Rosewood

In 1923 white residents of nearby towns invaded the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, lynching and killing many residents and burning their houses to the ground. The actual number of victims is estimated to have been as few as 6 and as many as 40. The survivors left the area and the events were largely forgotten, at least in official histories of Florida, until the early 1980s, when accounts of the event surfaced and were published.

The name of Rosewood is now a byword for one of the worst episodes in America’s racial history—though not the worst. The New York Draft riots, and any number of race riots in the 19^th and 20^th centuries exacted larger death tolls among African Americans and white Americans as well. What is significant about Rosewood is that its story was suppressed and forgotten for so long.

John Singleton’s 1997 film chronicles and dramatizes the events surrounding Rosewood. It is organized as a documentary, divided into sections labeled with the dates on which events occurred. The film shows what happened, or at least one version of what happened. It seems closely based on contemporary accounts of the event, as well as on a study commissioned by the Florida legislature in 1983 that led the legislature to pass a bill providing reparations for the families of Rosewood survivors.

The events chronicled in Rosewood begin when a white woman of dubious reputation is savagely beaten by her white lover. For reasons that were not clear she lies and claims that she was attacked by a black man. (This recalls for me Faulkner’s story “Dry September”). The consequences explode and lead to lynchings and mass chaos, with white mobs roaming back and forth across the town, setting buildings afire, shooting and hanging men and women. The sheriff at one and the same time leads one of the mobs even as he tries to control it. Some whites are sorry for the murders they commit; others murder with relish. It is difficult to connect these events with anything recognizable in modern times. But of course they did occur.

Among the few virtuous whites are the storekeeper John Wright (Jon Voight) and his wife Mary (Kathryn Meisle). Voight plays a weak and conflicted man who cannot face the mob and is afraid of losing business if he stands up against the murders. His wife is new to the South, horrified by everything that is happening around her, and appalled by the weakness of her husband. Ultimately, Wright helps survivors escape. Ving Rhames plays Mann, a stranger who is passing through town when the trouble begins. He is the ostensible hero of the film (the “Mann”), though he is not based on a historical character. Because Wright and Mann conspire to help the survivors escape, and because Wright himself is white, the film recalls Schindler’s List, where the Nazi Schindler helps many Jews escape the death camps. This is a way of suggesting that the suffering of African Americans is akin to the suffering of the German death camp victims.

I wanted to like or at least admire this film, but it fails to do much more than show the events leading to Rosewood’s destruction. It doesn’t provide much of an explanation for why the mobs do what they do, other than suggesting that they are racists and that racists behave murderously. White people kill black people and the remaining black people kill white people. There’s a lot of shooting, much death and carnage, many images of horror, and a lot of suspense as the survivors barely manage to escape on a locomotive Wright has secured. Ving Rhames as the itinerant stranger Mann suffers recurring crises of conscience, but ultimately he overcomes his hesitation and rises to the task of being the film’s hero. Wright’s tenuous family situation is redeemed by his discovery of courage.

The film is important for the story it tells, but it fails to tell the story with much understanding and resorts to stereotypes in the process of doing so.