Rage and Ruin: The Rosewood Massacre

Today when most of us hear about the state of Florida, it is almost always quickly followed by some quirky story about someone acting incredibly and hilariously stupid (Florida Man), but amidst that light and lively sensation, it can sometimes be difficult to remember that that hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t that long ago, for some people it’s even still within living memory, that Florida was a hotbed of radical and racist ideology that led to countless deaths.

This was the case for Rosewood in the 1920’s and it was a community that would never be the same again.

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In 1847, settlers arrived in Rosewood to harvest cedar wood. Up sprouted two pencil mills, several turpentine mills and a sawmill, and out of that grew a little pocket of civilization in the swampy Floridian wilderness. Then followed farms, a post office and even a train depot and a dock. This was the burgeoning beginnings of Rosewood, and what promised to be a profitable, industrious community without racial segregation.

This is a key thing to note, especially given the times. Racial tensions had eased a bit since the civil war, even though they weren’t gone entirely, but for the most part, Rosewood was a happy place to live for anyone of any racial background.

That was until about 1890 when the cedar trees began to run out. In response, many of the white residents of Rosewood moved to the nearby town of Sumner and Rosewood became a predominantly black township.

Two families then emerged from Rosewood’s population, both of them incredibly successful and both of them black. The Goin family bought into the turpentine industry, but then had to leave in order to avoid lawsuits from white competitors. That left the Carriers, who had made their name and fortune in the logging industry and were now a key part of the Rosewood community.

1915 was the peak for Rosewood, which saw its population rise to 355 people, but in so many ways it was also the beginning of the end. 

The turn of the 20th century had seen an incredible rise in legislative racial segregation. It was now law that white and black people couldn’t get on the same bus, let alone drink from the same water fountain, and tensions began to rise higher and higher. 

The state of Florida then created new criteria that citizens would have to meet in order to vote and cut off the growing strength of black communities at their knees. By 1920 most of the 344 black population of Rosewood were unable to vote and were being controlled by the 294 white residents of Sumner. Black residents could no longer run for office, had no legislative power and weren’t even allowed to be jurors. 

Ever resilient, the people of Rosewood did what they could to look after themselves. They built three churches, a school, a Masonic Hall, a new turpentine mill and a sugar mill. They even had their own baseball team called the Rosewood Stars. They had two grocery stores and about a dozen or so two storey houses for the local residents. People had pianos and organs. They had time and money to paint their houses different colors and one former resident recalled that “There were roses everywhere you walked.”

Rosewood needed to rely on Sumner for very few things and that was a good thing. Lynchings were at an alltime high in the South. What legislation couldn’t take from the black communities, supremacists were pilfering behind white masks and pointed hoods.

And then things escalated even further with the looming threat of the First World War. Just when things looked like they were about to devolve into a racial war with one wrong word, the US army began arming civilians with weapons and sending them off to battle. 

All the radical, white supremacists saw then was that the US government was giving weapons to despondent, second-tier citizens.

Even the Germans sought to capitalize on the growing racial tensions and dropped propaganda pamphlets encouraging black, American soldiers to turn on their white counterparts.

Back home, Southern extremists were ever concerned about interracial relations, especially after witnessing these relations between black soldiers and European women during the war. They pulled rank and emphasized the importance of white women’s purity. They made it part of their culture that the very worst crime a white woman could commit would be to take a black lover, and the very worst crime a black man could commit would be to sexually assault a white, Southern woman.

These fears and concepts of sexual taboos reached their peak in the winter of 1922. One of the first bursts of explosive and violent behavior came from Perry, Florida, when a group of white men stormed a black man’s house after a schoolteacher had been found murdered. The man, Charles Wright, was dragged out into the streets and burned at the stake. The following day, two more black men were shot and hanged, and the school for black children, the church, amusement hall, several homes and even the Masonic lodge were all burned to the ground.

And then, just a few weeks later, a woman in the predominantly white town of Sumner had a shocking story to tell. 

Fannie Taylor was a twenty-two-year-old married woman with two young children. Her husband, James Taylor, was a millwright and would be up and out of the house before dawn every morning for work, leaving Fannie to look after the home and children.

One morning in 1923, Fannie’s neighbor woke up to screaming. Thinking that something was wrong, her neighbor then grabbed her rifle and rushed over, only to find Fanny on the floor. Fannie had been beaten, her face was bruised, and there were scuff marks on her notoriously clean floor. Fannie claimed that a black man had broken into her house after James had left for the day. He had then allegedly tried to rape her before beating her and running out the back door.

The neighbor searched the house and didn’t find anybody else, except Fannie’s infant child.

Fannie Taylor had a mixed reputation around town at best, but rumors of her assault sparked a flame that wouldn’t easily be put out.

Levy County Sheriff Robert Elias Walker rounded up some men and began searching the town, desperate to put minds and hearts at ease and rid the streets of a violent criminal. 

But links to prominent names in the Rosewood community quickly threw up a different version of events. One that shone Fannie in a different light entirely.

Working as a laundress for the Taylors was Sarah Carrier, who would often bring her grandchildren Philomena and Arnett Goins with her. The three of them had individually and collectively seen a white man entering and leaving the Taylor household on several occasions, and believed him to be Fannie’s lover. If anyone had beaten Fannie and left the house that day, it had been this man and no one else.

Despite this new information, a mob continued to form in Sumner. News had broken about a black convict named Jesse Hunter who had escaped from a nearby chain gang, and with that the white population began to arm themselves. Around 400 men piled into Sumner from neighboring towns, many of them were believed to have taken part of the KKK rally that had happened a few days before in Gainesville. It’s believed that about 100 men attended that rally, where they’d burned a cross and gathered under a banner reading “First and Always Protect Womanhood.”

Sheriff Walker deputized some of these men, but with the sheer number of angry, armed and intoxicated individuals in front of him, he must have known that things were going to turn ugly fast. If he’d had any doubt about that, they would have been quickly set straight with what happened to Aaron Carrier.

Sniffer dogs lent to Sheriff Walker from a nearby convict camp led him and over a hundred men to Aaron’s home in Rosewood. Believing that they had their man, the mob then stormed the house, beat and roughed up Aaron outside, and tied him to the back of a car. Aaron was then dragged all the way back to Sumner.

Seeing the situation devolving, Sheriff Walker then changed strategy. Instead of trying to find Fannie’s would-be assailant, he began urging the black population to take cover and hide.

The mob then grabbed hold of a local blacksmith named Sam Carter. They believed that Sam had helped Jesse Hunter escape, and tortured him into confessing. Sam then took the mob out to the forest where he had allegedly left Jesse. When no one could find him, one of the men turned around and shot Sam in the face. The mob then hung Sam’s body from a tree to act as a warning to others.

Sheriff Walker and mill supervisor W. H. Pillsbury tried to subdue the crowd, but days later the situation was only getting worse. Three days after the riot had begun, a mob stormed Sarah Carrier’s house where somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five people were hiding, many of them children.

Sarah’s son, Sylvester Carrier, was inside with his mother and he was known to be a bit of a character. Proud, determined, and an expert hunter, when Sylvester caught wind of what was happening in Rosewood he set about trying to protect as many people as possible.

It’s unclear who shot first, but some accounts say that Sylvester killed more than a couple white assailants in a shootout that left the house riddled with bullet holes. The standoff lasted well into the following morning when friends managed to approach the house and found both Sarah Carrier and Sylvester dead. The children were then hustled away to hide in the nearby marshland.

They were quickly joined by other Rosewood residents who were fleeing the mob. Men had begun pouring kerosene on to houses and setting fire to them while others shot and killed those who tried to escape the flames.

Allies escorted and smuggled women and children away, many of which had been helped by the white owners of Rosewood’s second grocery store, John Wright and his wife Mary Jo.

A week later and the official victim count was eight, but historians and eyewitnesses claim that number was much higher, and was probably something more like twenty-seven. When Haywood Carrier returned to Rosewood from a hunting trip, he found that his wife Sarah, his son Sylvester and his brother James were among the dead. It’s said that the shock and the grief destroyed Haywood, who rarely spoke after that, and died only about a year later.

The residents of Rosewood fled and never returned. Those who did try to stay, like John and Mary Jo Wright found themselves on very shaky ground. They were ostracized from the white community for helping black residents escape, and things grew so bad that John was rumored to have kept a gun in every room of his house. Mary died of cancer a few years later. John then took to drinking heavily, and quickly followed his wife.