Remembering the Rosewood Massacre

Get the Point...

During the first week in January of 1923, white mobs in Rosewood, Florida, a small lumber town near Gainesville, murdered masses of innocent Black people—and burned down nearly every Black house (along with the Black school, church, and Masonic Lodge) in the area—amid false allegations that a Black man, Jesse Hunter, had brutally raped a white woman, Fannie Lee Taylor, on New Year's Day.

Lest we forget that in 1994, then Florida Governor Lawton Chiles (D) signed a $2.1 million dollar claims bill that provided $150,000 to each of the nine still living Rosewood survivors. In 1998, acclaimed filmmaker John Singleton released a fictional version of the macabre events in a movie entitled "Rosewood" that starred Ving Rhames, John Voight, Don Cheadle, and the late Esther Rolle.

Knowing that I had familial roots in that part of Florida, about eleven years ago, after a case management conference at the Levy County Courthouse, I logged onto Google maps and soon found what was once Rosewood nestled deep in woods not too far from Shamrock, Florida, the small town in neighboring Dixie County where my paternal grandmother, Arilla Jones Hobbs, was born in 1922.

My Grandmother Arilla Jones Hobbs, the second little girl from the left, standing pressed against the leg of her father, lumberjack D.K. Jones, about 20 miles north of Rosewood three years after the massacre…

As I viewed the dense brush, pine and palm trees, and signs that noted "private property" for white homeowners where a vibrant Black community stood tall, the irony hit me that like the City of Pompeii in antiquity, that a once thriving Black township ceased to exist almost overnight all because a mob of lawless murderers—with the full assistance of law enforcement officers as depicted below—decided to deprive Blacks in the area of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As I paced and glanced for about an hour, one of the current white owners watched me like a hawk from her porch as I stood in awe—and anger—at what remains a total miscarriage of justice to that (and this) very day!

Picture of an old house in Rosewood that still stands over a century after most of the surrounding houses and buildings were burned to the ground—and the property was taken over by white squatters…

Not long after my visit, I read in a State of Florida historical narrative an excerpt of testimony from the early 1990's of a then octogenarian white male who, as a child in 1923, not only remembered the tragic events as if they had just occurred, but added—without even the slightest hint of shame—that he and his hunting and fishing buddies would stumble across “bones and skulls of dead n*ggers out in them woods” until they were well into 50's.

Onlookers survey the damage a week after the Rosewood Massacre

Last January on the campus of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, my alma mater, with my daughter (Corri) and her maternal cousin, Lizzie Robinson Jenkins—a direct descendant of Rosewood survivors and THE architect of the centennial Rosewood commemorative events…

Sigh 😢…

May all of those innocent Blacks who were brutally murdered or scattered from Rosewood rest in peace—and may those of us who follow continue to fight for racial justice in America!