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Part Three
NEWS COVERAGE AND EDITORIAL RESPONSES OF FLORIDA AND SOUTHERN, NORTHERN, AND BLACK NEWSPAPERS Although newspapers had their biases in reporting the Rosewood events, the editorial responses of white and black state, regional, and national newspapers and other publications are important in evaluating the Rosewood affair. Most major Florida and Southern white news- papers ran the AP stories but did not editorialize. They expressed alarm at the extent of racial violence, but generally said it resulted from the attack on Fannie Taylor and blamed the subsequent deaths on the action of black residents. These papers also denounced criticism of Florida by Northern newspapers. Of those that did editorialize, some justified and defended the violence, but others tempered their opinions with calls for law and order. Usually, white journals in the North also limited themselves to AP releases. Yet, several were highly critical of the mob action. Without exception, the African American press condemned the entire episode. White Florida newspapers often denounced the lawlessness at Rosewood, but not the action itself. The Tampa Times, while decrying outside distortions and exaggerations, was an exception. "We have visited the crime of one on the members of a race," the paper editorialized. "Now that the senseless passion has been gratified, and an awful revenge has been taken, we are content to settle down to a period of quiet. But we will not admit that we are anything but a Christian and civilized people." The Tampa Morning Tribune was another exception. Events at Rosewood "almost make the blood curdle in one's veins," a Tribune editorial declared. Qualifying its statement, the paper added that the "provocation, assault of a young pure white woman by one or more negroes, was great. It is a provocation which, more than any other, stirs the anger, and whets the determination to punish, in every white man who reads of it." Having defended one of the region's oldest and most deeply held shibboleths — the sanctity of Southern womanhood — the Tribune settled into its argument. "There is no reason in Florida," the editorial continued, "why justice should not be meted out by the courts in such cases, instead of by mobs defiantly assuming to be arresting officer, court, witnesses, trial judge, jury, and executioner, all at the same time." The Tribune did not temper its conviction that "Lawlessness is anarchy. This state is law abiding. The American people are law abiding. What then is the source of this maddening virus in our veins when reason gives way to riot and judgement is lost in clamor?" The paper pointed out that the South had defeated passage of an anti-lynching law by Congress in part by arguing that the individual states themselves could and would handle crime, including extra-legal mob action. Not to do so, as in the Rosewood turbulence, would be to ignite again "the flames of hatred and scorn fanned toward the South by those in other states who think nothing good can come out of us." Still, and emphasizing again the ancient taboo, as much as the affair was to be regretted, it offered "another proof to the lawless negro that he cannot with impunity, or even with hope of escape, lay his hands on a white woman, for white men will shed their blood to get him." The Tampa newspaper demanded that "county and state officials must take immediate steps to punish every man, black and white, who is guilty of violating the laws of the land, be they state or national laws. . . . The 'riot' is a warning to [Florida] enforcement officials, from the veriest constable to the sheriffs, and the judges, that unless there be speed in the punishment of crime, through the regular channels of the law, there will be more and more an increase of such horrible things as this." No newspaper in Florida reacted more strongly than the Gainesville Daily Sun. The Sun's wrath was so visceral that as late as Saturday, five days after the attack on Fannie Taylor, the editor was unable to comment: "Words cannot express the horror of the tragedy at Sumner and Rosewood in Levy [County]. A brutish negro made a criminal assault on an unprotected white girl. As a result of this, two officers of the law were killed and another wounded. Five or six negroes were killed and many others wounded. Houses were burned, indignation, vengeance and terror ran riot. We do not know how to write about it. We feel too indignant just now to write with calm judgement and we shall wait a little while. One thing, however, we shall say now — in whatever state it may be, law or no law, courts or no courts — as long as criminal assaults on innocent women continue, lynch law will prevail, and bl[ood] will be shed." Having made clear that sexual crimes against white women led inevitably to violence, the Sun's editor felt able "to write with calm judgment," and editorialized the next day: "Let it be understood," he declared, "at the very beginning of what we shall here write, that the racial trouble at . . . Rosewood was no 'Southern Lynching Outrage.' It was caused by the shooting down and killing of two officers of the law and the wounding of another. These law officers were shot down by negroes, barricaded in a house where a brutish beast was supposed to be sheltered and this brute had criminally assaulted a white woman. These officers in Levy [County] were trying to do their duty. . . ." The editorial cautioned: "Do not let it go abroad, however, that racial troubles are impending in this state. Do not let it be attributed to malice or hatred between the races. We have many good negro citizens who deplore these things as deeply as the white people do. There is no more racial prejudice in the south than [there] is in the north. We are glad to testify to the law abiding character of the large majority of colored people of Florida. Let us speak plainly, how- ever. We do not write in justification of lynch law for offenses like murder or arson or crimes like that. We believe the law should take its course and that patience should prevail even with what [we] are pleased to call 'the law's delays.' Preach and admonish and warn as you may, however, the crime of rape will never be tolerated for one single moment. Congressmen may rave and froth and pass laws as they please but the time will never come when a southern white man will not avenge a crime against innocent womanhood. Nor will the men of the north tolerate it any more than the men of the south." After conceding that other crimes did not justify mob action, the Sun repeated its sentiments: assault against a woman "creates in the hearts of brave men a determination that vengeance shall speedily follow the brutish deeds of the rape fiend. Call it lawlessness if you will. Legislate against it as you may. Let it be understood now and forever — death of a dog." Having taken its stand, the Sun used Sunday's editorial to condemn the murder of James Carrier. The partial recanting to what the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch called a "barbarous act," was not made until the Sun raised the level of the attack on Fannie Taylor to an actual rape: "In writing yesterday about the horrors of the Rosewood race riot, we did not speak of it as justifiable in the sense that the law defines justification. We spoke of it as the inevitable result of the crime of rape. We said that it was no 'Southern Lynching Outrage.' That it was brought about because of the shooting down to death of two white men and the wounding of another by negroes barricaded in a house where a brutish beast, who had ravished a white woman, was supposed to be harbored. We spoke of it as the result of aroused indignation." Then the paper declared, "In no sense do we excuse all that happened. What occurred at the 'Death house' was inevitable. The taking of the old negro man, the next morning, to the cemetery and there shooting him down was an outrage. It was unworthy of our race. We are told that bootleg liquor was the bottom of that. What a shame! What a disgrace to manhood! If that old negro man was accused of any crime, short of the rape itself, he was entitled to a fair trial." The Gainesville paper, inspired by the Sanford Herald, published at the seat of government of Seminole County in east-central Florida, next arrived at a final explanation. The paper's rationale was a variation on the 'outside agitators' theme that has universally, historically, and without regard to geographical location been used to dismiss controversial issues and to avoid local blame. The episode was the work, both newspapers deduced, of a stranger, a vagabond, and was thus caused by the absence of or lack of enforcement of laws against tramps. The two journals absolved the black race in general of any inherent criminality. Quite the opposite, the papers conceded, most blacks were hard working and law abiding. According to the Sanford Herald, "Again a no-account negro — an escaped convict in fact — has aroused racial feeling and caused mob rule and killings and bad feelings generally in this state. This trouble is always caused by strange negroes and not by the local negroes and goes to show that the vagrants especially of the vicious type should be closely watched and made to leave as soon as possible. The trouble has never been with the local negroes but the negro tramps and vagrant gamblers and vicious negroes generally." Echoing the Herald's sentiments, the Sun remarked, "The horrible trouble at Rosewood was brought about by a lawless and criminal negro vagabond. He was loafing over the country, shirking work, violating law and was a disgrace to his race. The people of his race in Florida should not be condemned because of the act of this vagabondish convict. The negroes of Florida are conducting themselves well. They are a law abiding people who desire to live in peace." The Sun admitted, "We have vagabonds and criminals in our own race. They have no legitimate employment but go about committing crime and avoiding work. They are burglars and thieves. They are wiretappers and bootleggers. They burn houses and sometimes commit rapes. What we need in this devoted land of ours, in city and town and country is a rigid enforcement of the vagrancy laws without distinction of color or condition. The man who does honest work does not commit crime. The man who lives by devious means is a vagrant and a criminal." In Tennessee, the Nashville Banner attempted to discriminate between acts of retribution against individual African Americans in the South and wholesale violence against a black community which was more typical of the North. The Banner concluded: "Clashes will probably continue to occur as long as the two races live together on the same soil — and that will be, apparently, forever. We hope to make them less frequent. The best men of both races are earnestly working toward that end." Reports in Northern newspapers were entirely different in tone and largely condemned Florida and the South generally for its racial violence. The New York Call, a socialist journal, saw the Rosewood incident as demonstrating "how astonishingly little cultural progress has been made in some parts of the world, and . . . also explain[s] the industrial backwardness and political reaction of the South." In New York state the Utica Press commented: "Certainly this latest calamity in Florida is a serious reflection upon the State and its people." The New York World used Rosewood and other examples to warn that if the South did not police its own house, the federal government would step in. "At Rosewood in Levy [C]ounty," the World editorialized, "a race war has broken out that threatens to lead to the gravest consequences. It is the usual story of a reported attack on a white woman, followed by the lynching of a negro [Sam Carter], not in the belief that he was the actual criminal but on the charge that he had 'transported in a wagon for several miles a negro suspected of the crime.' From that started fighting between armed white men and negroes, which the county authorities professed to be unable to stop. How many have been killed is not known, but the utter breakdown of the law is admitted." As was common with many white Northern newspapers when discussing the South, the editor saw fit to lecture both races with a gratingly sanctimonious tone: "Incidentally there is an awful lesson to the black race in this and in every other state in the Union: when one of his color is sought for a crime of such intense blackness as that which started the Rosewood 'riot,' his duty is to conceal nothing; but like a man, and like a law abiding citizen which his leaders claim — and, which mostly — he is, aid the regular officers of the law in bringing to justice the criminal. And that advice stands for the white men of the state too — those who take vengeance of a summary nature upon aiders and abettors of law and order maintained in a lawful way." Black newspapers universally denounced the events in Rosewood and blamed southern society for the persistence of racial violence. A black newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, the Argus, explained why violence against blacks, as in Rosewood, occurred: "When a mob goes out to lynch a victim it knows when it is forming, that unless by accident not one of their number will be hurt physically, and that no mental anguish will come to anyone by being arrested or subjected to a fine or jail sentence." Therefore, the Argus contended, "There will always be mob violence and lynching just so long as mob members can satisfy their blood lust on a certain class of people, knowing that not one of their number will be punished by the constituted authorities of the law." The same idea was expressed by the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch. The Oklahoma paper had fought for passage of federal legislation against lynching, and now offered a post-mortem: the nation's record in 1922 was "a severe indictment of the white South which fought to the death the Dyer Bill in the [S]enate of the United States." The more recent events of 1923 made it difficult to refute the Black Dispatch's overall analysis: "we believe that the seed of lawlessness in America is IN HER HYPOCRITICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE NEGRO.'" A despairing Walter F. White, black native of Atlanta, Georgia, activist, authority on lynching, and later Executive Secretary of the NAACP, understood the essence of the problem. In a letter to the New York Call about the deaths of African Americans at Rosewood, he asserted, "Their crime was that their skins were black." White reduced the issue to a single query: "Let us put aside any considerations of humanity or decency — the American conscience is no longer shocked by murders at home. The question to be faced is simply this: How long can America get away with it?" A spokesman for blacks, the New York Age, compared the racial discord in Chicago in 1919 with that in Rosewood: "In Chicago . . . the Negro was not afraid to fight back and when the fight was over he felt that he had something pretty near a fair chance before the law. Those are two conditions which the suffocating, damning atmosphere of the South does not permit." The Age mentioned that "the newspapers this week carry the name of a Florida riot, the culmina- tion of a series of lynchings, which included men not even alleged to have committed any crime. In this riot a whole Negro community has been wiped out, their homes and their churches destroyed by fire, and the Negroes themselves are hiding in the woods like hunted animals." William Pickens, a black native of South Carolina, who served as field secretary for the NAACP from 1920-1942, wrote a letter to the white New York World. In it Pickens compared how the law was applied in New Jersey and in Florida. "Rosewood and Orange," he wrote. "Two beautiful names, but almost as different as Hell and Heaven. . . ." Pickens believed, "If anything is needed to show up the folly of mob action, the contrast between mob action in Rosewood, Fla., and the legal process in Orange, N. J.[,] supplies that need." According to Pickens, "In Florida a Negro is accused of 'attacking' a white woman (whatever may be hidden under that word), and the mob, savage, furious and hellish, gets busy. What was the result? Seven people dead (some of them white) and all the homes of all the innocent Negroes burned down. The only fellow [Jesse Hunter] there who has not suffered is the fellow who is charged with the crime. For that fellow escaped. Mobs are not so proficient as the law." In contrast, in Orange "a black committed an attack and murder, and the law got busy & the only person to suffer is the criminal. He'll be hanged & the innocent whites and blacks go about their business. That is law. That is civilization. That is justice — justice to both the criminal and the lawabiding." Few black newspapers failed to point out that the blacks who died were innocent people. A typical comment was that of the Norfolk Journal and Guide. The journal observed with bitter irony that "none of the persons done to death [were] in any way whatever connected with the alleged assault." A number of historians have traced Northern racial discord during the time to economic causes. Job competition built up animosities between blacks and whites and often resulted in violence. Such trouble was far less frequent in the rural South, but the episode at Rosewood raises the issue. Both blacks and whites from Rosewood, Sumner, and other nearby communities were employed by the Cummer Lumber Company. Were the two races at odds over employment, specific jobs at the mill, and pay scales? Did whites resent those blacks in Rosewood who owned houses and land? The Kansas City, [Kansas] Call reported the Rosewood episode and remarked, "It has been proven time and again that the desire to eliminate Negroes from industrial competition, to acquire Negroes' property without paying a fair price, and other similar mercenary reasons have been the real cause of race riots." There may have been economic rivalry between the races at Rosewood, but the authors of this report have found nothing to substantiate this. Oliver Miller, a white resident of Cedar Key, declared in 1993 that relations between his fellow whites and blacks were good before and after the Rosewood incident, that there were few if any repercussions in Otter Creek or Cedar Key, and that blacks continued to work at the Cummer saw mill in Sumner. Elmer Johnson, like Miller a resident of Sumner in 1923, remembered that the pay scale at the saw mill was less than fifty cents a day for both races. Evidence that blacks and whites apparently got along in their business relations could be seen in real estate transactions between them. The affair at Rosewood also brought out larger issues of how blacks perceived themselves and their place in American society. The shootout on Thursday night was seen by some blacks as a manifestation of their refusal to be subservient to the white majority. Arming themselves and fighting back demonstrated that blacks were prepared to defend their homes and their lives to the last extremity. The actions of Sylvester Carrier were portrayed as heroic by black writers. The Pittsburgh American, a black newspaper, declared that what happened at Rosewood should "make Negroes everywhere feel proud and take renewed hope. For our people have fought back again! They have met the mob with its own deadly weapons, they have acquitted themselves like free men and were not content to be burned like bales of hay." The American noted that "Things have come to the place in this country that the only course for the Negro is armed resistance. The states refuse to protect us against the mob and the federal congress has washed its hands of all anti-lynching legislation. Lynchers are free to prowl the earth and butcher any Negro who gets in their path. The only way for the black man then is to keep his powder dry and shoot back." As the paper evaluated the situation, "It was a much needed lesson in race solidarity that these southern Negroes at Rosewood gave to their brothers in the North." "No man in his right senses expects to run, and run, and run forever," the Kansas City Call declared. The black paper added, "Three hundred years of slavery did not drive all slaves into abject submission, nor will continued oppression kill out our determination to sell life dearly, even down in Florida. . . . Man created in God's image will always chose to die face to the fore — whenever it is sufficiently clear that he may not live in peace. . . . We cannot establish rights by fighting. But how under Heaven can we urge our people to die like sheep. . . . How can we ask them to be cowards? We cry aloud for mercy and the answer is the torch! We call for justice and are answered by the yells of the mob! Maybe it is the will of Providence that we shall be spared the worst working out of hate, but we fear it is not to be!" A special report to the New York Amsterdam News, unsigned but obviously written by an African American, offered important evidence of how Rosewood was held up as an example of bravery and courage in the face of overwhelming odds. The Amsterdam News's story was decidedly not a truthful or even an objective example of journalism, but because of its emotional and psychological message, parts of the report are included: "Hearing that the accused man, Jesse Hunter, was hiding in the village of Rosewood whites from the neighboring towns invaded the Negro section and attempted a house to house search. They were met with a hail of bullets at the first house they came to. The inmates, recognizing the belligerency and lawless composition of the howling mob, did not wait to ask for an explanation of their visit. They opened fire and prepared to sell their lives dearly. They might not have committed any crime, but they knew a lawless mob when they saw one.EFFORTS TO RESTORE THE LEGAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AFTER ROSEWOOD Although Florida's newspapers were slow to criticize the violence in Rosewood, they recognized that the extent of the destruction in the community had been excessive and they were concerned that additional racial violence would undermine stability in the region. They also worried that the criticism by the northern press threatened the state's unprecedented prosperity that was fueled by tourists and the real estate and development boom. Florida was begin- ning to shed its image as a poor, backward region. To ignore what happened at Rosewood was to invite northern criticism and injure the state's booming economy. In the aftermath of the Rosewood affair, regional newspapers attempted to persuade local residents to stop the sum- mary executions and to allow for the restoration of legal due process. Fear about continued racial unrest and northern criticism led Governor Cary Hardee to order a special grand jury and a special prosecuting attorney to investigate conditions there and in Levy County. On January 29, he named A. V. Long, who was the sitting judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, and George DeCottes, prosecuting attorney for the Seventh Judicial Circuit, to inquire into "certain high crimes that have been committed by unidentified parties or persons." A native of Jacksonville, DeCottes, replaced A. S. Crews, the regular state attorney for the eighth district, possibly because he had failed to secure a conviction in a recent lynching in Newberry. DeCottes was a forty-three-year-old World War I veteran who lived in Sanford and was active in the state's military affairs. Long, forty-six, who was born in Lake City and lived at Gainesville, had a fondness for bow ties and a reputation for fairness and impartiality. Governor Hardee took the action because "it is necessary that the State should use what may be necessary of its resources to apprehend and punish crime;" and it is "essential that a thorough and rigid investigation be made of mob violence in the two counties." As the Jacksonville Journal put it, "There will be those who condemn him. But Governor Hardee can comfort himself in the fact that his attitude also expressed the attitude of the great thinking class of the South. . . ." Blacks and some whites, who noted that twenty-four Floridians (one of them white) were lynched during Hardee's administration, remained skeptical. The special grand jury investigating Levy County was empaneled at the
courthouse in Bronson on February 12. Before a packed courtroom, Judge
Long charged the grand jury to make every effort to fix the blame where
it belonged and to see that the "guilty parties are brought to justice."
He declared that mob violence had brought disgrace upon Levy County and
the entire state. Examination of witnesses was begun the next morning,
and a grand jury
On February 13, thirteen witnesses testified. At the end of the day, DeCottes declined to comment on whether sufficient evidence had been obtained to secure indictments. The prosecuting attorney explained that he could not discuss the matter but said that the incident was being thoroughly investigated. Twenty-five white and eight black witnesses were scheduled to testify the next day. The February 14 examination of witnesses ended shortly before noon so that DeCottes could go to Gainesville and subpoena additional witnesses. Finally, on the sixteenth, the grand jury's foreman, R.C. Philpett, a prominent Levy County farmer, reported that the jurors regretted being unable to find evidence on which to base any indictments. The jurors deplored the mob action and declared that they were also speaking for the best people of Levy County. DeCottes was praised by the grand jurors for his efforts to secure true bills. Within three months Sheriff Walker resigned from his office and within a year DeCottes resigned as Prosecuting Attorney for the Seventh Judicial Circuit. The reasons for their action is not known. CONCLUSIONS Based on our research of the Rosewood violence, we are prepared to offer several conclusions. First, the affair at Rosewood lasted virtually the entire first week of January 1923 and we can document that eight people were killed during the racial violence — six blacks and two whites. The rest of the black community of Rosewood was driven from the area by white mobs who then burned their homes, a church, masonic hall and a store. The black residents never returned. The tax rolls of Levy County reveal that Ed Bradley, Hayward and Sarah Carrier, and Emma Carrier were all taxpayers in the years prior to the violence. After 1923 much of their property was acquired by John Wright and other whites who paid the delinquent taxes on the property. We believe that Sheriff Walker failed to control local events and to request proper assistance from Governor Hardee when events moved beyond his control. While Hardee condemned the violence and ordered a special prosecutor to conduct a grand jury investigation, he did so (more than a month had passed) only after black residents were forced to leave Rosewood and their property was destroyed. The failure of elected white officials to take forceful actions to protect the safety and property of local black residents was part of a pattern in the state and throughout the region. In Ocoee in November 1920, and Perry in December 1922, local and state officials failed to intervene to protect black citizens, and in each incident several innocent blacks were killed and their property destroyed. The same was true in other southern states where rape and black resistance were not tolerated by white residents and were seen as a legitimate excuse to abandon the law in favor of brute force. Pleas from citizens and their spokesmen fell on deaf ears, and Florida's white leadership responded to the civil and racial unrest only when it threatened to jeopardize the state's economic advancement. Like the racial violence in Ocoee, Perry and numerous other communities throughout Florida and the South during this era, Rosewood was a tragedy of American democracy and the American legal system. In all these incidents, alleged assaults against white women were sufficient to warrant the abandonment of the American justice system. The need to protect southern white women was seen as sufficient to justify racial violence and oppression. When black resistance was added to an alleged assault upon a white woman then elements of southern society believed retribution against the entire black community was warranted. Far too many whites believed an example had to be set so that other black communities throughout Florida understood that such resistance to southern racial mores would not be tolerated. We conclude that by their failure to restrain the mob and to uphold the legal due process, the white leaders of the state and country were willing to tolerate such behavior by white citizens. The authors support the views expressed by former white residents Leslie and Ernest Parham who characterized Rosewood as a "good community." Ernest Parham said about Rosewood's black residents that "the people had nice homes and were law abiding and took care of themselves. . . ." Leslie Parham added that "they did not deserve what happened to them." The authors agree with the Parhams. BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Manuscript Collections
60 Minutes Segment on Rosewood. Feature Films "Rosewood," presented by Warner Brothers in 1996, directed by John Singleton and starring Ving Rhames, Esther Rolle, Don Cheadle, Jon Voight, Michael Rooker. Secondary Sources Books: Bench and Bar of Florida. Tallahassee, 1935. F. W. Bucholz, History of Alachua County Florida. St. Augustine, 1929. Chalmers, David. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Durham: Duke University Press, 3rd edition, 1987. Colburn, David R. and Richard Scher, Florida's Gubernatorial Politics in the Twentieth Century. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1980. D'Orso, Michael. Like Judgment Day, The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood. New York: Boulevard Books, 1996. Ellsworth, Scott. Death in the Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 4th edition, 1974. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism. 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1965. History of Florida Past and Present. Chicago and New York, 1923. Rudwick, Elliott. Race Riot in East St. Louis, July 2, 1917. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Spear, Allan H. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto,
1890-1920. Chicago: The
Tindall, George B. The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Tuttle, William M. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Unpublished Materials Carper, Noel Gordon. "The Convict Lease System In Florida, 1866-1923," Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1964. Dabbs, Lester, Jr. "A Report of the Circumstances and Events of the Race Riot on November 2, 1920 in Ocoee, Florida," M.A. Thesis, Stetson University, July 1969. Dye, R. Thomas. "Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Economic Development: A Case Study of Cedar Key, Florida," Unpublished Master's thesis, Florida State University, 1992. Zarur, George De Cergueira Leite. "Seafood Gatherers in Mullet Springs:
Economic Rationality and the Social System," Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Florida, 1975.
POSTSCRIPT On March 24, 1994, the Florida Legislature's Special Master, Mr. Richard Hixson, submitted his FINAL REPORT and RECOMMENDATION** on the claims against the State of Florida by the survivors of the Rosewood, Florida Massacre to: RE: HB 591 by Representatives De Grandy and LawsonThe Honorable Bo Johnson Claim of Arnett Goins, Minnie Lee Langley, et al. v. State of Florida RECOMMENDATION For the . . . reasons [outlined in my Final Report], I recommend that HB 591 be amended as follows: 1. The bill should direct the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, or other appropriate law enforcement officials, to conduct a complete investigation of this matter including interviewing the available witnesses to determine if any criminal proceedings may still be pursued. 2. A fund should be established to compensate the Rosewood families who can demonstrate a property loss as a result of the displacement of the Rosewood residents. 3. The elderly claimants who sustained emotional trauma as a result of the destruction of Rosewood and the evacuation of the residents should each be compensated in the amount of $150,000. 4. A state university scholarship fund should be established for the families and the descendants of the Rosewood residents. As AMENDED, I recommend HB 591 be reported FAVORABLY. Respectfully submitted, /s/ Richard Hixson Richard Hixson
On Monday morning, April, 1994, the Florida State House of Representatives met and voted on HB 591: RE: Arnett Goins, Minnie Lee Langley, et al. v. State of Florida. The bill passed with 71 yeas to 40 nays. On Friday, four days later, the Florida State Senate voted, 26 in favor to 14 opposed, to accept the Special Master's Final Report as amended.
**The full text of the Special Master's Final Report is found at:
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