The recent 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre has brought a lot of coverage of this forgotten event. You would assume it will now be covered in high school classrooms in the future. But that is not guaranteed. A similar incident that occurred two years later and was uncovered in the 1980’s was soon forgotten again.
Rosewood, Florida was a small town that was all-black except for the husband and wife who ran the local general store. On Jan. 1, 1923 a white woman in nearby Sumner was found bruised in her home. 22 year-old Fannie Taylor did not claim she was raped, but she did claim she had been assaulted by a black man. (It is likely that it was actually a white lover who had beaten her when her husband was off at work.) Sheriff Robert Walker learned that a Jesse Hunter had escaped from a chain-gang and he became the leading suspect. Walker went to Rosewood, but so did a white mob led by Fannie’s husband. Dogs targeted the home of Aaron Carrier (nephew of Sarah who did laundry for the Taylors). Carrier was tied to a car and dragged to Sumner. There he was beaten before Walker intervened to rescue him and ship him off to a jail in Gainesville. The mob continued the search. Blacksmith Sam Carter was tortured. He claimed he knew where Hunter was hiding and led the whites into the woods. When no Hunter was found, Carter was shot and hung from a tree. 25 blacks took refuge in the home of Sarah Carrier, including many children. The night of Jan. 4, a group of whites surrounded the house thinking Hunter was there. Shots were exchanged. Sarah was hit in the head and her son Slyvester was killed, too. But not before he killed two whites trying to break in. Eventually, the mob got in, but the kids escaped to the swamp. Newspapers reported the standoff and morphed it into a mob of armed blacks launching a race war. This increased the number of whites rushing to the area, including many KKK members from a recent rally in Gainesville. Churches were burned, houses were set afire and fleeing blacks were shot. By this time, most blacks had taken refuge in the swamps. When James Carrier (son of Sarah) returned, he was captured, forced to dig a grave, and was killed. Not all whites were villains. John Wright and his wife hid blacks at their general store. John and William Bryce, who owned their own train, used it to rescue women and children. Sheriff Walker tried to reign in the mob with limited success. It returned on Jan. 7 to finish the burning, leaving only the store. After it was only ashes, the black community refused to return and the town ceased to exist. The story also died. Officially 6 blacks and 2 whites were killed. Some historians, based on eyewitness accounts, estimate the actual figure was closer to 27. The story was rediscovered in the 1980’s and John Singleton made a highly fictionalized movie about it, but it was soon forgotten again. Share this so it won’t happen again.
https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/rosewood-massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre
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