Unless you know what you are looking for, Rosewood, Florida
is easy to miss, but I grew up about 30 miles inland from Rosewood and we drove
through it constantly to go to fishing or oystering in Cedar Key. When you are young, and you hear
grandparents, great grandparents, great aunts and uncles tell stories, you do
not realize the impact they have on you until you grow up, move away, make
friends outside of the one red light town you spent your teens in. I always knew Rosewood was scary, ghost-story-flavored-scary,
but now I realize that it is another kind of scary, the kind that teaches important
life lessons.
Minnie Lee Langley was almost 10 years old in 1923 when she
lived in Rosewood, a predominately African-American, somewhat prosperous
community on the Gulf Coast of Florida. She
remembers what happened the night hundreds of white men came to exact justice
on an unnamed black man, accused of attacking a white woman and recounted it on
numerous occasions in the early 1990s.
While there are several versions of the story, some no doubt urban
legend at this point, the fact of the matter is that one the riot was over,
there were eight official deaths, two white, six black, but witnesses give
numbers of deaths in the mid-twenties. What
is certain is that the entire town of Rosewood was destroyed and citizens old
and young fled to the nearby woods and swamps to escape certain death, finally
making their ways to Gainesville, Jacksonville, or out of Florida entirely. A grand jury decided a month after the event, that there was not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for their involvement in the Rosewood Massacre.
In 1994 Rosewood Massacre survivors and descendants of
survivors were giving monetary compensation in the amount of $2.1 million, roughly
$150 thousand to a person who could prove that they lived in Rosewood in 1923,
the balance put into a pool for descendants.
Other than a few ramshackle buildings and one dilapidated house, the
only tangible thing that marks Rosewood today, is a plaque erected in
2004. And there will always be the stories
that the offspring of the local white men tell, and the stories that progenies
of the Rosewood refugees, scattered to the winds, tell.
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