A white mob wiped this all-black Florida town off the map. 60 years later their story was finally told
Even by the standards of the 1920s South, the chain of events in Rosewood were unfathomable
Nine-year-old Minnie Lee Langley was outside with her mother on New Year’s Day 1923 when she saw them coming: a mob of white men marching toward her hometown of Rosewood, Florida. A daughter of the Jim Crow South, where violence against black people was part of everyday life, Minnie knew that all those white men together meant terrible trouble.
“We was out there in the front yard and them crackers were just coming down the railroad just as far as you can see, some of them,” she recalled in a radio documentary in the 1990s. “Just as far as you could look, you could see them in those big white hats and on horseback.”
Even by the standards of the 1920s South, the chain of events that followed was unfathomable. Over the course of a week, Minnie Lee’s small town would be wiped off the map, with the families who lived there so terrified to speak of what happened that the town was almost wiped from history, too.
Rosewood was a relatively well-off, nearly all-black town a few miles from Florida’s Gulf Coast, with an African Methodist Episcopal church, a Masonic lodge that doubled as a schoolhouse, and two general stores. Most of the people who lived there were domestics for white families in nearby Sumner, or worked in that town’s sawmill. The white mob had been summoned after the screams of Sumner resident Frannie Taylor brought neighbors running to her door on the morning of January 1. Taylor had been beaten, her face visibly bruised, and she claimed her attacker was black. Eyewitness accounts from her domestic workers told a different story; they said she was struck during an argument with the white lover she was seeing while her husband was at work. Nevertheless, the group of whites, numbering in the hundreds according to white witness and Sumner resident Edith Foster, were deputized by the county sheriff. They’d followed a bloodhound’s nose two miles to Rosewood and Minnie Lee’s family’s front yard, where they grabbed Aaron Carrier, Minnie’s uncle, and started looking for rope to tie him up with. “Mama just went to crying and all that, saying ‘Don’t kill him ’cause he don’t know nothing about this,’” Langley recalled. The sheriff intervened and took Carrier to a nearby jail for his own safety; it was the only time that white authorities would help black residents of Rosewood.
https://timeline.com/all-black-town-rosewood-wiped-off-the-map-by-white-mob-73ca6630802b
