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Rosewood, FL families were a diverse crowd of prominent landowners, farmers and businessmen before the massacre.

Remembering the Rosewood Massacre

Rosewood, Florida was a bustling and fiscally diverse town with Black landowners. It was estimated that Rosewood’s families owned up to 300 acres each — a fact that was instrumental in their unprecedented reparations win decades later. Many of those families called grand twostory residences, with such luxuries as parlors and pianos, home while others tilled smaller plots and had more modest accommodations. Life in Rosewood dared to boast promise and security in the Jim Crow South, but that charmed existence was shattered when a vicious tale devastated the lives of the close-knit community and destroyed the town.

On January 1,1923 the thriving Black community of Rosewood, was turned into a place of terror and fear after Fannie Taylor, a 22-yearold married White woman, claimed she had been assaulted by a Black man. Her claim “opened the doors for the lynch mob to come in and over a seven-day period of time, they went on a killing spree. From January 1, to

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