Nine miles earlier than Florida State Road 24 dead-ends within the Gulf of Mexico, a solid aluminum historic marker stands subsequent to a white two-story residence – all that is left of Rosewood, a once-thriving, predominantly Black town terrorized and razed to the bottom by a racist mob 100 years in the past this month.
But due to many years of persistence by descendants of victims of the massacre, the reminiscence of Rosewood burns extra brightly at this time than the fires that ravaged it in January 1923, when white rioters, drawn by the unverified account of a white girl who claimed she had been overwhelmed and assaulted by a Black drifter, set the town aflame in a murderous rampage.
Remains of Sarah Carrier’s home in Rosewood, Florida, in a picture first revealed in Literary Digest journal on Jan. 20, 1923. At least six folks have been killed after white rioters set the town ablaze. (Credit: Bettman through Getty Images)
For nearly 60 years the massacre, which left no less than six murdered whereas the remaining, together with dozens of kids, escaped within the center of the night time, operating by means of swamps, hiding within the woods and leaping onto prepare vehicles, was all however erased from historic reminiscence. No legislation enforcement company investigated, and nobody was ever charged with crimes. The erasure mirrored that of racial violence throughout the U.S., the place lynchings and mob assaults in Chicago, Tulsa, Omaha, and in small towns and large cities across the country were, and in many cases continue to be, left unremarked and unremembered save by communities of survivors.
In recent decades Rosewood has made itself the exception. In the 1990s, descendants, working with a law firm that signed on to help them pro bono, pushed the Florida Legislature to commission a study on the history of Rosewood, so historians could verify survivors’ accounts. They marshaled a media campaign to raise awareness of the massacre and to overcome the fears of Black lawmakers that the issue was too divisive. They lobbied conservative state lawmakers by focusing not on racial justice but property rights.
The efforts paid off.
In 1994, after years of legal struggles, the Florida Legislature passed a bill awarding $2.1 million in compensation to survivors of the massacre and their descendants. It was a fraction of what descendants had sought but remains to this day the only government reparations ever paid to victims of anti-Black racial violence in the U.S. Four years later, Florida passed a law allowing descendants of Rosewood victims to attend Florida colleges and universities tuition-free. More than 300 have done so to date. In 2004, then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush traveled to Rosewood to dedicate the Florida Heritage Landmark historic marker, memorializing those that died and whose lives have been ceaselessly impacted by the massacre.
Rosewood descendants and tons of of different folks will gather next week on the weeklong Remembering Rosewood Centennial Commemoration – co-sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center – first for a wreath-laying ceremony in what was as soon as the affluent town and then for a sequence of occasions on the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law in Gainesville, about 50 miles away. Attendees will have a good time their success at confronting white supremacy and reclaiming historical past. But they will even mourn what was misplaced when Rosewood was destroyed, decry the boundaries of what justice descendants have attained, and condemn each the resurgent white nationalism on this nation in addition to the deepening pushback in Florida and elsewhere by right-wing politicians and policymakers in opposition to an trustworthy reckoning with historical past.
“We are deeply honored to partner with the descendants of Rosewood to bring this painful history to light – and to radically imagine a future where all people are free from the grip of white supremacy,” stated Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the SPLC. “This kind of truth-telling is necessary to end the centuries of oppression and anti-Black racism that continue to haunt communities today. It is through this shared learning and reflection that we, as a nation, can begin to heal and ensure equity and justice for all.”
‘Candid telling of history’
The commemoration has been organized by the nonprofit Descendants of Rosewood Foundation and is co-sponsored by – along with the SPLC – the University of Florida and Holland & Knight, the legislation agency that represented the descendants of their authorized battle. Other sponsors embrace Florida State University, Visit Gainesville, Martin Luther King Jr. Commission of Florida, the Miami Center for Racial Justice and Onyx Magazine.
The keynote speaker on the commemoration can be outstanding racial justice legal professional Ben Crump, who has represented households within the Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and Flint, Michigan, civil rights circumstances. The occasions additionally embrace the opening of the Rosewood Traveling Museum on the college, screenings of each the function movie Rosewood – directed by John Singleton – and a separate documentary, in addition to a number of panel discussions that includes descendants, filmmakers, historians, authorized students and civil and human rights activists.
In an irony emblematic of how a lot work stays to make sure fairness and justice for all, the commemoration takes place simply months after a new legislation took impact in Florida that goals to limit faculties and workplaces from instructing in regards to the United States’ legacy of racism. Last yr, the SPLC filed an amicus brief in a federal lawsuit difficult the constitutionality of the legislation, HB 7. Commonly referred to as the Stop WOKE Act, it’s already having a chilling impact on the instructing of historical past in Florida.
The Florida Board of Education’s specs for 2022-23 social research supplies have interpreted HB 7 expansively, prohibiting “social justice” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Scholars monitoring the implementation of the legislation warn that in lecture rooms throughout the state the instructing of the historical past of Rosewood; of the 1920 Election Day massacre within the town of Ocoee, close to Orlando; and of the lynchings and different racial violence strewn all through Florida historical past could also be silenced.
Katheryn Russell-Brown, a legislation professor and director of the Race and Crime Center for Justice on the Levin College of Law, in addition to an SPLC board member, stated HB 7 demonstrates “how progress happens. Yes, we achieved reparations for Rosewood, but now here comes the rollback. We’re not in the place we were in 1923, but we are still not where we want to be. It’s an ongoing fight. The times change. The goalposts change, but the fight is still there.”
For the SPLC, the chance to amplify the work of Rosewood survivors by becoming a member of with accomplice organizations to co-sponsor the commemorative occasions is “symbolic of our entire fight for racial justice in the South, especially in places like Florida where the pushback is so intense against a candid telling of history,” SPLC Chief Legal Officer Derwyn Bunton stated.
Rosewood is “one of a thousand stories where communities of color or just vulnerable, targeted communities had to endure an insane injustice,” Bunton stated. “But the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of those families that were forced into that swamp never let it go. They came together with advocates and communities to seek justice. And that is something that increasingly is at the center of what SPLC is doing, partnering with other nonprofits and organizations to bring about change in the South.”
‘He won’t discuss it’
For some who survived the massacre, the trauma was simply too painful to share, even with their households. Jonathan Barry-Blocker was 13 years outdated in 1997 when his father got here into his room and sat down on his mattress. There was a film popping out, Barry-Blocker’s father instructed him. You ought to know, he stated, as a result of folks could also be calling us. What his dad shared that day for the primary time was that Barry-Blocker’s grandfather, the Rev. Ernest Blocker, was a Rosewood survivor.
“He won’t talk about it,” Barry-Blocker remembers his father warning. “So, you can never ask him questions.”
James Davidson, left, and Edward Gonzalez-Tennant doc Rosewood’s African American cemetery in a 2012 picture. Gonzalez-Tennant, who has studied the 1923 Rosewood massacre for many years, says that “there’s a direct connection in terms of understanding this sort of violence and connecting it to what is happening today.” (Courtesy of Edward Gonzalez-Tennant)
Barry-Blocker, now a visiting professor on the Levin College of Law and a former employees legal professional with the SPLC, stated what he has been in a position to uncover about how his household historical past was formed by Rosewood is unsatisfying. He is aware of his grandmother’s household moved from Georgia to Rosewood to work in a Black-owned turpentine enterprise that was one of the financial pillars of the town. He is aware of from county and U.S. census data that his great-grandparents married and then rented their residence, close to a publish workplace, on the outskirts of Rosewood. He is aware of his great-grandfather operated a casual retailer within the town, which had a number of church buildings, a Masonic lodge, a college and tidy, two-story Black-owned properties, many with pianos and different ephemera of middle-class lives.
Lastly, Barry-Blocker is aware of his household fled the whole lot in a panic, within the center of the night time. Somehow, his great-grandparents have been separated. And his great-grandmother and the youngsters – his grandfather amongst them – ended up on a prepare to Gainesville.
When he began to grasp his household historical past, “I was so angry,” Barry-Blocker stated. “The thoughts in my head were: Was my grandfather one of the children screaming amid the violence? Did they have to jump onto that train? Were they in that swamp? And what could have been? Rosewood was a pretty wealthy Black town for the turn of the century. Could my family have built some homeownership, land holdings? Could they have gone to college sooner? After Rosewood, they had to start all over. They had to start from the bottom in a sense, in a place where they had no footing. … What would have accrued to them until now, but for the attack on Rosewood?”
Despite his anger and his questions, Barry-Blocker stated he adopted his father’s recommendation. He by no means requested his grandfather, who lived to his 90s, in regards to the massacre.
“I’ll never know what made them flee, what they went through. I’m still trying to figure stuff out,” Barry-Blocker stated. “That’s the rough part.”
As descendants like Barry-Blocker seek for solutions on their very own, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists are additionally working to make clear the historical past of Rosewood and locations prefer it. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, spent years finding out Rosewood, first as a graduate scholar and then as an assistant professor in Florida. Using laptop mapping and 3D modeling strategies, he combed by means of 1000’s of property deeds, performed excavations and went by means of a broad vary of different sources to re-create as intently as potential what Rosewood regarded like earlier than it was destroyed. The digital world he created is publicly available.
“Obviously doing work like this, a lot of people are upset by it. That’s the past, they say. Why open old wounds?” Gonzalez-Tennant said. “But I think there’s a direct connection in terms of understanding this sort of violence and connecting it to what is happening today. It’s like putting the voices of people who were silenced back into the narrative. Then we can see how we are silencing these communities today.”
‘The blood land’
Indications of how much understanding is still needed are rife in and around Rosewood.
On Sept. 6, 2022, prominent Black psychologist Marvin Dunn, who more than a decade ago purchased five acres in the unincorporated area of Levy County where Rosewood once stood, was victim of an assault near the property. Dunn told police the driver of a pickup truck made several dangerous passes at him and his group gathered on the side of a public roadway. The driver screamed a racial epithet at them. The Levy County Sheriff’s Office later arrested David Allen Emanuel, 61, and charged him with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, according to media reports from September.
And as for that historical marker dedicated by then-Florida Gov. Bush? It is still there. But it is pocked with bullet holes from vandals.
“Levy County and Rosewood in particular has an element of racism that is dangerous and easily provoked, and that has been clarified by what happened to me on Sept. 6,” Dunn said. “There have always been folks out there who don’t want any Black people coming back to Rosewood.”
That hasn’t stopped Dunn. The author of several books on Rosewood and on Black history, he bought the property with a partner after he discovered on the land the remains of railway tracks likely used by people escaping the massacre.
It is, Dunn believes, just the second purchase by a Black person of land in Rosewood since the town was burned to the ground. A Black family had owned land in Rosewood in recent decades, Dunn said, but left in 2003.
In the years since, Dunn has worked cooperatively with many white local property owners to uncover relics of Rosewood. His land, now a private park, will be the scene of the wreath-laying ceremony on Jan. 8 that will kick off the centennial commemoration. He has raised more than $50,000 in donations to help clear the land.
“There is an importance in owning what I call the blood land, the land where these things happened, for the sake of keeping history alive,” Dunn said. “The best way to remember these experiences is to go to where the blood was shed.”
Picture at top: Attendees of a 2020 service to remember the victims of the 1923 Rosewood massacre gather at a historical marker erected in their honor. Next week, the Remembering Rosewood Centennial Commemoration will include a series of events held in the once-thriving Florida town as well as in nearby Gainesville. (Credit: Zack Wittman for The Washington Post via Getty Images)