ROSEWOOD FLORIDA JANUARY 1923

Wednesday January 06 2016

By MURPHY BROWNE

On January 1, 1923, the African-American town of Rosewood in Florida was attacked by a White mob and by January 7, 1923, Rosewood no longer existed.

Rosewood was not the first African-American town that was destroyed by covetous and envious White people. The town of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the “Black Wall Street”, was destroyed between May 31 and June 1, 1921 by a White mob envious of the prosperity of African-Americans. The mob was aided by the government in the destruction of Greenwood.

On January 7, 1923, the White mob that attacked Rosewood burned to the ground three churches, a train station, a large Masonic Hall, a school and several two-storey houses and smaller two-room houses. The businesses included a general store, sugar mill and turpentine mill. There was even a baseball team, the “Rosewood Stars”.

On January 1, 1923, a White woman (living in Sumner, a White neighbouring town to Rosewood) had a quarrel with her White lover. When her husband arrived home unexpectedly, she had to explain the marks of violence on her face and her dishevelled appearance. The White woman told her husband that she had been attacked by an African-American man.

The documentation submitted to an investigative team in 1993 includes this quote: “Some African-Americans in the area contended privately at the time, even as Black descendants contend publicly today, that the man who visited Fannie Taylor was her White lover. For some reason they quarrelled, and after physically abusing her, the man left. Then the White woman protected herself by fabricating the story of being attacked by a Black man.”

Since the African-American community was aware of these extramarital shenanigans, the White community would most likely be aware also. However, it would not be the first or last time that a White community would use the excuse of “Negro attacked White woman” to destroy African-American individuals, families or communities. A “posse” of White men was organized and on Monday, January 1, 1923, they lynched an African-American man who was an easy target.

However, the bloodlust was not satisfied with the hanging of one African-American man which, combined with envy of some prosperous African-American families in Rosewood, led to another mob attack. On Thursday, January 4, 1923, rumours began to circulate in the White community that one of the more prosperous African-American men had gathered a group of relatives at his home for protection. Using that as an excuse a White mob gathered to “investigate” this “uppity” behaviour. It was considered very disrespectful for African-Americans to think they could resist “White might!”

When the White men approached the house and opened fire, the African-Americans in the house defended themselves, killing two White men and wounding four. As the news of the battle spread in the White community, hundreds of White men began to pour into Rosewood, armed to the teeth.

According to reports in the Jacksonville Times-Union on January 8, 1923 and the Miami Herald on January 8, 1923: “At some point one of the attackers, armed with a flashlight, worked his way across the open space between the crowd and the house. He climbed through a darkened window, switched on his flashlight, cast its beam on the crouching Blacks, and shouted to his White comrades to fire. One of the Blacks quickly shot him. The bullet struck the intruder’s head, inflicting a serious wound. The injured man fell through the window to the ground and was rescued.”

The White posse, which included many members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) realized that the moonlight made them easy targets of the African-Americans defending the house. An excerpt from the “DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF THE INCIDENT WHICH OCCURRED AT ROSEWOOD, FLORIDA, IN JANUARY 1923 SUBMITTED TO THE FLORIDA BOARD OF REGENTS DECEMBER 22, 1993” states: “There were no other attempts to enter the house. The Blacks seemed well supplied with arms and ammunition, and the bright moonlight made the attackers such easy targets that they contented themselves with a siege. Desultory firing from a safe distance ceased around 4 a.m. when the Whites’ ammunition ran low. More shells and bullets were ordered from Gainesville, as they waited for daylight before making another move.”

Newspapers reported the massacre as it happened yet (not surprisingly) no government intervention was reported to protect the African-Americans under siege by the White mob. Reports of the Rosewood Massacre appeared in several White newspapers, including the Jacksonville Times-Union on January 3, 1923, the Tampa Morning Tribune on January 2 and 3, 1923 and in the Gainesville Daily Sun on January 4, 1923.

African-American newspapers like the Afro-American based in Baltimore praised the courage of African-Americans who defended their homes against the White mob with comments such as this published on January 6, 1923: “The ‘Uncle Toms,’ the South loved are gone forever, and in their place have grown up heroes like Uncle Jim Carrier who died true to his friends and true to his home.”

On January 10, 1923, this comment was published in The Baltimore Herald, an African-American newspaper: “Negroes throughout the country, are in the fullest sympathy and cherish the highest admiration for the men of the race in Florida who fired into the mob and killed two of their number. We regard the twenty, or whatever the number killed as martyrs. They died defending their own lives and in defence of law and order. Every shot fired into a mob and every member of a mob killed is in defence of law and order.”

African-American reporter, Eugene Brown, writing for the African-American newspaper, Chicago Defender, interviewed one of the survivors of the Rosewood Massacre. In an article entitled “Nineteen Slain in Florida Race War”, published on January 13, 1923, Brown wrote about Ted Cole, an ex-soldier from Chicago who had recently arrived in Rosewood and rallied the African-Americans to resist the attack on the Carrier house. According to Brown, Cole, an army veteran, used combat skills acquired in World War I to good effect, managing the stand-off exchange between the African-Americans and the White mob.

In the 2010 book, Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851-1946, White American author Kerry Segrave writes: “Toward morning the mob was just about out of ammunition. Sensing that, Cole led his band of 20 (according to this account, four people inside the house had been shot to death by the mob, two women and two men) out of the house and in a charge on the Whites, Reportedly, the members of the mob broke ranks and scattered.”

There were reports of African-Americans trying to flee the carnage who were slaughtered as they ran out of their houses that were set on fire by the mob. African-American girls and women were raped and then murdered by the White mob. Many African-Americans who fled into the woods were hunted and killed. Some (mostly women and children) managed to flee to safety by reaching the railway tracks and were taken aboard trains and rushed to safety in Gainesville.

One of the survivors (who was a child in 1923) during a deposition in 1993 said: “You know, everybody was hollering and crying and praying, and they put us all on the train.”

Her family eventually moved to South Miami and tried to live a normal life after the trauma of being burnt out of their homes. Some survivors changed their names and tried to forget the horror and terror of January 1923.

In the aftermath, the White newspaper the Gainesville Daily Sun reported on January 8, 1923: “Masses of twisted steel were all that remained of furniture formerly in the negro homes, (and) several charred bodies of dogs, and firearms left in the hasty retreat, bore evidence to the mob’s fury which set fire to the negro section of Rosewood.”

During an interview, Jason McElveen, one of the White men who “participated in the affair” said: “they went up there and buried seventeen niggers out of the house. And I don’t know how many more that they picked out of the woods and the fields about the area”. McElveen also said: “they just took \’em and laid out in the road [and] plowed the furrows, with a big field-plow, extra big field-plow, fire plow. [They] plowed two big furrows there and put them niggers in there in the trench and plowed it over”.

As for identification, “there is no markings or anything; don’t know who they was, why they was, and they said there was twenty-six of them there”.

As a final grisly note, McElveen remembered, “and after that for the next four or five years they picked up skulls and things all over Gulf Hammock – all around Gulf Hammock”.

On Monday April 4, 1994, the Florida House of Representatives voted in favour of a $2.1 million reparations bill in compensation for the Rosewood Massacre. The package included $1.5 million to be divided among the 11 or so survivors of the massacre, $500,000 to compensate Rosewood families for the property they lost and $100,000 in college scholarships for Rosewood descendants and other minorities. Democratic Senator Charles Williams, representing Tallahassee, whose district includes the area that used to be Rosewood, disagreed with compensating the Rosewood survivors.

“How long do we have to pay for the sins of our forefathers?” he asked.

This is the second year of the United Nations (UN) designated “International Decade for People of African Descent”, which has mostly been ignored by the members of the UN, including the USA and Canada. Every country where Africans were enslaved needs to work on “Reparations” compensation for the descendants of enslaved Africans.

Murphy Browne © January 2016