[Thinking about the role that historical testimony played in
getting some measure of justice for the Rosewood survivors, it’s
hard not to also think about the way that lawmakers in Florida are
trying to skew the teaching of history. ]
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ROSEWOOD MASSACRE AT 100: BLACK FLORIDA HISTORY AND WHITE TERROR  
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Dan Royles
February 27, 2023
African American Intellectual History Society
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_ Thinking about the role that historical testimony played in getting
some measure of justice for the Rosewood survivors, it’s hard not to
also think about the way that lawmakers in Florida are trying to skew
the teaching of history. _

Vegetable pickers, migrants, waiting after work to be paid, near
Homestead, Florida, February 1939, New York Public Library Digital
Collections

 

A version of the following comments was delivered at the opening of
the exhibit An Elegy to Rosewood 
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the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International
University in Miami.

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Rosewood Massacre
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whites descended on the nearly all-Black community of Rosewood,
Florida, intent on wiping out any trace of the town and its people. On
New Year’s Day 1923, a white woman in nearby Sumner had accused a
Black man of assaulting her. The hunt for her supposed assailant led a
posse of whites to Rosewood. Residents there were apt to defend their
homes, and a firefight left several of the white attackers dead. In
retaliation, even more, white men poured into Rosewood, intent on its
destruction. Most Black residents fled into the surrounding swamp, but
those who could not were murdered by the mob, which also set fire to
every building in town, save for the home of John Wright, a white man.
Those who escaped made their way to the relative safety of
Gainesville, but many would be haunted for the rest of their lives by
the horror they had witnessed.

It’s important that we talk about what happened at Rosewood and the
specific, individual stories of both those who perished and those
whose lives were forever changed in January 1923. But we also must
recognize that the story of Rosewood is, in many ways, not unique. In
recent years the public has come to learn about other similar
massacres—in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898
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1919
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or in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921
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These are just a few examples of the full-scale attacks on Black
communities that were typical in the United States between the end of
the Civil War in 1865 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In
the “Red Summer” of 1919
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violence of the kind that was perpetrated in Rosewood broke out in
dozens of cities across the country. In fact, Rosewood isn’t even
unique in the scope of Florida history. Seven years before
Rosewood, in 1916, at least six African Americans were lynched in
Newberry
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Four years later, in 1920, dozens of Black Floridians were killed in
Ocoee on Election Night
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than a month before Rosewood, whites murdered Black residents of
Perry, Florida,
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Black homes and community institutions.

In many ways, the Rosewood story follows a pattern that we see
elsewhere, of a white woman’s accusation against a Black man that
escalated into a full-scale assault by a white mob against an entire
Black community, sometimes to the point—as happened in
Rosewood—that the entire community was murdered or dispersed, and
material evidence that it had ever existed was destroyed. The fact
that this started with the accusation that a Black man had assaulted a
white woman is important because the idea that this kind of violence
was necessary to _protect_ white women was central to the story that
whites, and especially Southern whites, told themselves and each other
about why this kind of violence was both necessary and justified.

We know, of course, that this was a lie. As Ida B. Wells showed
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decades before Rosewood, very often, it wasn’t that white women were
being threatened by Black predators, it was that the institutions of
white supremacy were being threatened by Black people and Black
communities that were standing in their power. In Elaine it was Black
farmers organizing to get fair wages. In Ocoee, it was Black citizens
clawing back the political power they were denied under Jim Crow. In
Tulsa, it was Black Oklahomans
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had built a community so economically prosperous that it was nicknamed
“Black Wall Street
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And throughout the Red Summer, it was Black veterans who were
returning from war to make the world safe for democracy and determined
to make the United States live up to its own democratic promise.

Rosewood _is_ exceptional in that reparations were actually paid to
survivors. This happened in Florida through a bill passed by the
legislature in 1994 that granted $150,000 to each of the living
survivors. That wasn’t enough, and it was much lower than the
survivors had hoped to get, but it was something. And it was made
possible because people told the truth about what had happened in
Rosewood. On one hand, a team of historians
[[link removed]] assembled research into a
report on the massacre, and on the other hand, a handful of survivors
described [[link removed]] not only the
horrors they had witnessed but how they and their families had been
permanently scarred by what they endured.

As in so many of these other stories, the families that were driven
out of Rosewood lost everything. They lost their homes, their land,
their belongings and family heirlooms, their community, and any sense
of security they might have had.

But thinking about the role that historians and historical testimony
played in getting some measure of justice for the Rosewood survivors,
it’s hard not to also think about the way that lawmakers in Florida
and a handful of other states are trying to skew the teaching of
history away from any topic that might undermine the idea that we have
ever been anything but great. They threaten educators who even come
close to challenging this narrow line of thinking when it comes to
events like Rosewood.

These attempts to short-circuit discussions are about more than just
scoring political points. In a larger sense, recognizing this history
makes it clear to us that the way things are is not the way things
have to be. The parts of the country that are entirely white aren’t
that way just because people “like to be with their own kind,” but
because people were driven out of places like Rosewood or because
other African Americans saw what had happened there and elsewhere and
decided that it just wasn’t safe to be around white people. The
suburbs weren’t overwhelmingly white for decades because Black
people didn’t want to live in them; it was because there was an
entire architecture of policy
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practice—including violence
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kept the suburbs that way. And we have a massive racial wealth 
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in this country partly because Black people were dispossessed of their
property through violence.

Recognizing that the way things are is not the way things have to be
makes the study of history—the true study of history, not the
veneration of some glorified past—threatening to people who want to
maintain the status quo. Because studying history means seeing the
paths not taken and the opportunities foreclosed. It means being able
to imagine a present that is better than the one we’re living in.
And it makes it possible to imagine and build a more just future.

That’s what it means to learn and teach the history of Rosewood in
2023.

_Dan Royles is an assistant professor of history at Florida
International University in Miami. His first book, To Make the Wounded
Whole: African American Responses to HIV/AIDS (University of North
Carolina Press, 2020), examined the diverse ways that black
communities have responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic over the last
thirty-five years, and was a finalist for the Museum of African
American History's Stone Book Award. Follow him on Twitter @danroyles
[[link removed]]._

_The African American Intellectual History Society
[[link removed]] (AAIHS) is an independent scholarly
organization that aims to foster dialogue about researching, writing,
and teaching black thought and culture. AAIHS originally began as a
blog founded by Christopher Cameron
[[link removed]] in early 2014.
Cameron founded the AAIHS blog
[[link removed]] to “provide a
space for scholars in disparate fields to discuss the many aspects of
teaching and researching Black intellectual history.” Despite a
rough start [[link removed]],
Cameron was able to bring together a diverse group of scholars who
agreed to contribute monthly pieces to the blog. By December 2014, the
blog included a roster of nearly twenty regular contributors. In 2015,
we incorporated as a 501 (c)(3) educational non-profit organization
with Chris Cameron as founding president, Keisha N. Blain
[[link removed]] as founding secretary, and Ashley D.
Farmer [[link removed]] as founding treasurer. Today
AAIHS is one of the leading scholarly organizations in the United
States. We support the research of scholars in the field through an
array of fellowships, awards, and prizes, including the Pauli Murray
Book Prize and the C.L.R. James Research Fellowships. We publish the
popular blog Black Perspectives
[[link removed]], the leading online
platform for public scholarship on global Black thought, history, and
culture._

* African American history
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* Black History
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* History
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* Florida
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