Descendants of Rosewood have a family reunion in South Florida. Everyone’s invited.

BY STARLA VAUGHNS CHERIN
FLORIDA COURIER

Early in the morning on New Year’s Day 1923, in Rosewood, Fla., Fannie Taylor, a White woman, said she was attacked by a Black man. It was a lie. But it didn’t matter.

Founded in 1845, Rosewood was a selfsuffi cient Black community nine miles from Cedar Key and the Gulf of Mexico. Rosewood families supported themselves by lumber work, gathering tree sap to make rubber, making turpentine, and farming and domestic work.

It wasn’t long before the local sheriff’s posse turned into a mob of up to 150 White men with clubs and guns. First, they tortured and killed Sam Carter. Then, after surrounding the house of Sarah Carrier whose son Sylvester was a strong, outspoken and “uppity” man, shots rang out and Sarah was dead. That was Jan. 3.

Killing spree
On Jan. 4, the mob grew. They brought torches. Buildings burned. The church was burned. When the mob set her house on fire, Lexie Gordon fled from hiding underneath it, only to be fatally shot.

More than 250 White men continued the siege three more days, burning every house and trying to kill every Black person they saw. Black residents of Rosewood ran to the swamps and hid, and women and children were put on trains to Gainesville, but conductors would not pick up Black men. James Carrier and Mingo Williams were murdered. Some White residents hid Black families.

In published eyewitness accounts, Ruth Lee Davis described the experience: “I was laying that deep in water, that is where we sat all day long...We got on our bellies and crawled. We tried to keep people from seeing us through the bushes...We were trying to get back to Mr. Wright house. After we got all the way to his house, Mr. and Mrs. Wright were all the way out in the bushes hollering and calling us, and when we answered, they were so glad.”

Every Black person that lived in Rosewood was forced out as the mob burned the town to the ground. Families were scattered, their homes and businesses gone.

Jealous rage
“They were jealous of what those Black people had in the woods,” Rosewood decendant Janie Bradley Blake told the Florida Courier. “They were thinking, ‘What do they need with a sugar mill, a turpentine still, a general store, gardens and homes?’ We were surviving just fine without the help of anyone.”

Sarah Carrier was Blake’s great-great aunt. Black grew up in Otter Creek, about 45 minutes from Rosewood. She and cousin Sandra Maxwell and about 200 other decendants of Rosewood families will gather in Miami this weekend for the 25th anniversary of the initial Rosewood Family Reunion.

Under the theme “Keeping the Legacy Alive,” Rosewood families will celebrate with a Gospel Fest at Christian Fellowship Church, Family Fun Day at the historic Virginia Key Beach, a banquet featuring former Congresswoman Carrie Meek as keynote speaker, and a Soul Food Fest with collards, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato pie and red velvet cake at St. PaulR

17;s African Methodist Episcopal Church. All events are open to the public.

Common history
“That is one of the reasons we chose Virginia Key,” Maxwell told the Florida Courier. “It has historical significance for Blacks in Florida just as Rosewood does.

“All of Black people have a strong heritage. It is especially important that the younger generation understand the historical part. There was a real racial divide that resulted in this massacre at Rosewood.

“Young people will know they have a heritage and that they must repeat what happened to their family and never forget it. Although this is a Rosewood Family Reunion, it is something that Black people all over Florida experienced in different degrees. It is all of our histories.”

The families are making a point to use African-American businesses for the reunion. “Everything we’re doing for this reunion is Black except the hotel,” Blake grinned.

Peaceful, independent
“The Goins family had a sugar mill and housing for people who worked there. It was 600 acres of land they held title to. Every family there owned land. My great-grandfather had 375 acres and my grandfather 175,” she explained.

“Every year we had the biggest baseball game you’ve ever seen at Cedar Key for Memorial Day. Business owners provided the picnic and transportation. Everyone was off from work.

“My birth mother always had a Bible. Daddy was the catcher (on the baseball team). The batter swung the bat and it shattered his facemask and pierced his head. My mom poured some salt in his head and read from the book of Ezekiel and watched the blood stop. I remember that day because when Daddy got hurt, it cut out the fun. They went to singing and praying.

“For everything, you prayed before you left. You prayed when you got there. You prayed when you ate and prayed when you left. I guess they were trying to protect us. We were brought up with love. The love was portrayed by everyone in the community. No matter who it was, wherever you were, if someone did something wrong they would chastize you and they let me know they did it because they loved you.”

Historic recognition
In 1993, survivors of Rosewood filed suit against the state government for its failure to protect them and their families. Sponsors in the Florida House and Senate introduced compensation bills for the survivors and descendants of Rosewood. A group was commissioned to research and provide a report by which an equitable claims bill could be evaluated by the Florida Legislature.

Historians from Florida universities delivered a 100-page report (with 400 pages of attached documentation) of the Rosewood massacre that became part of the legislative record. Despite virulent opposition, Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles signed the Rosewood Compensation Bill in 1994. A $2.1 million package compensated the survivors and their descendants for what Chiles termed a “blind act of bigotry.”

It provided for $150,000 for each of the nine survivors, and a $500,000 pool for the descendants. Descendants could apply based on demonstrating that each had an ancestor who owned property in Rosewood in January 1923. Later, a college scholarship fund was set up for Rosewood descendants.

The Rosewood Family Reunion T-shirts will list the last names of the decendants attending this year’s reunion: Bradley, Carrier, Coleman, Edwards, Ebans, Goins, Hall and Robinson. There are only two left who actually lived in Rosewood at the time of the massacre.