Rosewood the Movie

The movie Rosewood had a lot of impact on black and white people throughout the century. Rosewood stems from a small town located in central Florida. It co-existed with 120 people, mostly blacks who owned and farmed the surrounding land. On New Year's Day of that year, Fanny Taylor, a white woman in the nearby predominantly white town of Sumner, ran out of her house screaming, bruised and battered, claiming that a black man had assaulted her. In fact, the beating had been at the hands of her white lover. Fanny had lied so that her husband would not find out about her adultery. Fanny claimed that an escaped black convict from a local chain gang had done this. This led to tension and resentment to all the local townspeople of Sumner. The County Sheriff led the whites to revenge letting nothing stop in their path of destructiveness. At the end of the week, seventy to two-hundred and fifty blacks were killed in the area and the town of Rosewood had been completely destroyed.

The events which occurred at Rosewood in 1923 were widely

reported at that time not only by the Florida press, but also by

the national media. In February of 1923, a month after the

violence subsided, a special grand jury was convened in Levy

County to investigate these matters. The grand jury returned no

indictments, and except for newspaper accounts, no records of

the grand jury proceedings remain. It does not appear that any

other official investigation of Rosewood was undertaken. Over

the years following these events, brief references to the events

of Rosewood were made in a few historical studies of racial

violence; however, no researched report of these matters was published (Johnson,1).

Until July 25, 1982, the investigative reporter,