levy County convened in February 1923 and returned no indictments against any member of the mob[1]. The grand jury heard testimony for four days and found "insufficient evidence" of any crime. The Tampa Tribune called the investigation a "whitewash" at the time[1]. Governor Cary Hardee, who had promised during the violence to call out the state militia if requested, was never asked to do so[1]. The official record of what happened was effectively suppressed for sixty years. Levy County government acknowledged nothing. Florida history textbooks made no mention of the massacre. Survivors, under the unspoken threat of further violence if the story were spoken of publicly, kept what had happened even from their own grandchildren. Arnett Doctor, a grandson of Philomena Goins Doctor, grew up knowing that his grandmother's silences at certain family dinners were about something; he did not learn the word Rosewood until he was an adult[5].

Black residents who survived were scattered. Most relocated to Gainesville, Ocala, or further north to Jacksonville and beyond. Property titles remained in the names of Rosewood residents, but the land was quietly absorbed by white neighbors and by timber interests through tax sales, adverse possession, and outright paper transfers that were not contested because no contest could have been safely brought[1]. The town was not rebuilt. It was not memorialized. It was erased from the map, and within a generation the name had disappeared from county road signage.

For sixty years, Rosewood was almost entirely absent from the historical record. Florida history textbooks made no mention of it. Levy County government acknowledged nothing. Survivors, under threat, rarely spoke of what had happened, not even to their own grandchildren. Philomena Goins Doctor, who had walked out of the swamp with her cousins as a young woman, lived until 1981 without ever publicly telling her grandson Arnett the full story; he reconstructed it from fragments after her death[5].

In 1982, investigative journalist Gary Moore of the St. Petersburg Times rediscovered the story and brought the survivors' testimonies to national attention[3]. Moore had been told about Rosewood by a colleague, and he spent months tracking down the then-small number of people who had lived through it and would still talk. His July 25 piece was the first substantial account to reach a national audience. The CBS program 60 Minutes followed with a 1983 segment that amplified his reporting. Arnett Doctor began a decade of organizing work that culminated in the descendants' claim to the Florida legislature.

The Florida legislature commissioned a formal historical investigation in 1993[1]. A team led by Maxine D. Jones, Larry E. Rivers, David R. Colburn, R. Thomas Dye, and William W. Rogers produced an 800-page report documenting what had happened. On the strength of that report and of survivor testimony given directly to legislators, in 1994 the legislature passed the Rosewood Compensation Act, awarding $2.1 million to the remaining survivors and descendants and establishing a scholarship fund for their heirs[4]. Governor Lawton Chiles signed the bill on May 4, 1994.

It was the first time a U.S. state government had paid reparations for a racial massacre. The precedent it set has been cited in every subsequent reparations effort in the United States, from Tulsa to Chicago to North Carolina. The Rosewood scholarship fund has continued to pay for the college education of descendants every year since 1994, a form of inheritance that attempts to restore some fraction of what was lost when entire family property portfolios were burned to the ground.