Racial unrest and violence was prevalent throughout the United States in the early 1900’s. It was hard to go any amount of time without hearing of the lynching of a black citizen, a violent mob against black people, or large riots of killing blacks. In Rosewood, Florida, an incident of high caliber and commotion occurred during these moments of extreme racial segregation. These Rosewood incidents became public knowledge as the entire population of blacks chose to move out of the small city. These black citizens were in fear for their lives as many racially heinous and violent crimes were occurring against the people of their same race. Lynching had become so common that many blacks moved in fear that if they did not, they would end up dead.
In Rosewood, the actual account of what happened was different from the story that was told to the public through this movie. A white woman named Fannie Taylor was married to a white man named James Taylor and they together lived right outside of Rosewood, Florida. Her husband, James, had gone to work that day, and Fannie was home alone. She chose to cheat on her husband with a white man who some believed worked for the Sea Board Airline Railroad; the same man who physically beat her as they finished having sexual relations that day. Her story to the courts and the people outside was that a black man came and “assaulted” her, both sexually and physically. As no one ever disputed the fact that this assault was done by a black man, the unanimity of the white community that this assault was in fact a racial assault against her—her story was never questioned. Although some blacks in the community knew as they were eyewitnesses to the man walking from the house, no one ever fought against Fannie...
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...they deserved something positive in return. These people in Rosewood suffered because of the color of their skin and not anything else. I have realized that I am lucky to have the choices I have in my education, and athletics, and I am grateful to be able to play basketball for my school—as back in the times that they lived, they were simply lucky to be alive and did not have any choice in sports to play or fun to have. They simply worked for white people, and tried to stay away from death. They were not given the chances that I have today. This movie gave me a new, grateful and thankful view on the society I live in today.
Works Cited
Jones, M., rivers, L., Colburn D., Dye, T.,& Rogers, W.(1993, 12 22). Documented history of the incident which occurred at rosewood, florida, in january 1923. Retrieved from http://www.displaysforschools.com/rosewoodrp.html.
The Moore’s Ford lynching shows that the Ku Klux Klan was still very powerful in Georgia just after the Second World War. Blacks who lived in these areas which were overwhelmingly rural and contained large plantations owned by white men were regularly browbeaten into submission by the white minority and sporadic outbreaks of violence were not uncommon. There was a wealth of evidence against several white men who were prominent citizens of the county, but no prosecution was ever conducted and the murderers went to their graves without having paid for their crime....
Neil McMillen’s book, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow categorically examines the plight of African Americans living in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow. McMillen, a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, describes the obstacles that African Americans dealt with in the fields of education, labor, mob violence, and politics. Supplementing each group with data tables, charts and excerpts from Southern newspapers of the day, McMillen saturates the reader with facts that help to understand the problems faced by black Mississippians in the years after Reconstruction.
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites—totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
Jones, M., Rivers, L., Colburn, D., Dye, T., & Rogers, W. (1993, 12, 22). Documented history of the incident which occurred at rosewood, florida, in january 1923. Retrieved from http://www.displaysforschools.com/rosewoodrp.html
It started when a white woman from Sumner said that she was assaulted by an African American. Her name was Frances Taylor. Fannie was 22 years old and her husband James Taylor was 30 years old in 1923. James was a millwright and he was working for Cummer and sons in Sumner. Fanny wasn’t the most social girl in the town barely anyone knew anything about her. People say that all she did was clean her floors with bleach to keep them stone white and take care of her two young children. On January 1, 1923 Fannies neighbor said that she heard screaming and grabbed a revolver to go investigate. She found Fanny on the ground beaten with marks all over her body. Fanny told the neighbor to go check on the baby because an African American had bust open her door and beaten her and that the African American was inside the house. Fanny original report said that the African American just beat her and didn’t rape her. But rumors started going all over the town and people believed he did rape her. Philomena Goins said that she saw John Bradley with Fanny and she said that they were together and that day they got into a fight and he beat her. Then when John Bradley left Fanny house he went to
Racism was a serious issue from the 1870’s to the 1900’s and seemed to be never ending. During this time, white people thought they were superior to all other races. They believed that all other races were inferior to them and treated them as if they were. They were brutal and nasty to them just because they were not the same race as them. During this time, the two major groups that were targeted were the Native Americans, African Americans, and Filipinos.
“Two Towns of Jasper” may seem like a normal, modern day town but on the inside the citizens still hold ideas of segregation and racism. These ideas are then examined as the documentary investigates the trials of Bill King, Lawrence Brewer, and Shawn Berry. The three murderers tried for Byrd’s death were all Caucasian and in some way showed hatred toward African-Americans. Bill King and Lawrence Brewer had tattoos that represented the Aryan Nation, a public and political white pride organization, and Shawn Berry was also thought to have ties to the organization. When they beat and murdered Byrd the issue of race arouse and citizens began to question each other’s motives. African-Americans brought up issues of segregation and Caucasians tried to justify the segregation as a traditional way of life. Societal change was examined and made possible because cit...
In the rosewood and racial violence in January 1923 lynching was common in the u’s but in the south of the united states two years before representative l.c. dyer of the Missouri introduced a bill in the house of representatives to make lynching federal crime. Dyer acted out as a voice for blacks the bill passed the house but not the south they prevented a vote resulting in the measure’s leaving the state to deal with the lynching. Although lynching had died down by sixty-four in 1921, 1922 fifty-seven years ended and lynching had fifty-one victims that were black and six that were white. That something I don’t understand fifty-one black’s not to count the ones that were gunned down and I believe that most of them that died did not have anything to do with it the stuff they deserve was harsh.lynchings,shoutings,burning,and whatever else they was just harsh. In 1923 there were several murdered. The first week of January, rosewood was the center that became a riot, massacre, between the races causing a race war between the two.
During post the World War 1 era, racial discrimination and violence spread throughout Florida and the United States. White Americans lashed out against African Americans by using unprecedented violence consequently wiping out whole communities. In one of the first documented race riots in America, a violent mob, armed with an excuse, massacred the residents of Rosewood wiping the town off the map.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
...dation and violence, including lynching, were an ever-present danger. Northern African Americans were not unaffected and suffered the same widespread discrimination and school and residential segregation.
Emancipated blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in fear of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was not only a way for southern white men to exert racist “justice,” it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, under the control of a violent white male ideology. In response to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was established—a campaign in which women played a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the forefront and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the first news reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles appeared in The Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper that she co-edited. She urged the black townspeople of Memphis to move west and to resist the coercive violence of lynching. [1] Her early articles were collected in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a widely distributed pamphlet that exposed the innocence of many victims of lynching and attacked the leaders of white southern communities for allowing such atrocities. [2] In 1895 Wells published a larger investigative report, A Red Record, which exposed how false or contrived accusations of rape accompanied less than one third of the cases documented around 1892. [3] The statistics and literature of A Red Record denounced the dominant white male ideology behind lynching – the thought that white womanhood was in need of protection against black men. Wells challenged this notion as a concealed racist agenda that functioned to keep white men in power over blacks as well as white women. Jacqueline Jones Royster documents the...
...lot of the historical events that took place in the report in the movie. He could have made them a little more accurate but I feel like that would have taken away from the movie. It would have made it more historical instead of making it grab my attention as it did. After reading the article The Rosewood Massacre and watching the film Rosewood, I learned that blacks were very easily subject to racial prejudice. Whites were gullible and persuaded to do things no matter how wrong or what harm it could cause to others. I knew the justice system was unfair but it seemed as if they did not have one at all or justice was only for whites. The Rosewood Massacre time period was not one I would wish anyone to be a part of; it was horrible.