TheLoop21.com

By: Susan Anderson (follow this member)
Wed, 05/13/2009 - 00:00

Most people don’t know that for at least one hundred years in America the ambiguous term “race riot” actually meant mob attacks by whites against African American people and communities. The long term, national pattern of white violence against blacks is a powerful argument for reparations. Some individual state governments seem to agree.

This week, we’ll take a look at the Rosewood Massacre, and how Florida became the first state in the country to compensate survivors and their descendants for damages suffered from what we would consider today a massive hate crime.

It was less than four years after the Red Summer of 1919, so called because of the attacks against African Americans that had spread across the urban north, whites’ reactions to the migration of disenfranchised southern blacks. The Ku Klux Klan was on the march in Florida. In January, 1923, white, 22-year-old Fannie Taylor claimed a black man assaulted her in her home in Sumner, adjacent to Rosewood.

Within the next week, a white mob rampaged throughout Rosewood, killing six African Americans — two whites died — and burning all the buildings, homes, and churches in the small town. An all-white grand jury heard testimony, but found no one to prosecute. During the melee, blacks had fled any way they could. Rosewood disappeared. Although it received national attention in the white and black press, the terrible incident was soon forgotten.

In 1982, an investigative reporter at the St. Petersburg Times uncovered the Rosewood Massacre. That led to a 60 Minutes story the following year. By 1993, Rosewood survivors sued the state of Florida for failing to protect them and their families. The Speaker of the Florida legislature commissioned a scholarly report to evaluate the claims made by survivors. 

Historians from Florida State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Florida investigated the Rosewood Massacre, interviewing blacks and whites, and consulting the historical record. Their report, the "Documented History of the Incident which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923" was completed in October 1993. 

After much debate in the legislature and in public, in 1994, Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles signed into law an unprecedented $2.1 million bill compensating the survivors of the 1923 Rosewood massacre and their descendants. Individuals received up to $150,000 each, and a scholarship fund was established by the state education department. 

By 1997, filmmaker John Singleton directed “Rosewood,” a fictionalized account. The best source for learning about the original vigilante violence, the few white townspeople who aided their African American neighbors, and the blacks who fought back in 1923, and years later, is Michael D'Orso’s book, Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood.

Susan D. Anderson teaches, speaks and writes about African American history, politics and culture. She is the author of Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History, published by Northwestern University Press. She has been a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion since 1999, and currently manages an archival program at the USC Libraries.

Photo from PDub at flickr.