How a Florida race massacre in 1923 was almost erased from history

[Nevilledog]

https://news.yahoo.com/florida-race-massacre-rosewood-1923-erased-from-history-163323201.html

For years, longtime Florida resident Arnett Doctor noticed that his mother routinely went into a deep depression around Christmastime. It wasn’t until weeks later that her yearly depression would subside, and he never understood why. Then one Christmas, when he was 19, Doctor’s mother finally told him about the week of racial violence that she and dozens of other Black people endured in January 1923, when a white mob terrorized and destroyed their rural community in Rosewood, Fla.

Now, 100 years later, historians and descendants of those families, who once buried the ordeal in their memory, are making sure the story of the Rosewood massacre is never forgotten.

“It’s really important that we remember these events because they’ve been hidden for too long,” Maxine Jones, a historian with a focus on African American history and a professor at Florida State University, told Yahoo News. “In order to understand the future and then move forward, we have to understand the past.”

The Rosewood massacre is eerily similar to a lot of other tragic incidents of racial violence in American history. In this instance, violence broke out in the town of about 150 mostly Black, land-owning residents on Jan. 1, 1923, after a white woman accused a Black man of assaulting her. News of the allegation spread fast as tensions quickly boiled over. An angry mob of white residents from nearby Sumner, Fla., began hunting for Jesse Hunter, a Black man accused of the assault with no evidence, for a week. Over that time, residents’ homes and businesses were burned down and churches were destroyed. In all, at least six Black people and two white people were killed; no one was arrested following the ordeal. Residents who were able to escape fled to nearby Gainesville, while others, historians say, disappeared altogether. For decades, the incident was never talked about by Rosewood victims out of fear of retribution.

*snip*

[summer_in_TX]

1. Wonder if and how Florida State University will cover

the Rosewood Race Massacre in light of Gov. DeSantis's war on anything resembling Actual American History and CRT.

[CoopersDad]

2. Thank you for posting this terrible bit of history. Never let it die.