The destruction of Rosewood

Rosewood, in Levy County, was a mostly Black settlement of perhaps 200 people with its own church, school, Masonic hall, turpentine work and landowning families. On 1 January 1923 a white woman in the neighbouring town of Sumner said she had been assaulted by a Black man. Mobs formed from Sumner, Cedar Key and towns further off, with Klan members among them.

Over the following week they hunted and shot Black residents, and burned Rosewood building by building. Sylvester Carrier's house, where women and children had taken shelter, was besieged through a night; two white attackers were killed in the exchange, and the siege became the pretext for destroying everything that remained. Survivors hid in the swamps in winter; some were carried out by train crews who hid them in the cars.

Official accounts recorded six Black and two white deaths. Survivors described far more, and no bodies were recovered from the swamps. Rosewood ceased to exist - no resident ever returned, and the land passed to white owners. In 1993 the Florida legislature commissioned a documented history of the attack; in 1994 it voted to compensate the survivors and their descendants, the first time an American state paid reparations for a racial massacre.