An Elergy to Rosewood

The story of the Rosewood Massacre begins with the celebration of the New Year. In January 1923, during a time when Jim Crow laws mandated, encouraged, and protected severe racial discrimination, a white mob descended on the predominantly Black town of Rosewood. This group included members of the KKK who had congregated in Gainesville (50 miles northeast of Rosewood) for a large rally the previous weekend. Responding to a later-dispelled rumor about an assault on a white woman (a common, and usually false, accusation behind many of the era’s lynchings and pogroms), the mob tracked, killed, and permanently displaced the Black residents of Rosewood. State officials suppressed reports of the event, now known as the Rosewood Massacre. Years later, Lizzie Robinson Jenkins clung to the firsthand accounts told by her aunt, a survivor of the massacre, and founded The Real Rosewood Foundation (TRRF) to research and expose the history of Rosewood.