The Rosewood Massacre and the 1994 Apology

On the first day of nineteen twenty-three, a white woman in the town of Sumner, Levy County, reported an assault. A rumor spread that a Black man from the nearby community of Rosewood was responsible. Within hours, armed white men from surrounding counties were converging on the road.

Rosewood was a prosperous community. It had a church, a school, a Masonic lodge, a turpentine operation, and several Black landowners who had built their own homes and businesses. In the week that followed, white mobs burned every structure in the town, drove the survivors into the surrounding swamps, and killed an unknown number of residents.

How many died is a question the historical record has never resolved. The state of Florida's official investigation, conducted in nineteen ninety-three, documented eight deaths. Survivor testimonies collected over the following decades described a toll that some witnesses put at twenty-seven or higher. Researchers working from other evidence have estimated figures ranging up to one hundred fifty. The total number of people killed in Rosewood in January nineteen twenty-three is not established in the public record with certainty. What is established: people were killed, a community was erased, and the survivors were driven out of Levy County permanently.

The town site today is unmarked woods. There is no plaque, no monument, no road sign.

In nineteen ninety-four, Governor Lawton Chiles signed the Rosewood Claims Bill, making Florida the first state in the United States to pass reparations legislation for a racial massacre. Nine survivors and their descendants each received one hundred fifty thousand dollars. An additional five hundred thousand dollars went into a fund descendants could apply to for lost property.

The bill passed with significant legislative opposition, seventy-one years after the week it was meant to address. The survivors who testified before the Florida legislature to make it happen were elderly. Several had never spoken publicly about what they saw until then.