One hundred years ago, during the first week of January, Rosewood, a thriving Black community, just south of Gainesville, FL, was burned to the ground by a racist mob. At least eight people were killed, including six Black people. These are only the recorded numbers on file to date, with some estimates being much higher.
The Rosewood Massacre began in a similar fashion as other racist, mob violence that preceded and followed the Rosewood killings, from the Tulsa Race Massacre to the killing of Emmett Till: with claims that a white woman was assaulted.
“A White woman from the nearby town of Sumner claimed she was assaulted by a Black man,” CNN notes. People in Sumner, a predominantly White town, were outraged and “began searching for the alleged and unidentified man, turning into a violent mob that lasted for a week.
“The destruction of Rosewood entailed the systematic razing of the entire town. Every African American structure was burned and the town’s Black residents violently displaced, forced to flee and never return,” historian Edward González-Tennant writes.
Today, all that remains at Rosewood is “a cast aluminum historical marker.”
Unfortunately, history was almost erased as this devastating tragedy was unbeknownst to many for nearly six decades. This all changed in 1994 when “a small group of living witnesses, aided by their media-savvy descendants and a powerful law firm, persuaded the Florida state legislature to award direct cash payments to nine survivors of the event. Descendants of those survivors also received money, in the form of small cash sums and college scholarships,” Time Magazine reports.
“Though politicians carefully avoided using the term reparations, the legislation represented the first time in modern U.S. history that a government not only acknowledged its role in the centuries of systemic racism, violence and economic harm toward African Americans, but also compensated them for it.”
In 1994, then-Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles signed Florida House Bill 591, sponsored by then state Rep. Al Lawson, into law. The bill is considered a model for reparations for Black Americans.
The legislation said local and state officials were aware of the conflict in Rosewood “and had sufficient time and opportunity to act to prevent the tragedy, and nonetheless failed to act to prevent the tragedy; an entire town was destroyed and its residents killed or fled, never to return.”
Authorities “failed to reasonably investigate the matter, failed to bring the perpetrators to justice and failed to secure the area for the safe return of the displaced residents,” the bill reads.
The bill awarded $150,000 payments to survivors who could prove they owned property during the massacre and set up a scholarship fund for their descendants who attended state colleges.
At least 235 students have received the Rosewood scholarship since 1994, according to a 2020 report by the Washington Post.
“Money is often how we make it up to people, it’s one of the ways you try to make someone whole,” Martha Barnett, a retired Tallahassee-based attorney who was representing about 12 Rosewood massacre survivors when the 1994 bill was passed. “Money for their property, money for the lost opportunity to live a good life. They lost the opportunity to have their first, second generation of kids benefit from the middle class life they had created.”
This week, the University of Florida is a hosting a centennial anniversary “Remembering Rosewood” to commemorate the horrific events of January 1923.