________________
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Burn and Shoot
The first pattern of arson in the Rosewood events was relatively limited, occurring as Thursday night was moving toward Friday. January 4-5, 1923. The arsonists were never identified, though the geography points to some suspects. This first spree of burning struck in a narrow, quarter-mile strip along the railroad, accessible to a railroad motorcar. The timing put it just after the Otter Creek group seemed to be repulsed from Sylvester Carrier’s house.
This didn’t prove it was them, however, or that the legacy of Otter Creek’s Henry Andrews was getting in one last kick. There were competing stories about mysterious horsemen at the scene, or a vengeful neighboring white youth, or a brother-in-law of Fannie Taylor—stories barely at the level of gossip, bereft of details..
The first residence southwestward down the railroad from Sylvester’s was the home of George Bradley and family, but this building was skipped by the arsonists, perhaps because in was rented from whites, having once been Ford’s Hotel. After that came a small Baptist church, also for whites, a leftover from cedar mill days, and it too was skipped. Beyond that, house plots owned by African Americans were scattered beside the tracks. Some of the houses were vacant, testaments to the community’s decline. But among them were two homes still occupied, those of widow Lexie Gordon and a couple with one child, Sam and Ellen King. These two homes, on adjoining plots, were certainly destroyed by the arson spree, along with two frame buildings that the arsonists could have viewed as community hubs: the First A.M.E. Church of Rosewood and Magnolia Lodge #148 of the Free and Accepted Masons. These too were burned.
In addition to those four burnings, it may have been easy to torch vacant structures owned by ex-residents, including the former homes of Fred Edwards, Benny McCoy, and the late Will Marshall, as well as the defunct cedar mill’s former boarding house, which had become home to the Burns family, then fell vacant before 1923. The torched church had been the replacement in 1912 for a church burned in an internal feud in 1911, and had weathered the Christmas pageant shooting around 1916 (see “Christmas”). This time the church would not rebound.
Only one eyewitness informant on these burnings would surface. In 1982 I located Eloise King Davis in the Opa-Locka suburb north of Miami. She was the adopted daughter of Sam and Ellen King. At the time of the violence she was eight. Though this age is close to the age-seven threshold that Rosewood seemed to d for early childhood pseudo-memories, it was old enough for some sharp impressions. As with other child informants, Eloise Davis’s sharpest memories were of daily life in a familiar routine. On the 1923 violence, with its sudden shock and shifting novelty, the images become sparse.
She was in bed, and heard no distant gunfire. The first inkling she remembered of something being wrong was when her father excitedly burst into the house from outside. Despite the late hour he had gone somewhere—perhaps walking up the tracks toward Sylvester’s. Now he was feverishly rushing back, gasping that they must all run for their lives.
The Kings and their next-door neighbor Lexie Gordon lived at Rosewood’s invisible internal boundary, the line between map sections 29 and 30, which also formed a confusing color line. East of the line were old pioneer families of African Americans like the Carriers and the Bradleys, who were dark-complexioned. But west of the line were the newer Goins-related settlers, coming from the Carolinas in the 1890s, also African Americans but very light-complexioned. Lee Ruth (Bradley) Davis, of the darker pioneer side in Section 29, said of the Kings: “They were white people, but they were goin’ for colored.” Yet in the census the Kings were “B,” for Black, and they had adopted a very dark-skinned daughter. Their close neighbor Lexie Gordon was a pale, diminutive woman with long red hair. Little Eloise King felt sure that Miz Lexie next door was white, but in the census Lexie Gordon was “Mu,” for Mulatto. For more than a century her ancestors had had listings such as “Free People of Color” and “Indian wife.”
The relevance of all this to Sam King’s sudden alarm is that the pale-skinned half of Rosewood seemed not to have reacted as swiftly to the possibility of a rampage, or it got the word late. Also factoring in somehow was Sam King’s work, as a logger under woods boss Andrews. He may have personally known the Otter Creek avengers. When he dashed home, according to his daughter, he barely had time to run next door and shout a similar warning to Lexie Gordon, before hurrying back to where his wife Ellen had thrown a coat over Eloise; then all three fled into trees behind the house.
As soon as they got there, Eloise said, she heard a man’s voice shouting in front of the house, calling for Sam to come out. When the house made no reply, Eloise saw flames billowing from it, then heard her father say sadly to her mother: “Baby. all your stuff is gone.”
By contrast, the fate of Lexie Gordon’s house next door would leave no informants, though the name “Lesty Gordon” made the AP wire next day, announced as a fatality. Stories about how the murder had happened were legion. All agreed that Lexie Gordon had been sick and could not run. But when forced from the house by the flames, did she try to hide under a bush, or under the house, or under a quilt, or in an outhouse? The gossip could have no possible root but the secretive perpetrator or perpetrators, who were not under oath.
The scant information available about the section-line arson suggests that a sketchy plan was part of it, though the plan could be carried out only once. A one-two form of atrocity targeting had been made famous in 1917 by the East St. Louis race riot, called the bloodiest in twentieth-century America until the Los Angeles riot of 1992. The savagery in East St. Louis, the opening bout of the World War I-era riots, reached a systematic form, in which houses would be set on fire in order to shoot down occupants forced to flee from the flames.
There would be many stories after Rosewood about great numbers of African American residents allegedly cut down in this game of Burn and Shoot, as had happened at places like East St. Louis. But years of tracing and following every morbid lead have reached the same conclusion from many different directions:
Yes, there was Burn and Shoot at Rosewood, but it happened only once—for the simple reason that after that, all the other targets had fled. From that point onward, when houses were torched there was no one left inside to shoot.
In reality, the mountains of Rosewood corpses sometimes attributed to Burn and Shoot boiled down to one diminutive 55-year-old woman with long red hair.
_________
A figurative information province of perhaps 15,000 people could be posited as existing in January 1923 along the Seaboard tracks between Gainesville (population about 7,000 but claiming 10,000) and gulfside Cedar Key (population about 1,000 and dismally declining).
Roads were poor and automobiles were still few, so the Seaboard passenger train on this route (twice daily, toward Gainesville before dawn, and back to Cedar Key in the evening) was common transportation even for short flag-station hops.
And if the rails were the spinal column of this cozy but scattered province of shared information, then its spinal cord, crackling and sizzling with nerve impulses, was formed by the East Florida Telephone wire that slouched along on poles above the rails.
The wilderness end of this information province, in the swamps and pine flats of Levy County by the Gulf, knew the trackside phone line as being especially cozy, for along that stretch, at least from Lennon north of Otter Creek and down to the Gulf at Cedar Key, phone subscribers were lumped together on a single party line, meaning that only personal discipline kept anybody from eavesdropping on the phone conversations of anybody else.
Here was a paradise for rumor, like a laboratory experiment trying to see how quickly the process of excited half-hearing and pressured free association could turn a neutral word like “cow” into something like “ferocious panther.” The results could then barrel up the line to the civilized end of it, at the upstairs main telephone switchboard in Gainesville, a mile from the medieval-looking castle parapets of the University of Florida, which in those days was all-male, all-white, and plagued by malaria.
This was an information realm of two counties, Levy and Alachua, and in both, the stroke of midnight going into Friday, January 5, 1923, would more or less mark out the beginning of a mass psychological adventure. After that point, and for at least three more days, the great majority of adult white partakers in the information province would seem to embrace a new belief, becoming convinced that a tiny, mysterious place called Rosewood had spawned a black uprising.
There seemed to be few efforts to pin down what, precisely, the word “uprising” was referring to in this case. There were general ideas about a fearsome if profoundly mystifying and shape-shifting event—able to cause panic, rage or merely shocked curiosity.
Even among the many whites who were genuinely repelled by what other whites wound up doing in the mysterious-sounding community of Rosewood, there seemed to be few if any who failed to believe in the basic premise that was moving the more violent whites—that is, that the uprising was real.
This operated much like any mass delusion. Word spread that the gloomy old house that had killed Poly Wilkerson and Henry Andrews (two “lawmen,” they were called) had been able to strike this grievous blow because it was packed with armed black rebels—rebelling against exactly what, and organized by whom, were not first-priority questions. Whether some believers (and murderous responders) actually believed that something like the slave uprisings of old had occurred, with the equivalent of Nat Turner’s minions now out to massacre white families as in 1831, or whether others simply used “uprising” as shorthand for “riot,” and saw the uprisers as a formless wave of unreason yearning for primeval mayhem, either way the word “uprising” said that the uprisers weren’t yet finished rising up—so somebody had better do something.
An elusive psychopathological segment of the white population—among the rioters—could thus see itself as being the true and the brave, more assertive than more timid believers who simply gasped and watched.
By dawn on Friday, January 5, a clanking linotype machine that filled the cramped downstairs area of the Gainesville Daily Sun had produced a screaming summary of the delusion, in the form of a giant 10-line collage of headlines, whose 74 words devoured the front page:
5 DIE SUMNER RACE RIOT
TWO WHITE MEN AND THREE BLACKS
ARE SHOT TO DEATH
Rosewood, Three Miles Out of Sumner
Centre of Trouble
Arising From Case of Assault
Twenty-Five Negroes Barricaded in House,
Defy Armed Posse and Open Fire on Whites,
Killing Two, Wounding Several
Entire City of Cedar Key Up in Arms
Sheriff Ramsey and Many Others Respond to
Call of Levy County Officers to Aid in Quelling
Rebellious Black Population
The heart of the delusion was in lines 7 and 8:
“Twenty-Five Negroes Barricaded in House…
....Open Fire on Whites.”
The real occupants of Sarah Carrier’s house that night, 15 to 17 people, were almost all women and children. But an approximate count of them had apparently found its way to local law enforcement via refugees at the improvised shelters. Then still more vaguely described approximations of this number hit the rumor mills and the telephone party line, to almost immediately transmute in ways that might seem semantically impossible.
The number floated (and enlarged) not only onto the alleged uprisers, but also, by Sunday, onto the number of secret corpses allegedly hidden in a mass grave (variously put at 17 or 18), and, in a completely separate vein of believers, to the “nineteen” white men supposedly dead on Sarah Carrier’s porch (Apparently eleven-year-old witness Philomena Doctor did not invent the number nineteen on the spot; she herself later spoke of seeing it in a newspaper, perhaps meaning the locally-circulated Chicago Defender. The number seemed to be retrofitted into her own claimed impressions as if it had originated with her).
Across America on Friday, at the touch of a telegraph key, the sensational story about the houseful of uprisers hit Associated Press member papers from New York to Los Angeles, and even the non-members, like Hearst outlets and some urban black weeklies could lift from the AP as desired. Headlines pasted onto the dispatches were up to local discretion. Some found “a score or more of negroes” in the glowering rebel band, while others stuck with twenty-five. None were making the time-consuming trip into the heart of darkness to see the horde boiling down to terrified and half-frozen Minnie Mitchell and such well-armed thugs as her young cousin Bernadina in a bloodstained gown.
The delusion had geographical gradations. Far from the scene, readers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Memphis Commercial Appeal might marvel at a phrase or two on smudgy newsprint, only for an instant, unmoved to take any action. But within ten miles of ground zero there were whites who would remember how they fled their homes in fear of the envisioned Nat Turner-style horde (which horde, being envisioned in fantasy, could be expected to do just about anything).
The operant explainer was the death of the two “lawmen.” “Defy Armed Posse and Open Fire on Whites, Killing Two.”
If the conspirators were out there engineering ambushes of lawmen—and not just one!—it must be because they wanted to get the thin blue line out of the way first, to make way for their monstrous plan of general chaos. Unseen by white believers in this idea were the huddled refugees who were beginning to formulate their own polar opposite explanation: the whites must have come originally with diabolical plans to kill Sylvester first, because they knew he would stand up, and they wanted to get him out of the way, so they could proceed with (etc.)…
By Friday afternoon the picture of a black uprising conspiracy was being summarized by an evening paper, the Jacksonville Journal, recently taken over by regional press lord Richard Lloyd Jones, who in 1921 in Oklahoma had been accused of helping to incite the Tulsa race riot.
On Rosewood, the uprising picture was stitched together neatly by the Journal. The gang rape of Monday, now accepted as a given, is found to have come from the same hive of degenerates that rose up (“heavily armed”) when questioned on Thursday:
"Since Monday this section of Florida has
been stirred as a result of an alleged criminal
attack upon a young white woman at Sumner. Three negroes are alleged to have taken part in the attack….A party of citizens came here from Sumner to investigate. In onehouse, it was said, they found about twenty-five negroes, heavily armed. Andrews and Wilkerson started to enter the house and citizens said they were shot without warning.”
The delusion would not entirely end with the end of the Rosewood violence on Sunday, January 7. Even at that late date, as sightseeing women and children gawked at vacated ashes and ruins, the Sun’s grandiloquent editorialist was still fuming. This 73-year-old lawyer and orator, Robert Davis, was known genially as Colonel Davis, though he had never been a real colonel. On Sunday he amplified the Rosewood delusion by figuratively pinning deputy badges onto the two martyred bodies on the porch.
In reality, one of them, Wilkerson, really was a district constable, though he had lost his more prestigious badge as a deputy sheriff when he was fired. The other “lawman” had no credentials at all, besides the tales about sadism that dogged “Boots” Andrews. But in Colonel Bob’s editorial in the Sun, both martyrs became virtuous, peace-loving “deputies.” This distortion finally became too much for the Levy County Sheriff’s Department, which had been overwhelmed by the chaos set loose by the two. Sheriff Bob Walker, angrily making his case to a small weekly paper in Levy County, succeeded in getting an article published that then shamed the larger Gainesville Sun into a rare act: a retraction.
“We Were Misinformed,” mumbled the Sun’s editorial title on January 13—admitting that 1) the two were in no way deputized, 2) they were not on a legitimate law enforcement mission, and 3) when they went, nobody really thought the Monday fugitive was somehow conveniently hiding in Sarah Carrier’s house.
It was a little late by then, and even this retraction did not retract the core uprising delusion. That belief would continue for decades among many local whites. More widely across America, hasty readers of the wire-service extravaganzas were left to continue believing whatever details they might remember from the sea of ink. Few would see Colonel Bob’s tiny local retraction, confessing that it wasn’t so.
_________
After the apparent failure of the motorcar avengers from Otter Creek, in their bid to dislodge Sylvester Carrier and rescue the bodies from the porch (and possibly their subsequent resort to wider arson), the man with the six-shot pump shotgun was left all the more alone.
Not even the prying eyes of a later Information Age could see Sylvester Carrier at this point. As dawn approached on Friday, January 5, 1923, eyewitness informants who might serve a later age were not on hand—despite a cloud of third-hand gossip full of conflicting tales about what other gossips had said.
Possibly by this point he was wounded. There was the strange story about the bed. This allegedly involved a white besieger named Red Rollison (though in 1994 an impressive search by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement could find no trace showing that such an individual ever existed). Rollison is described as risking his life against possible shotgun fire in order to take a peek into Sarah Carrier’s downstairs bedroom window. Easing up fearfully to see over the sill, the spy is surprised to find, by the light of a lamp left burning beside a bed, a man lying there motionless, wounded. Rollison then seizes his chance. Craftily lifting his gun toward the man on the bed, he “plugged Sylvester Carrier right in the burr of the ear,” finishing him off.
And yet other stories, as energetically told, have the coup de grace coming outside the house, as white reinforcements closed in around the wounded marksman and found him on the ground. There were many variants. The deciding calculus would seem to have been as Sam Hall put it: Once Sylvester’s mother had been killed he was not going to run away from that house, and if he did not run away, the whites would not stop coming, in larger and larger numbers, until the box of 24 shotgun shells he had reportedly bought on Monday would not be enough.
Sheriff Bob Walker’s display to a photographer of Sylvester’s by-then fabled shotgun was not in itself conclusive proof that Walker was not using some kind of ploy to calm the mob. The proof of the death lay in a mountain of circumstantials, no one of them conclusive by itself, but conclusive in the aggregate —such as the fact that after Sylvester’s wife Gert escaped the violence she went to South Florida and remarried, twice.
Fifteen-year-old Sam Hall, having spent Thursday night in the woods, gamely got up in the morning and began his usual walk to work in Sumner. Hall said that as he was walking through Rosewood on the railroad he suddenly heard a roar, and looked back down the tracks to see a crowd of whites excitedly gathered around a target on the ground, shooting. He had the impression that he might have witnessed the customary lynching ritual of joint gunfire, and the end of Sylvester.
The competing story, about the bed, is particularly haunting, because of what it obviously obscures. The third-hand gossips were not necessarily positioned to know that Sarah Carrier had been killed on that bed. That dismal part of the heroics had been covered up by yet other excuse stories. Add to this the probability that the only living person known to be inside the house was not going to be dragging his mother off the bed to dump her onto the floor. She happened to have died in the single most reverential spot available, and likely stayed there. Other ways to looking at it can be found, but this way would mean that the lamp was lit by Sylvester, all right, but not because Sylvester was the figure on the bed. Could the clever executioner in the window have been shooting a woman—who was already deceased? More likely the story was cobbled together non-factually from such floating hearsay elements as “bed” and “body,” and then added drama.
Nine miles from Rosewood at the end of the railroad, the Gulf fishing town of Cedar Key was in an uproar as Thursday night deepened. The very first phone call about shooting at Sarah Carrier’s house would have alerted the party-line operator who sat in Cedar Key. In no time there was tumult about how to go and save the brave lawmen lying on the porch. White Cedar Key resident Frank Coburn heard with a shock how the two had simply been “invited to check up on things” at the house of death, but found themselves walking into an ambush.
A fishing town was accustomed to staying up late to catch the tides, unlike early-to-bed farmers on the mainland, and the Island Hotel where Coburn lived was soon buzzing with alarmed activity—as he recalled it. The caveat here is necessary because of indications that a panic atmosphere in Cedar Key was not only causing real actions but was intruding to affect later memories of those actions.
Coburn hitched a ride in a line of cars streaming out of Cedar Key at dawn, the first sizeable party of Rosewood reinforcements (or self-appointed rioters), splashing across tide flats and sand ruts beside low railroad trestles leading to the mainland. At the edge of town before the tide flats, Coburn recalled, improvised sentries were already posted, so great was the fear of black uprising somehow spreading from the envisioned mainland chaos. When the car was stopped just before the last bridge out of town, he saw a solemn face peering in through the window, as a sentry checked for secreted black uprisers.
But did this really happen? The informant gave every outward sign of sincerely searching his memory for real events, but the sentry scene would not be the only one that gives pause. Would cars going out of Cedar Key be searched? And cars filled with white vigilantes? Had the alarm and its resulting soldierly pretensions become that absurd? Perhaps they had. But was the real indicator of the panic a feverishly over-dramatized memory pattern—to finally leave no reliable picture of what people were really doing?
“Entire City of Cedar Key Up in Arms” cried that morning’s headline collage in the Gainesville Daily Sun, 60 miles from Cedar Key but apparently plugged into that possible town crier, the Cedar Key telephone operator. The story beneath the headline was excitedly vague: “...the population of Cedar Key was aroused...many armed men from there were planning to go to Rosewood...”
The Rosewood events would show incidentally that the decaying island town, isolated from the rest of the world not only by miles of Levy County swamps but by nearer mudflats drowned at high tide, had produced a special intensification of the frontier tall-tale culture. In an in-bred setting of luminous seaside beauty and violent individualism, Cedar Key fairly feasted on its private cycles of legend—and especially morbid, ominous legends—such as the way railroad magnate Henry Plant had laid a curse on Cedar Key, and the way Mormon missionaries were run out of town and then laid a curse on Cedar Key, and how the 1865 Civil War skirmish at Number Four Bridge was secretly a triumphant massacre of black Union troops.
Galloping horrors seemed to multiply as the bypassed railroad port shrank and nearly died. Moreover, the fantasy violence wove together confusingly with savagery that was all too real—like an 1890s takeover of the town by outlaws causing federal troops to be sent in, and the 1930s burning alive of irritating Greek fishermen in the Cedar Key jail—and the exploits of brawler and town marshal Pat Taylor, who was Fannie Taylor’s brother-in-law.
There is no knowing how many times white culture in Cedar Key had convulsed over the gallon-of-gasoline rumor—an uprising specialty. This rumor said that insidious black residents of Cedar Key were so enflamed that they had been buying up a gallon of gasoline apiece for a great orgy of destruction that would burn down the town. Perhaps with roots in the 1830s burning-of-Charleston cycle that had involved both real arsons and many fantasies, the gallon-of-gasoline rumor in Cedar Key was remembered flaring not only in the panic over Rosewood but again in 1960s Civil Rights tensions. That hawk-eyed bridge sentry in Frank Coburn’s memory had to check for the hidden gallon.
It was Cedar Key’s trove of macabre insider tales that first introduced me to what was then the buried Rosewood mystery—but introduced it in an over-dramatized form. This included claims that a giant Rosewood massacre was why Cedar Key’s own black population had disappeared, supposedly in a sudden terrified exodus (in reality they had left gradually along with many whites as job possibilities died, while the fallback of commercial fishing was an all-white preserve). Cedar Key was like a living museum, whose moldering exhibits included fantasized information about Rosewood.
The Friday morning motorcade of Cedar Key rescuers, Frank Coburn would recall, intentionally waited until dawn before making their nine-mile run to Rosewood, for fear of snipers. After all, if Poly and Boots had been ambushed, wouldn’t the uprisers fan out? His fellow motorists told Coburn that a nondescript mass of woods they had entered was Rosewood. As the cars stopped, he recalled diving out fearfully and taking shelter behind a log. The comrades dug in similarly. And then nothing. No uprisers seemed to cooperatively come forth.
Something in the bushes and shadows attracted a few shots. But even the source of the shots was invisible, since they came from someone also hidden in the bushes. Occasional streams of curses and shouts were recalled floating up from unknown throats, vaguely, without specific words. Then at last there was something solid. A pathetically disoriented dog dashed through the notably detail-free memory. Then a roar of gunfire, then a strangled yelp, and the heroes had made their mark on something.
Coburn’s group advances, finding only wandering whites, still nobody to shoot. A great deal of interest focuses on one house. Its insides have been trashed by one group or another, but one of its rooms has still not been searched—an attic. To reach it, no stairs are in evidence, not even a ladder. So Coburn, a small man, is boosted up to a trapdoor in the ceiling, to peek over the sill and look around. He is suddenly the center of attention, the focus of his platoon. Peering over the sill he sees a black man lying there, dead.
Who this was, or why, he has no idea. He never finds out. And thus the story ends. Someone who had heard many tales and somehow entered them in imagination might not have been positioned to know that Sarah Carrier’s house, while it did have an attic-like second story, also had stairs.
So have we learned anything at all here about Friday morning’s first waves of whites and what they were really doing? Or has Cedar Key told one more ghost story?
The 1923 Florida death certificate numbered 775, for Sylvester Carrier, reflects the chaos that overwhelmed local authority that week. It has too many irregularities to be sufficient proof that the stories about Sylvester’s miraculous survival are wishful fantasies. More persuasive is the fact that all located Rosewood ex-residents who were above the age of twelve in 1923, in the best position for firm knowledge, accepted matter-of-factly that Sylvester Carrier really did die that day. To them the evidence seemed impossible to avoid.
The stories of his miraculous survival apparently began to grow in later years among a few survivors who had been young children in 1923, and were impeded by no personal knowledge. Special circumstances were discovered to explain how everyone else could be wrong, by recruiting the all-purpose explainer also used for the secret white boyfriend story: the Masons.
So secret were the Masons, and so powerful, that they could completely cover their tracks. The Masons had put Sylvester in a fake coffin and then got him to a boat on the Gulf, going to someplace where no one could ever go and look. This was also what happened to the secret white boyfriend. Maybe it was a crowded boat.
It all works fine if you want it to.
And this brings us to the Florida historical marker that was placed at the site of Rosewood in 2004. It says that in the Rosewood violence the number of African Americans killed was not six, as the 1990s claims case agreed, but only five. Naming the five, the historical marker conspicuously leaves out the name of Sylvester Carrier. It seems to give sturdy official support to the stories of miraculous escape.
What happened with the marker is this: A local advocate insistently petitioned the state for a marker until the Florida Division of Historical Resources took action. Customarily, the $2,000 cost of such a marker is paid by the petitioner, but in this case, according to the Division, the entire cost was assumed by the state—though wording was to be supplied completely by the local petitioner. Then the Division saw the wording that was proposed. The word “colored” stood out, but there was also a flood of factual distortions. The proposed text was so unfortunate that even the skittish Historical Division saw that something had to be done.
As a compromise, a university professor was assigned to work with the local petitioner to make the marker text not only coherent but accurate. The compromise, however, seemed to tire the professor, and though some of the worst errors in the text were taken out, according to the Historical Division, part of the disputed material became a sort of consolation prize conceded to the petitioner, and was left in, including the word “colored.” That word and the remaining fact errors continue to greet visitors to the site of Rosewood today. In a 1998 journal article the same professor had stated flatly that the Rosewood death toll among African Americans was six, including Sylvester Carrier. But historical truth in Florida is apparently negotiable. Now anyone loving the myth can say the state says it’s so.
_______
To residents living beside the rock road leading from the town of Gainesville into the Levy County back country, the coming of Friday, January 5, 1923, seemed almost to bring a parade. Compared to the usual sparse traffic, it seemed that a veritable stream of cars was moving southwestward alongside the Seaboard tracks—toward a newly famous place called Rosewood. In many of the cars were armed men, all of them white. The morning’s headline in the Gainesville Sun had given the call:
Sheriff Ramsey and Many Others
Respond to Call of Levy County Officers to Aid in
Quelling Rebellious Black Population
Sheriff Perry Ramsey of Alachua County surrounding Gainesville had a larger department at his disposal than did hard-pressed Sheriff Bob Walker in the wilds of Levy County next door, but that did not mean that the newspaper announcement was entirely correct. The “call” for “Aid in Quelling Rebellious Black Population” was not an official one from Sheriff Walker, as the headline implied. The story below the headline showed that the newspaper itself was somehow the receiver of the call:
“The Sun was requested to ask Sheriff Ramsey of this, Alachua County, to go to the scene with as many men as possible as it was feared the situation...would grow worse.”
This picture was to gain such influence, via the makeshift Associated Press telegraph key in the Sun’s tiny office, that news of the Sun’s heroic intervention managed to cross the nation, along with the rest of the uprising illusion. Wasting no time as Morse code dots and dashes came in furiously, page one of the Los Angeles Times relayed on that same day:
“The Gainesville Sun was requested to ask Sheriff Ramsey of this (Alachua) county, to go to the scene with as many men as possible...”
It was unheard of in old Florida (or new Florida) for a newspaper to be used as an intermediary when one sheriff’s department was making emergency contact with another. The mysterious phone call in the announcement was a creature of the growing excitement—including apparent excitement inside the Sun’s lonely midnight shift. Its own text went on:
“Citizens of this place appealed to Sheriff Ramsey of Alachua County of Gainesville shortly after midnight to go to Rosewood with as many men as he could gather.”
As if rebellious hordes had already consumed poor Sheriff Walker of Levy County, some anguished bystander (“Citizens of this place”) seemed to be left pathetically to call far and wide for aid—and did this calling not directly to the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department, but by pleading for a newspaper to step in and join the drama.
The likely translation is that “Citizens of this place” means the excited telephone switchboard operator sixty miles from the Sun in Cedar Key, eavesdropping on the Levy County party line and infected by Cedar Key's wildfire gallon-of-gasoline rumors (see preceding section), which were springing up in the old island town’s peculiarly fantasy-ridden atmosphere.
Small-town telephone operators of the time and place, privy to every local call, would periodically tip off newspapers about local emergencies, though usually not with such stellar results as on that Friday. Usually the emergencies did not involve a “Rebellions Black Population.” Somewhat as when the two fallen nightriders were identified as “officers,” the Sun was now clothing in official authority what was perhaps a panicked private squawk. Not far from the house containing the Cedar Key switchboard, a fishing family named Tooke (as their daughter Naomi Tooke Dorsett would recall in 1982) grew so frantic about the uprising news and gallon-of-gasoline rumors that they put out to sea en masse in their boat, like Noah escaping the flood. Nearly everyone who could remember Cedar Key in that moment seemed to have some kind of siege-mentality story to tell.
And yet there was no siege. While black residents of Rosewood were fleeing from a real menace (not wishing to wind up like Lexie Gordon for fleeing too slowly), whites in Cedar Key and well inland through the woods were also in fear, but of phantoms. Distant Gainesville probably felt no direct threat from a blowup deep in the countryside, but it thrilled to the idea of riding to the rescue. Mob responders began coming from at least 75 miles outside Rosewood. Kinsmen of Henry Andrews were said to ride to the focal point from the town of Starke, on a 75-mile journey.
So if “Sheriff Ramsey and Many Others Respond to Call….” then who were these “many others”? A hurried reading might suggest they came from some kind of special deputies list, but the headline didn’t say they were from the Sheriff’s Department. One sketchily described carload was said to contain both the owner of a popular cafeteria serving the Sunday church crowd downtown, and a seat-of-the-pants mechanic who worked on grass-airstrip biplanes. Gainesville’s largest store, Baird Hardware facing the town square, was said to be flocked with men buying guns. A particularly lyrical story had the new purchases getting stripped so quickly of their brown wrapping paper that streamers floated in the breeze behind the cars.
The mood of the motorcade was suggested around 1:00 p.m. on Friday, at a point roughly halfway between Gainesville and Rosewood. At this point the road plunged down from sparse pine scrub on sand hills to bottom out in what could easily seem a lush, flat jungle. Specifically the spot was a mile northeast of Bronson, the Levy County seat, barely a crossroads among turpentine camps. Here, reportedly a mile outside town, one of the cars stopped.
A pedestrian was beside the road, and he stood out. Word was spreading that this road on this day could be a dangerous place for African Americans, yet this African American pedestrian seemed not to have heard. There would be suggestions later that the solitary figure might be mentally retarded or have some other impairment that put him in a fog. He had a a sarcastic nickname, variously remembered as “Lord God” and “God Knows.” However his name of record was Mingo Williams, born in 1866 just after the Civil War.
There would be conflicting stories about how the gunfire came from the car, and how the body was left beside the road. At a spot no one had foreseen, some twenty miles from Sarah Carrier’s house, the Rosewood violence had brought about its fifth African American fatality, and its seventh fatality overall. No charges seem ever to have been filed. One story claimed to identify two perpetrators, but this was never backed it up.
As with the Burn-and-Shoot pattern of Thursday night that boiled down to just one victim, Lexie Gordon, Mingo Williams had stepped from the shadows to emblemize another folkway of racial violence, the Three R’s—that is, rural Jim Crow homicide that was random, roadside and racial. The shooter requires no personal knowledge of the solitary target, only the opportunity. This was provided in many Three R killings simply by a dark night, but apparently on January 5, 1923, there was the added thrill of rampage.
To be sure, it was a pathetically intermittent rampage, as far as fatal effects went. Stories would say that in towns surrounding Rosewood for miles around, African Americans were cut down in uncounted numbers. Insistent inquiries in all those towns as well as many other threads of evidence show that the sordid reality was smaller. All the stories of random roadside shootings seem to boil down to one man, with his cryptic name, Mingo Williams.
_____
When Lee Carrier woke up in the woods before dawn on Friday, January 5, he thought the shooting excitement of the night was probably a passing thing. At this point it was inconceivable to him that it might reach out to consume his lodging at his Uncle Wesley’s place and the entire community. He stood up and started walking to work in Sumner, as usual. His younger co-worker Sam Hall did likewise.
Arriving in Sumner, the various Rosewood workers again walked in unmolested, though Sumner’s atmosphere would soon change, within a few hours. Through the day carloads of new arrivals, coming from places unannounced, would pile out into the ghostly silence of Rosewood, three miles from Sumner, but they would find no black insurrectionists to shoot. As the early Cedar Key motorcade was described doing, they wandered around uselessly, then by default a growing number swarmed into the nearest populated nerve center, Sumner (the Wylly turpentine camp on the other side of Rosewood was slightly closer, but after some cursory searching it seemed to draw little attention).
Apparently by midday a feeling was growing among the new arrivals that if the “twenty-five negroes, barricaded in a house… heavily armed” were not to be found in deserted Rosewood, then they must be hiding in the still-unsearched black quarters in Sumner. The die was cast when word spread that adult black males from Rosewood, prime insurrectionist candidates, actually worked in the Sumner lumberyard.
The fifteen-foot-high lumber stacks worked by Lee Carrier and Sam Hall made a maze that was acres wide, where outsiders could not see in. Just before the noon lunch whistle, workers in the stacks were summoned by yard foreman Troy Jones to a secluded meeting—which in Lee Carrier’s view came to seem almost like a police line-up.
At the front of the group, Jones conversed with a stern-looking, dark-complexioned white man in a necktie. This figure, short, athletic, restlessly energetic, was Walter H. Pillsbury, general superintendent for the Cummer Lumber Company in Sumner, overall manager of the company town.
As Lee watched Jones briefing Pillsbury in low tones, he did not know what Pillsbury knew—that during the tumultuous night, women and children fleeing from the western half of Rosewood had followed the white-sanctuary custom to their nearest possible refuge: the lumber stacks in Sumner. From there they were furtively channeled by Pillsbury’s orders to a community building not far from his own family’s bungalow. As per the other local rule of surrealistic racial mayhem, no men or older boys were allowed into the Sumner refuge, repeating the pattern seen at the other three nodes of white-owned asylum: Wright’s shed in Rosewood, McKenzie’s turpentine groves near Wylly, and woods rider Jack Cason’s ranch toward Otter Creek.
Pillsbury’s wife Grace, along with the wife of his assistant manager and assistant bookkeeper Elizabeth Smith, would work nervously through Friday night to accommodate the distraught hiders. Stories said that fear of discovery by the growing mob was so great that when babies cried, mothers tore pieces from their petticoats to stuff into small mouths. Again the precise contours of the panic are elusive—for during the day on Friday other refugees, those at John Wright’s in Rosewood, were said to stand in Wright’s yard in full view of wandering rebel-hunters, but supposedly remained certified as non-targets by the mere act of standing on a white man’s property. The impression of such sharp divisions, as if in chalked out-of-bounds lines at a sporting event, may be just one more part of the illusion.
At the midday meeting in the lumber stacks, Lee Carrier thought he could hear some of the words that foreman Jones was muttering to the top boss: “Mr. Pillsbury, I don’t think Bishop was in it…” Jones seemed to be glancing one by one at the hands who lived in Rosewood, assessing their possibilities as fiercely armed rebels. Donarion “Bishop” Bradley, Lee’s roommate at Wesley’s house, apparently looked mild enough to pass muster. But the process itself seemed crazy—judging a man’s guilt in an imaginary crime on no information at all—other than whether he looked suspicious. The age-old trade-off of beleaguered authority facing an overwhelming mob had surfaced once again: How many of the demanded scapegoats must we surrender to them in an effort to save everybody else?
Pillsbury was no stranger to tough situations. Even at the top, the company town of Sumner was a wilderness catch-all for unlikely adventurers. The boss’s dark skin and chiseled features came from Native American roots in the logging woods of Michigan, but his father was a lost scion of New England’s Pillsbury flour-mill fortune. Trust-fund collegian, charismatic bush-league baseball star, Spanish American War veteran, he was also a fervent founder of Baptist churches and a moral crusader in Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era—while retaining a profoundly elitist blue-blood pride, as recalled by his daughter Martha and others. This was the mind that ran the regimented company town in unregimented jungles, and now he faced the riot test.
Just below Pillsbury in the Sumner hierarchy, the catch-all litany continued. His second-in-command in Sumner was a ship-jumper from the navy of Sweden who had a mail-order bride; and his third-in-command, yard boss Troy Jones, had a nervous affliction given to seizures and a severe stutter. Lee Carrier, trying to catch what Jones was telling Pillsbury in the Friday meeting, thought he heard the fatefully stuttered words:
“But I-I-I think Lee and Raleigh might have been in it.”
Raleigh Bradley was Lee’s age, a young Rosewood widower who lived with his two small daughters in the home of his parents George and Maggie Bradley, that is, in the big house that was once Ford’s Hotel. Now Lee and Raleigh, who often walked to work together, had lost the insurrection guessing game.
Foreman Jones was saying that they looked rough enough, and tough enough, to have been “in it,” meaning in the imaginary fortress containing twenty-five imaginary rebels, guns blazing.
Soon it scarcely mattered who was and wasn’t accused. Pillsbury stood up before them to give his verdict, dark eyes flashing. He opened with words of concern, informing the lumber stackers that a tide of opinion in the arriving mob had now sharply focused on the lumber stacks, to the point of a planned attack. Pillsbury said that at quitting time the Rosewood hands, unlike the great majority of workers who lived in the quarters, had best not leave the yard as usual by the front gate, for their abduction was planned there. Pillsbury counseled them to instead slip out the back. He apparently had impressive sources, for his warning turned out to be true. Quitting time would find the Rosewood workers barely escaping an apparent abduction plan by slipping out the yard’s back side.
But this solicitous advice was only the warm-up in Pillsbury’s speech. The paranoid beliefs of the mob (though he didn’t quite put it that way) had made the Rosewood workers too much of a liability to keep on board at all. If their continued presence were to cause a general mob attack, the whole quarters could go up in flames—and if the population of the black quarters were to flee, mill production would stop dead.
Pillsbury said that when the Rosewood hands left secretly by the back way that day, they were not to come back. They were all being fired. This was his sacrifice to the mob—and not his last.
Lee couldn’t believe it. Only last night he had walked past Sylvester’s bullet-riddled house and had not turned aside, had specifically refrained from getting involved in what was none of his business. And now this! He was punished anyway. And there was more.
Tomorrow, Saturday, was payday, and Lee was owed the usual two weeks’ wages. How would he get his money? Already as Friday morning had deepened a white carpenter in the yard had warned him not to go to the commissary for lunch, for the way was filling with rebel-hunters; the carpenter considerately said he would go and get whatever Lee needed and bring it back.
But now there was a bigger issue, the money. Lee reminded Troy Jones of what was owed to him, and the difficulty of going to get it. Jones was sympathetic, saying he would go to the pay office himself and see if they couldn’t pay Lee a day early. It was almost time for the noon whistle when Jones trudged back. The head bookkeeper at the pay office was a notorious stickler known to fly off the handle at breakfast at the company hotel if his eggs weren’t cooked just right. Lee would never forget the final stutter:
“I-I-I’m sorry, Lee. They wouldn’t do it.”
In other words, no one had found it necessary to impress upon the obsessive bookkeeper that these were special circumstances, forced by the company itself, and the debt should be paid.
As the words that Lee never forgot drove into his brain—words meaning that he was not only being driven into homeless desperation but without even his wages—the roar of the noon whistle came, fixing itself in memory, as if flaunting the unconcern of a workplace he had thought could be depended upon. Finding himself now headed into a long flight to nowhere, he remembered saying to only himself:
“I ain’t got nothin’ down here.”
__________
That Friday afternoon in Sumner, any news of the Mingo Williams killing around 1:00 p.m. in Bronson, more than twenty miles away, was overshadowed by a closer event, in Sumner itself. In the Cummer shingle mill Robert Missouri, working his usual double shift, looked out the window and saw a solemn wagon passing, along with a silent procession.
This wagon was the funeral hearse for the local constable, storekeeper and ex-deputy sheriff, Poly Wilkerson, killed the previous night by Sylvester Carrier’s shotgun. Wilkerson’s body was being taken to Shiloh Cemetery, more than a mile and a half north of Sumner. Some of the graves in the sand and wiregrass there had makeshift markers, such as sun-bleached conch shells or a rain-grayed wooden cross. The Sumner constable’s grave would not be locatable in later decades. His companion on the fatal porch, Henry Andrews, was sent for burial to his family’s home in the town of Starke, with a Masonic square and compass etched on his headstone.
The graveside ceremony for Poly Wilkerson would be recalled by the Sumner sawmill’s assistant bookkeeper Elizabeth Smith, in luminously symbolic imagery that reprised the questions about her memories of the Fannie Taylor assault. Over the casket, Smith said, stood a visiting preacher, a rough-hewn circuit rider on revival in Sumner, having worked his way down from Alabama. Smith remembered the exhortations bringing forth small dribbles of chewing tobacco, dripping onto the coffin lid as if in divine rebuke for a moonlit porch.
How many of Sumner’s newly arrived mob avengers were present at the funeral was not recalled. At lunchtime their mood was still in flux. Just after the noon whistle, naïve Sam Hall, one of the newest lumber stackers, age fifteen, had seen no reason not to saunter over to the commissary for cheese and crackers as usual—though on his return to the stacks a shocked co-worker scolded, “You fool!” He had obliviously walked past the milling avengers and no one had bothered him. The mob danger was still a spotty, unpredictable affair, moving toward the foretold push at quitting time.
Three miles northwest of Sumner in the center of now-ghostly Rosewood, storekeeper John Wright, maintaining one of the improvised sanctuaries for women and children, cranked up his Model T. He and his wife Mary would go to Poly’s funeral. It was necessary obeisance for Wright, the deliberative frontier diplomat who managed to stay esteemed by both races. He was straining the limits of his popularity with white woodsmen by sheltering his black neighbors, and Poly had been a woodsman’s favorite, joking and jawboning at their fiddle frolics. In Wright’s concern for the black households ruined by Poly’s visit, the funeral trip seemed to be saying, he meant no disrespect.
Standing safely in Wright’s yard, not in the original sanctuary shed, little Lee Ruth Bradley, age seven (with her pattern of early childhood pseudo-memories) would recall fretting to her sister Ivory as they saw the car drive away. Why don’t we, too, get out of here, she suggested to Ivory. Why don’t we go to Wylly and find Hoyt (their grown brother who lived there)? In Lee Ruth’s memory the two small sisters began hiking through contested territory, but then grew terrified and took shelter in a swamp, then repentantly crept back toward Wright’s.
Then worse terror struck, for a horseman galloped toward them. They dived under a bush, whereupon the terrifying pursuer began strangely coaxing and pleading for them to come out, saying he wasn’t going to hurt them. Seen through the lens of age-seven reminiscence, this sounds like a rather accurate portrait of busy woods rider Jack Cason, who on Monday had defended Aaron and Mahulda Carrier. As Friday progressed, Cason seemed to pop up all around, galloping back and forth in efforts to gather in children scattered by panic.
Back in Sumner, January’s early sunset was nearing as the knots of new arrivals became a crowd, converging on the Cummer lumberyard’s front gate. Apparently a local woodsman or two had offered to point out the Rosewood workers, distinguishing them from the larger mass of men headed only to Sumner’s black quarters. A topsy-turvy officiousness prevailed: Though seeking to scapegoat innocent targets for a non-existent uprising, the mob nonetheless made much of its selectiveness. Not just any innocent target would do. It had to be the right innocent target.
When black workers living in the quarters began to exit the yard after the quitting-time whistle, they apparently passed the mob unmolested, as self-appointed accusers who knew Rosewood said, more or less: “No, no, not him. Nor him either. Wait for the ones from Rosewood.” This became apparent when the accusers reached an embarrassing moment. The last workers exited and no Rosewood hands had been identified. The Rosewood workers, perhaps as many as six of them, had left out the back of the yard in a furtive group as advised. As on Monday when Aaron and Mahulda Carrier were whisked away, the mob faction was left barefaced and outsmarted. Their anger would now build toward a boiling point, soon to come after nightfall.
Meanwhile the Rosewood workers, fleeing on a back trail through the woods, feared attack at every turn. Just before quitting time as they had stood hidden from outside eyes by the lumber stacks, they had heard cars crank up at the front gate, as if the gathering crowd was readying for a chase. The kinds of interrogation that may have been planned were not pleasant to consider.
Suddenly, on the back trail, their fears seemed realized. The sounds said someone was approaching through the woods, strangely intermittent sounds, as if barging heedlessly through the undergrowth. The workers dived out of sight, and to their surprise saw a familiar figure lurching into view on thei trail.
James Carrier, Minnie Mitchell’s grandfather, age 56, was laboring along under the handicap of his two strokes, which had left one leg partially paralyzed and one arm twisted, while his speech was badly garbled. How he had become separated from his family would never be clear—whether he had never gone to Sarah’s house with his wife Emma and the children, or whether he had gone there and fled separately after the shootout.
Apparently when seen by the lumber stackers, the disabled woodsman and trapper was attempting to use the back trail to reach the Sumner quarters, where his grown daughter Rita lived. This was the kind of movement that superintendent Pillsbury feared, a move that could attract the mob with rumors of uprisers hiding on company property. Concealed in the bushes, both Lee Carrier and Sam Hall would remember this moment, painfully. The twisted figure did not see them. One of the hiders breathed to the others: “Leave him. He’ll slow us down.”
Then he was gone. The memory would eat at them increasingly, for James Carrier had only one more day to live.
________
The next memory-picture, still in Sumner, jumps ahead to a point a few hours after quitting time on Friday, at about 9:00 p.m. The witnesses now are white employees of Cummer Lumber: Ernest Parham and Perry Hudson, backed by supporting evidence.
As night has closed in, a large mass of whites, made up of new arrivals in cars and local woodsmen, has achieved some kind of crowd organization, with an informal headquarters down at the freehold portion of Sumner near the railroad depot, outside Cummer property. Their plans have hardened into a determination to search Sumner’s African American quarters for the Rosewood rebels, the ones in that still-imagined army that must have jointly gunned down Wilkerson and Andrews, and wounded the other heroes. And if no rebels are found, the quarters might provide other forms of destructive satisfaction. The mob never speaks publicly to define its aims, or to defend the apparent illogic.
Ernest Parham can see the mass of them flashing under electric streetlamps on the depot street as they move toward him. He is standing with a group of other white mill employees who are blocking the road. Parham, 18, holds an old squirrel gun. Hi co-workers have found weapons where they could. In front of them stands the compact, fiery figure of Pillsbury. Logger Perry Hudson is just behind Pillsbury, also facing the crowd, though in the crowd there may be some of Hudson's kinsmen. He is a cousin of Monday shooter Bryant Hudson, and of Mannie Hudson who was left for dead on Sarah Carrier’s front porch. But Perry Hudson will stand with the company tonight. Parham feels the dizzy thrill of a combat soldier wondering if he may soon be dead.
In post-millennial Rosewood summaries, whether in the press, academia, the blogosphere or elsewhere, some of the most indignantly false myths portray Sumner and Rosewood as two neatly epic opposites. Sumner is called “a white town” or even “an all-white town,” in ignorance of the fact that its majority population is black, living in the African American quarters.
And this fantasized white town is said to have felt angry jealousy toward Rosewood’s allegedly more prosperous town of African American entrepreneurs. Typically the defunct Goins turpentine operation is cluelessly resurrected in such myths to make it look still operative in 1923, and in the fantasies it is flanked by other black-owned Rosewood businesses, also non-existent in 1923. This melodrama version of Sumner-vs.-Rosewood depicts fierce and ragged white Sumner attacking dynamic and promising black Rosewood.
In reality, Sumner’s white sawmill employees were aggressive only in the Monday manhunt seeking the attacker of Fannie Taylor. After Sam Carter was killed that night, Cummer employees left the violence, not only out of disgust but because by Tuesday they were forbidden by superintendent Pillsbury to meddle farther in the dangerous controversy. Then in Thursday night’s nightriding a few broke ranks, including high-level Henry Andrews—but that disaster further turned Sumner against mob action. The myths that demonize Sumner are far too uninformed to include the Friday night showdown in the street, which took place not between blacks and whites but between two factions of whites, with the Sumner workers standing against the mob.
As Pillsbury stood in the street and faced the approaching crowd, the spur track for the log train was in front of him, crossing the street and making a line of demarcation. As the mob was about to reach the track he cried out (or words to the effect): “Another step and we’ll shoot!”
Parham wondered if this moment was his last. The mass of men facing them was not close enough for their individual words to be heard. There was a great murmur.
Then Parham realized they were vacillating. The crowd was breaking up. They weren’t so committed to hunting uprisers as to risk death. In the elated sense of relief, Perry Hudson would always remember, Pillsbury turned to him and said, “Hudson, I knew you’d do.”
For the second time in the Rosewood violence the threat of deadly force has been used against a mob. The first time was on Monday when Jack Cason threatened to shoot as he protected Aaron and Mahulda Carrier. Both times it worked. But these, apparently, would be the only times. On Friday night the Sumner quarters was saved, but the rest of the week would see no further armed resistance.
_____________
Also on Friday, January 4, 1923, there came a flurry of attention to the Rosewood violence from the state government of Florida—or at least so it was said in two wire-service bulletins; no official records of the moment were preserved.
Florida’s cozy state capital, Tallahassee, was smaller than Gainesville in 1923, with a population of about 5,000. Tallahassee lay more than 130 miles northwest of Rosewood in old plantation country near Georgia, in what had been the power center when Florida became a state in 1845. The state governor in 1923 was Cary A. Hardee, a genteel, aristocratic-looking figure, though in fact he was born in an over-sized log cabin in swamp timber country, much like the Rosewood area and less than 90 miles away. Hardee was presiding quietly over Florida’s historic crossroads period, as the old frontier culture that had produced him met the early 1920s beginning of the frenetic Florida Boom. Most of that real estate frenzy, however, was centered far from Tallahassee in southern Florida. The state capital offered little clamor to disturb the jaunty tapping of Hardee’s gold-headed walking cane, as he made storied strolls to the Capitol building on brick sidewalks under moss-hung oaks.
Both of the newspaper mentions of the governor’s attention to Rosewood described incidents on Friday, January 5. First, in the morning (“early today”), Hardee was said to have learned that something was wrong in a place called Rosewood, but only because an unidentified inquirer from the Associate Press told him about it.
The telegraph key in Tallahassee’s local newspaper would have been chattering as the various AP bulletins came in, announcing the fantasized uprising. The local paper’s skeletal staff may have phoned the governor’s office, then in print could have mantled the conversation in corporate dignity by self-identifying as "the Associated Press” (since after all this paper was one of the 1,300 AP members in the Western Hemisphere). The blurb said the governor “immediately made efforts to get in touch with authorities at Rosewood”—a bit difficult since by that point hardly anyone was “at Rosewood” besides mob stragglers hunting for uprisers.
The issue was grave, however: Should the governor send in the National Guard? Under Florida law such assistance could be made only when requested by local law enforcement.
The second AP blurb then neatly followed up that same afternoon (“late today”), by saying that the governor had now heard back “from the sheriff of Levy County,” who reportedly assured him “that local authorities had things under control,” and “the racial disturbance around Rosewood had quieted down.”
This sequence had somewhat the appearance of a shadow play, leaving out any back-channeling by which the governor himself might have discreetly invited a Levy County reply that would cover his flanks. At any rate the National Guard was not sent. Rosewood legends saying otherwise have no discoverable basis, other than imagination.
The 1990s claims case did not buy into those legends, but did rely heavily on the tenuous wire service blurbs. The claims case floated the premise that if the National Guard had been sent, the remaining physical structure of Rosewood could have been saved from the arson that was coming on Sunday, and the refugees could have returned to their homes. This could have been true in some ways, but it leaves out a world of obstructing realities. Moreover, if there really was a never-preserved reply from Levy County saying not to be worried, there is no guarantee that it was not referring to the uprising fantasy, and saying there was no cause for alarm about “twenty-five negroes…heavily armed.”
_______
By Friday afternoon, a network of influential Rosewood-area whites who were sheltering black women and children had begun secretively moving toward a damage-control plan of their own, involving dismal trade-offs.
The network of improvised sanctuaries, stretching northeast along the railroad for more than ten miles, ran from Sumner (where Pillsbury and his wife were using an outbuilding to hide refugees) to a whistlestop called Rocky Hammock, where Jack Cason had brought others to his farm. This phenomenon marked the second time in the violent week that the real dynamics of local crisis response were kept out of the newspapers. The first time was the Monday rescue of Aaron and Mahulda Carrier, when unlikely heroics that defied a mob were translated for public consumption into looking like a routine arrest of two fearsome “suspects.”
The sanctuary pattern that emerged after Thursday night was larger, encompassing not just two rescuees but dozens of them (Rosewood’s total African American population at the start of the violence was probably no more than 100, notwithstanding claims and fantasies spying a populous “Black Mecca”).
That the sanctuaries were invisible in press coverage is no trivial postscript. Cryptic news stories like this, looking much like the Rosewood fare that invented black insurrectionists and omitted white dissenters, are often the building blocks of history. It is a custom of many historians to cite such material credulously as if it represents unquestionable fact. To the extent that this is done without corroboration, the orthodox picture of incidents like Rosewood rests on sand, and history slips toward academic pretense.
All four of the nervous sanctuary managers—Wright (Rosewood), Pillsbury (Sumner), McKenzie (Wylly), and Cason (near Otter Creek)—were well acquainted with one another. The first three socialized as a local upper crust. The fourth, Cason, farther away and very different, was against the mob not by virtue of social refinement but by rugged individualism, verging into an outlaw reputation. For these men’s planning of what was to occur—as of 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 5—they had to be careful of telephone contact on the heavily-eavesdropped party line, though there was a phone in Pillsbury’s office, another in his home, another in Wright’s store in Rosewood, and apparently a fourth in McKenzie’s turpentine office in Wylly. Wright, situated in the middle with his Model T, was a logical go-between. On Thursday night his car had ranged for four miles over sandy lanes to warn the isolated McCoy farm of rampage danger, according to Lutie (McCoy) Foster. And Cason, as a turpentine woods rider, was accustomed to spending all day on a horse.
But there was also a fifth man—more mobile than the rest, and forming the crucial link in the plan.
“Tickets, please. Tickets, tickets”—this cliché picture of the conductor on a passenger train formed only the publicly visible part. As any railroader knows, a train conductor is captain of the ship, while the engineer is his pilot. As the engineer marks time at the throttle, the conductor is back at his papers in the caboose, toting up manifests, sifting through directives. And William Crighton “Kay” Bryce, conductor of the Seaboard passenger train out to Cedar Key, was the beaming, lordly epitome of this role. Moreover, in the adventurers’ melting pot of frontier Florida, he was perhaps the world’s most unlikely train conductor.
Coming from old family wealth, with a plantation the size of a small community at Bryceville and a turpentining operation down the line at Kaytown, he wasn’t into train conducting for the money. He had loved trains since the days when he was punished as a child for running off and hopping onto them, said his daughter Leona.
In the grim plotting of January 5-6, Kay Bryce did not operate a stationary refuge, but ran a larger mobile one that would substitute for the others. The idea was that after the passenger train left Cedar Key as usual at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, it would make a series of secretive stops, at each of the sanctuary nodes, taking on women and children, then taking them all to safety in Gainesville. The fear surrounding this plan was apparent in its prohibitions. As in the original waystations, none of Rosewood’s fleeing men or older boys were to be allowed on board the rescue train. The Lexie Gordon and Mingo Williams killings had demonstrated that there were men in the crowds now roaming through Rosewood who might seize any excuse to twitch the trigger.
The rescue plan, like many actions by outnumbered authority in a riot, was not a triumph but a dispiriting limitation of defeat. Families were atomized by the gender rule, and the worst defeat did not need to be spelled out. To appease the mob, giving them a token prize to crow about so that hopefully they would go home, the remaining buildings of the community were being surrendered to them. The deserted homes, barns, and other structures would stand in wan expectation through Saturday, like a condemned man at the noose, waiting for the flames that no one would stop on Sunday.
Little Minnie Mitchell, half frozen in the pine grove before dawn on Saturday, was elated as she found herself being led from hellish outdoor concealment into the smiling care of Bryce the train conductor, as he gave her a box lunch. She wondered why some of the older women coming with her didn’t seem to feel her joy and relief. Didn’t they know they were being saved? Why were they crying?
And one last thought on Kay Bryce, the improbably rich train conductor with the heart of gold. It’s unsettling to me now to listen to my informant tapes from what sounds like the Stone Age of pre-digital information, back in 1982. It’s unsettling because it reminds how lost I was in the flood of legends and fantasized myths that came swarming out when I unlocked the Rosewood secret. Writing the opening article was like batting at moths under a streetlight. I had to choose, on far too little corroborating evidence back then, which of the fervent assertions to accept as telling the real story of Rosewood.
And in that confusion, somebody, somewhere along the way, told me vaguely about two fascinating train conductors. They were brothers, the story said, and had orchestrated the dramatic rescue by train. I was told that they were John and Kay Bryce—and I verified that they existed, sure enough.
The problem was invisible to me at the time: I had it on far too little authority that both brothers had participated, together, in the Rosewood train rescue. For they didn’t. Only Kay Bryce was on the rescue train. His brother John was apparently on another run. Lamentably, in my investigative article of July 25, 1982, I attributed the train rescue to them both, as an endearing brother act.
However, there was a silver lining.
What I further failed to guess was that in later decades my fumbling error would inadvertently provide a remarkably effective litmus for testing which emergent journalists, authors, advocates, bloggers and other commentators on Rosewood were heedlessly lifting from my old work, without bothering to check. It seemed to make little difference to the lifters that I had long since corrected the original Bryce brothers error in print. They scarcely stopped for such inconveniences. After a while they didn’t even need to lift the error from my own mistake in 1982, but could lift it from other lifters, whole generations of them, who, with similar heedlessness, seemed to like the irresistible picture of the brother act, without much caring whether it was true.
“The ordeal ended due to the efforts of two white brothers, William and John Bryce,” declared the $50,000 report prepared for the Florida Legislature in the Rosewood claims case (p. 61), amid a sea of other errors in that report.
The myth that might be called The Flying Bryce Brothers was like a circus sensation. In the claims case of the 1990s it grew so potent that still further embellishments arose. Suddenly the Bryce Brothers, who supposedly saved Rosewood together in a fantasy duet, weren’t just wealthy hobbyists. A 1992 fantasy said they owned the whole Seaboard railroad, and that these two miraculous brothers had adventurously moved to Florida from up north (the real Bryces had old southern roots going back for generations).
The Washington Post then thrilled to the discovery that the bold Bryces came from up in Post country: “Other heroes may be John and William Bryce,” announced the Post on May 30, 1993, calling them “two wealthy white Northerners who sent a slow-moving train through Rosewood…” The Post's version of the rescue train did have a certain northern brusqueness, not deigning to make a full stop for the hustled refugees and only slowing down for them to precariously hop on (unlike the real train). But the Post endorsement called to generations of future imitators.
Still further, wide-eyed discoverers began saying, for reasons unguessable, that the two heroic brothers were not just northern transplants, but were Jewish (though for generations the real Bryce family had been Methodist).
On September 23, 1993, the Rosewood claims case “academic team” extended The Bryce fantasy by interviewing claims case publicity liaison Arnett Doctor, he of the mansions with manicured lawns, the 30 women and children buried alive, and generous misattributions to me.
“The Bryce brothers,” Doctor confabulated freely, “were a couple of brothers out of New York that came down to Florida to make their living. They were Jewish people and they had some sort of enterprise in the Levy area. They were entrepreneurs in the Levy area.” (Now they become not train conductors but some kind of clever Semitic fixers). The description was not finished: “And it was my understanding that they had a very close relationship with the people who owned the Seaboard Railway. Supposedly there was a joint effort by Mr. Wright and the Bryce family to get the train to come in….By that time they were aware of the fact that the soldiers from Camp Blanding, Florida…came in and stood guard.” (This, on page 157 of the 1993 Rosewood academic report appendix, lumps the brother act in with some non-existent soldiers).
So how could the story of a real atrocity start to look like a slapstick farce, with mythical participants popping in and out of weighty tomes and media masterpieces? Could it happen only in ditzy Florida? Or was it the whole nation’s fantasy-prone racial complex that was at fault?
The siren call of wonderstruck storytelling seemed to have a special hold on Rosewood—whose real facts were already so like a demonic fairy tale that artful embellishers could scarcely resist taking it the rest of the way—to create the perfect bygone paradise devoured by the perfectly gigantic massacre—amid the heart-warming tap dance of the two northern Jewish brothers.
At any rate the point here is that if you, dear reader, should happen to come across any commentary on Rosewood that exalts the two brave Bryce brothers (rather than the one real conductor), you’ll know that you’ve been privileged to meet a gem-like indicator that you’ve stumbled onto a source not very given to real research.
_____
As daybreak came at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, January 5, 1923, the rescue train carrying Rosewood’s women and children was long gone. Most of the community’s men and older boys had begun secretive journeys on foot to seek relatives living beyond the rampage zone, bringing stories of narrow escapes.
But three figures, all associated with Sarah Carrier’s crowded “house of death” on Thursday night, have not yet been accounted for here.
First, there is Emma Carrier, age 52, the grandmother of little Minnie Mitchell and the sister of Sarah Carrier. When Minnie fled with the others from the upstairs sleeping room at Sarah’s, Emma was nowhere to be seen. Minnie’s earlier attempt to go downstairs and look for “Mama” (caregiver Emma), had been foiled by the front-door explosion, as the whites on the porch broke in. Then after that storm of gunfire she numbly went back upstairs, abandoning her search for Emma. More than twenty-four hours later on the rescue train, after two fearful nights in the woods, Minnie was still wondering frantically what might have happened to Mama.
The answer goes back to the period at Sarah’s before the nightriders broke down the front door—the same period of initial gunfire in which Sarah herself was killed. In a barrage of simultaneous fire suggesting “target panic” dynamics, someone with a shotgun seemed to be busy. Or perhaps two someones. While at an upstairs window Minnie’s brother Ruben lost an eye to a shotgun blast, downstairs, apparently in Sarah Carrier’s front bedroom, two shotgun pellets were striking Emma Carrier.
The wounds, in a finger and an arm, suggested that she might have been trying to shield her face in the suddenness of the fusillade. Neither wound was serious, but the shock and fear—as Emma’s sister lay dead in the bed nearby—may explain why Emma fled the house alone, apart from the children and perhaps after they had unknowingly left her behind.
Like Sylvester’s wife Gert at an earlier point, Emma managed to make her way to the logical nearest friendly ground, at John Wright’s store. However, her trajectory from there would remain solitary. She had become a particularly dangerous refugee to harbor, because her wounds showed she was present at the killing of the two whites. An automobile was assigned to carry Emma alone to distant protective custody at the Alachua County Jail in Gainesville. She apparently did not know for some time that her son Aaron was also being held there. Well after the arrival of the rescue train in the same town, Minnie was finally reunited with her dazed, dispossessed grandmother.
It was from Emma Carrier that law enforcement authorities would seem to have had their earliest glimpse inside the “house of death” in the Thursday night shootout, thus seeing the fallacy in stories of ambush and uprising that were then spreading rapidly in rumors. Centrally, a count of the number of people said to be inside the house emerged, and is known because it was transmitted to the Gainesville Daily Sun, which published it. Since local reporting techniques would not likely have included walking two blocks from the Sun’s office to inquire of black prisoners in the county jail, the newly announced number evidently came from one of the fleeting phone conversations between the Levy County Sheriff’s Department and the upstairs newsroom.
This reported number, 18, would indeed be a close approximation of the total number of occupants of the two households gathered at Sarah Carrier’s: eight individuals from Sarah’s house itself, and another seven or nine from the disastrously visiting household of Emma Carrier (no more than a total of 17, but still close).
However, this isolated bit of concreteness would soon be swept into the rumors of uprising and massacre, to float free of its original context as if in a dream. Soon it seemed to pop up, slightly altered, in more fantasized counts, such as the alleged number of bodies on the porch or in a mass grave. In the Sun’s Morse code wire-service dispatches, published nationwide, the word “children” was discreetly omitted from the count of occupants of the controversial house, in favor of a more fearsome insinuation about those 18 heavily armed rebels (then ballooning to 20, 25, etc.).
The real list of occupants went like this:
From Sarah’s own household: Sarah, Bernadina, Harry, Sylvester, Gert, Philomena, A. T., and Buster (George Jr.).
From Emma’s household: Emma, Eddie, Lonnie, Goldee, J.C., Ruben, and Minnie (with uncertainty on Willard and James; see below).
Meanwhile, the official count of 18 also sheds light in another direction, regarding the second and third mystery figures that are to be accounted for here. These are the two disabled adult males in Emma Carrier’s household: her husband James (partially paralyzed by stroke), and her grown son Willard, known as Big Baby because of his disability, which in stories about him somewhat resembled autism. These two names fell into such controversy that memories from within the house seemed to avoid clarifying whether they were actually there or had remained at home in Emma’s and James’s house.
Willard (“Big Baby”), age 19, would be wreathed in controversy because persistent stories began to say that he was shooting at the whites from within the house. No eyewitnesses would report any specific glimpse of him doing so. To some degree, the stories may have grown out of his past.
In 1908, according to court proceedings that confirmed community stories, young Willard Carrier was sitting on his porch and staring, as he customarily did, when some young men in the community, perhaps drinking, began to call out from the road and tease him. Everyone seemed to agree, including those at his later trial, that the child called Big Baby then walked into the house, came out with his father’s shotgun (almost as big as he was), and one of the tormentors, Jack Coleman, was shot dead.
It wouldn’t be history’s first or last murder by a child shooter, but it was shock enough for Rosewood. After the murder trial in the county seat, little Willard Carrier was quizzically remanded to the custody of his parents. He would still be there when a new disaster struck in 1923. Whatever the nature of his disability, the events suggested .
Rumors about Willard Carrier as a silent hero in 1923 were further fueled when he seemed to disappear in the violence, leading to stories used lovingly by the 1997 film Rosewood, which showed in elaborate detail how Willard was killed in the house and then his body was disguised to look like Sylvester’s, allowing Sylvester to make his miraculous escape.
In reality, Willard Carrier’s niece Minnie, like many, was still wondering whether he was alive or dead when, at a time long after the violence, he appeared at her door. Then Big Baby explained to her haltingly, Minnie recalled, that he had fled alone from the violence to a logging job in a particularly deep swamp, Okefenokee on the Georgia state line. Whatever the epic mysteries, for purposes of a recap on Saturday, January 6, 1923, Big Baby was no longer on the scene.
This then leaves one more shadowy form, last glimpsed on Friday afternoon as he hobbled unknowingly past Sumner lumber hands concealed near a trail. The final outcome for stroke-crippled James Carrier, Emma’s 56-year-old husband, would come on Saturday morning, reportedly around 9:00 a.m.
Apparently when James Carrier was seen by the lumber stackers on the back trail to Sumner it was already getting dark, and his slow progress left him to spend Friday night in the woods, sleeping on the ground. His family would agree that he seemed to be trying to reach Sumner’s black quarters to look for his grown daughter Rita, who was married to a former Rosewood resident and sawmill employee. Rita, however, was doubly ill-positioned to receive her father. Strict orders from superintendent Pillsbury said that any refugee from Rosewood found in Sumner was to be turned over to him. Moreover, Rita had sufferings of her own, having fled repeatedly from beatings by her husband Charlie Williams. According to her niece Minnie,
Rita had been so desperate at one point that she fled far across the Suwannee into no-man’s land, was caught in a peonage trap, and had to be bailed out by her family, then to be returned dejectedly to the abusive husband. She was not in a position for bravery when a mumbling, tottering figure appeared at her door in the quarters. She apparently did as the directive said, and turned her father over to Pillsbury.
The stern-looking man in the necktie, who had fired the Rosewood lumber stackers but sheltered their women and children, was on the hot seat again. A former adventurer who was also a puritanical Baptist moralist, Pillsbury sometimes served as preacher in the small church he had built in Sumner. At night he sometimes peered into Milton’s Paradise Lost as recreational reading at home. Pillsbury apparently placed James Carrier in the back-street shanty that served as Sumner’s jail.
Then word got out. Gossip among whites said that “an ole crazy one” had been caught—looking mightily like a Rosewood rebel. After James Carrier’s strokes he could apparently think and understand with at least some clarity, but his speech emerged in unpredictable bursts.
The makeshift army camping at Sumner was by this time facing the thought of going home empty-handed, with no war stories to tell. But now, at last, a chance for interrogation had arrived. The new captive was apparently assumed to know it all. This old bird could tick off the names, finger all the black rebels in that Thursday night ambush.
The next glimpse is in a wire-service bulletin, whose wording rearranged the geography a bit and was otherwise enhanced, but found its way into the Sunday New York Times:
“Carrier had returned to Rosewood this morning and appealed to W. H. Pillsbury, Superintendent of the Sumner Cypress Company mill there, for protection. Pillsbury locked him in a house in the negro quarter. Later, however, when a new clash became imminent, the negro was turned over to twenty-five or thirty men.”
When a sufferer of stroke-caused aphasia tries to speak, the result may be “stereotypy”—a fixation on a single word or phrase. The rumor mill in Sumner began saying something like the following:
That old crazy one, he egged ‘em on. He taunted ‘em, that shameless rascal. They tried to ask him civilized questions, and he threw it back in their faces. He shook his fist at ‘em, dared ‘em to fight, kept wavin’ that crazy hand over toward Rosewood, wantin’ to draw ‘em into an ambush all over again, and he kept sayin’: “Come on! Come on!”
Neither the gossips telling this story nor the newspapers chastely laundering it would mention that this dangerous cutthroat had any kind of disability. To reveal the pathetic extenuating circumstance would have been to reveal the full degeneration of the tormentors.
SEVENTH VICTIM
OF ROSEWOOD RACE RIOT
NEGRO MAN RIDDLED
WITH BULLETS WHILE STANDING
OVER THE GRAVES
OF THREEOTHER VICTIMS
REFUSED TO GIVE NAMES
Admitted That He Was in House
From Which Death Dealing
Volley Came That Cost
Lives of Two White Men…
Rosewood, Fla.—(By the Associated Press)—A new grave was dug in the negro cemetery at Sumner near here late today and in it Sheriff Elias Walker placed the body of James Carrier, whose death at the hands of several white men….
To be precise, James Carrier was not the seventh but the eighth fatality, if Sam Carter on Monday night is included in the count. The three other African Americans killed inside Rosewood may already have been interred by this point: Sarah Carrier, Lexie Gordon and Sylvester Carrier, killed in that order on Thursday night and Friday morning. Sam Carter was buried separately on Tuesday, when conditions still permitted a funeral. And in the news story above, the name of “Sheriff Elias Walker” was reported almost accurately, for Sheriff Bob Walker’s full name of record was Elisha Robert Walker.
In contrast to the Sam Carter killing earlier in the week, riot escalation has now left the murder of James Carrier with no uninvolved spectators to tell the tale. The show has become private. Perhaps the secretive audience consisted only of “several white men,” as in the one news report, or “twenty-five or thirty men,” as in the other. Perhaps it was not a crowd but a few cronies. Not even legend would be able to look into this closed circle and check. No specific killer of James Carrier would ever be named.
Though there is a clue. In the early 1980s when I asked local raconteurs about perpetrators of the Rosewood violence, the answers were usually vague, or if they alleged specifics these led back to dead ends and fantasies. But one name popped up over and over. This was Patrick I. Taylor of Cedar Key, age 20, a brother-in-law of Fannie Taylor.
Pat Taylor, a tall, lanky stringbean at six-foot-two, was perhaps Cedar Key’s most renowned brawler, known for shootings and alleged murders, as well as being Cedar Key’s future town marshal, its one-man police force—which perhaps said volumes about the reclusive island town.
On the one hand there were all the stories insisting that Pat Taylor had done something terrible that week, though they gave no reliable answer as to what. And on the other hand there was the James Carrier murder, with a definite victim but no identified murderer. No formal charges were ever brought against Pat Taylor. The questions were left to the legends.
____________
Perhaps the single most baffling eyewitness on the Rosewood violence was ex-sheriff James Turner. Though Turner was twice sheriff of Levy County, his Rosewood observations were made at an earlier age, when he was fourteen. This apparently occurred on Saturday, January 6. The moment that Turner described would have been around the time of the James Carrier killing and in much the same area, though he seemed to see no sign of that event.
Sheriff Turner forthrightly said he could not recall the date of his experience at Rosewood, but he placed it firmly on the day after Mingo Williams was killed in Bronson—and this would mean Saturday. The Williams killing on Friday was a strong marker for him because Bronson was where Turner lived at the time.
In various ways he seemed an ideal informant: cooperative, unexcited, clearly sincere. He showed neither boastfulness nor other signs of confabulation that arose in some questionable Rosewood witnesses.
But the issue with Sheriff Turner was this: voluminous other evidence, of various kinds and illuminating the scene from various perspectives, says that what he clearly and distinctly remembered seeing could not be true.
In this sense, Jim Turner embodies a central challenge to the investigative approach used in these pages. My method of inquiry insists that a locked chamber of cultural secrets, undocumented by official paper, is nonetheless accessible if we use a difficult tool: living memory.
At the outset I had no idea of the mental mysteries such a simple plan would unearth. Some of those mysteries, going beyond the usual notions of forgetfulness or tall tales, suggest imponderables of reality construction and personality where science falls short.
In this maze of perception and interpretation, the challenge became twofold—not only to pinpoint specific indicators of unreliability to justify the questioning of some reminiscences—but also, on the other hand, to show how some of the Rosewood memories were verifiable and definitely reflected material events.
We all know that some memories can be counted on as being basically accurate, just as some are obviously mistaken. It would be ridiculous to say that all memories are false just because some are—or that all are true just because that would make the storytelling much easier (the latter is the coy assumption in much of oral history, and in “based on a true story” cinema, and in no little historiography in general). The difficulty is in finding ways to check reliability.
On James Turner specifically, it is by no means proven that he was suffering from some kind of false memory syndrome that did not present the usual outward signs. But eventually I had to confront massive evidence saying that some such explanation had to be the case.
I didn’t reach such an improbable conclusion out of personal preference. For years, as the evidence came slowly trickling in, I kept hoping that perhaps Sheriff Turner’s memory might in some measure be vindicated as being true, for it presented a spectacular image that was much more marketable in journalism than the emerging alternative. Moreover, that alternative explanation has to involve some wrinkle in memory that I can’t explain—also not very marketable. But I had come a long way by then in an investigation predicated on evidence, and I had to choose which I wanted, a good-faith picture of the facts as they had emerged, or sales value. The fact that my commitment to the evidence in this case was against my own self-interest is not final proof, but it does count for something.
The challenge for me now, right here, is to present that evidence adequately to you.
Jim Turner would recall being brought to Rosewood at age fourteen by his father, a physician. Dr. James Turner, Sr., was a prestigious local figure who sometimes seemed to have delivered half the babies in Levy County. He would later be a state senator. At the opening of 1923, Dr. Turner was working as company doctor for both the Seaboard Airline Railway and the Cummer Lumber Company in Sumner.
By that time, much of the Sumner sawmill operation had already moved to Cummer’s new tract of cypress two counties away in Pasco County, with complete shut-down in Sumner scheduled for 1926. In the interim, the resident company doctor in Sumner, A. B. Cannon, was already going back and forth to serve both sites. When Dr. Cannon was not in Sumner, Turner of Bronson would come and fill in—with Dr. Turner soon moving to Sumner full-time until the 1926 closing. The shuffling had grown rather colorful by 1923 because of transportation. Dr. Turner’s twice weekly trips to Sumner from Bronson were facilitated by what the timber swamps called a “motorcar.”
This contraption, as mentioned elsewhere, was not a motorcar in the automobile sense but a small gasoline-powered work cart whose flanged metal wheels ran up and down the railroad. Dr. Turner’s dual employment, for both the railroad and Cummer Lumber, had earned him a motorcar on extended loan.
The day in question brought one of the doctor's regular rail trips to Sumner, which would take him through Rosewood. His son Jim had already been hearing the barrage of stories about the trouble in Rosewood that week, and how all hell was breaking loose. Jim would recall climbing onto the roaring little vehicle beside his father, pulling up a blanket against the biting rush of winter air, and sailing down the tracks toward a scene of mystery. Contrary to the frantic stories about a dangerous uprising, Dr. Turner seemed to take it for granted that a fourteen-year-old white boy could wander around ground zero without much risk.
The images that follow come from Jim Turner’s specific memories of what he saw.
As he had expected, he could see smoke rising from arson at several houses as they pulled into Rosewood’s small shed depot—an image only mildly troubling because the arsons in the Rosewood week seem to have come on Thursday night and Sunday, and seemed unlikely to produce voluminous smoke on Saturday, the day he indicated. A photo taken on Sunday by a late-arriving International News Reel photographer showed an incinerated house site where smoke seemed to have quickly ceased to rise. Circumstances also showed that another such photo, of a shanty fully billowing with smoke, was similarly taken on Sunday.
As Dr. Turner throttled back and Jim stepped out at the Rosewood depot, he recalled, there was no shortage of familiar faces. White men were milling about the depot, cradling shotguns or rifles as if on a deer hunt. Jim knew a number of them, though he would remember no names, except that one might have been Alf King, a neighbor from Sumner. As the son of a popular doctor and politician, Jim was soon receiving briefings. By age fourteen, accounts from others suggested, he was already something of a gregarious politician himself, headed for election to the sheriff’s office.
In the depot encounter he recalled no specific conversations, other than overhearing things like “There’s another one over here that we haven’t got yet”—meaning another house somewhere nearby that could be burned like others that were supposedly already burning. If this was an accurate impression, it would rearrange the picture of the Sunday-only arson spree that newspapers and the sheriff’s department were to present, though a multitude of factors might be able to explain the distinction as being trivial.
Then came the big chance. Someone, perhaps Alf King, asked if he wanted to see the bodies.
He was obligingly offered a ride in a Model-T. The macabre sight they were taking him to was some distance away. He estimated that the car traveled for about a mile on a sand road paralleling the railroad but well to the south of it, and then made a right-angle turn for another half mile north or northwest. Such a trajectory would have put their destination well on the north side of what is now Highway 24, but the informant felt that it was on the south side. Distance judging in monotonous pine flats could easily have been confusing—especially on such a distracting mission.
They got out of the car in what he called a pine thicket. A pit had been dug there. I asked (for a reason to be explained) how the pit seemed to have been dug. He said with shovels, making no retort about the obviousness of the question. He could recall seeing no shovels left at the site, however. What riveted his attention was the content of the pit.
He walked to it and looked down. Here was the repository for the killing spree he had been hearing about. All the bodies were of blacks; some were rather light-skinned. There were women, men, and, worst of all, there were children, some no older than “suckin’ babies.” He distinctly recalled seeing diapers.
The adults seemed dressed in no special way, the women in dresses, some in coats. The cause of death seemed to be gunshot wounds, specifically shotgun. He tried to count them, he said, but they had been thrown in haphazardly, jumbled together. The men who had brought him in the car said the number of corpses in the pit was eighteen.
Jim Turner was the first Rosewood eyewitness I located and interviewed, on May 20, 1982. I returned later to his home in the town of Chiefland and he repeated his impressions of the mass grave on tape. He and his wife were cordial and receptive without seeming effusive. I had feared defensiveness or evasiveness on such a delicate scandal for his home area, but there was none, nor demands like “Don’t use my name.” The former sheriff answered questions unhesitatingly but briefly, as lawmen learn to do in court. He volunteered little but gave an answer to each question, on some points saying frankly that he couldn’t remember, and seemed regretful and apologetic when he couldn’t remember more.
At that time I knew only that the seemingly impossible had occurred, that a mysterious African American community had been suddenly destroyed by a white mob, and that this prospective landmark in history had been somehow dropped from public knowledge, to be remembered only privately by elderly locals, like Jim Turner.
Listening to his first-hand account of the mass grave, I concentrated on maintaining a non-judgmental expression in order not to discourage further revelations. There seemed to be no way to doubt this earnest, methodical testimony.
I had no way to know that ahead lay months and then years of finding more and more elderly informants—until a picture would emerge from the aggregate showing that the image Jim Turner had remembered, from the evidence of his own eyes, could not be true.
Most importantly—and aside from many other disproofs large and small—there is the fact that exhaustive tracing over the years has proved over and over that the Rosewood violence killed no children. This is not a guess. One by one, all the candidates in Rosewood households containing children were shown to have remained intact after fleeing the violence. As I said, it should be noted (though this is far from being the only proof) that rural African American households in 1920s Florida were not pools of savage chaos where a child or two could be shrugged off without tremendous mourning, which would resound through family networks for decades.
The story told by Jim Turner—the actual image that apparently was sincerely remembered—inadvertently rested, like various other Rosewood stories told by whites, on a proposition that seemed self-evident to them: that no one would ever be able to find the disappeared black survivors to get their side of the story.
Additionally, not until 1990 was the legally mandated 70-year embargo on U.S. census information lifted from the manuscript household counts of the 1920 census, the census closest in time to Rosewood’s 1923 destruction. This formal inventory of the community, when combined with many converging survivor descriptions, allowed scrutiny of all the names that might belong in a rapidly narrowing list of people no one seemed to have seen since 1923, or people said to have been killed.
For instance, there were the stories about little Eloise King, the solitary child who liked to sit on a porch facing the railroad—in a house that documentably was burned in the violence. It was said that the arsonists shot down Eloise on the porch. And yet Eloise herself, when I found her in South Florida, insisted persuasively that she was not dead. In turn, she said it was a different neighbor child who was killed in the violence, little Sarah Goins. But my tape recording of Sarah Goins Ward finds her, too, very much alive.
And so it went, down many rabbit holes of ever more unlikely possibilities. Among the things that the 1990 release of the census names confirmed was the real size of Rosewood—very compact (though certainly not just a squatters’ camp as some local whites grumbled). The compactness was evident even after the community’s 1923 death, because many of the refugees wound up following Cummer Lumber to new jobs in its Pasco County sawmill, where the same family networks continued. And no one had lost any children. Except for the two mistaken rumors about Eloise King and Sarah Goins, no one had even heard tales of lost children.
So who were the infants in Sheriff Turner’s very sincere memory, the “suckin’ babies” in specifically observed diapers?
Were whites trucking them in from some distant killing field? The psychology of the rampagers was not given to far-ranging clean-up—and no candidates disappeared in surrounding communities either.
It was in my second conversation with Jim Turner that I asked him the seemingly stupid question: how did the mass grave look like it had been dug? The reason that I asked was because by that time I had also talked to white eyewitness Jason McElveen (though what, exactly, he was or was not a witness to was up for grabs).
Unlike Sheriff Turner, Mr. McElveen was a more classic example of boastful confabulation, shown when his descriptions parachuted him into dramatic scenes where he couldn’t have been present, not to mention the chuckling of his neighbors as they warned that he told tall tales.
McElveen assured me officiously that the mass grave at Rosewood had been dug by a two-mule fire plow, sent by Cummer Lumber to accommodate the legion of corpses that he said were there. “They killed eighteen out of that house,” growled the self-described Ku Klan associate—which at first blush might sound like confirmation of Jim Turner’s number, but then McElveen added, with the same confidence, that another ten were killed outside the house—meaning that there must be other graves, containing other hordes, not to mention still others he said were killed in surrounding communities, which communities he confidently named. African Americans in those communities had heard of no such carnage there.
The grave that Jim Turner saw, looking as if it had been dug the ordinary way, with shovels, could not have been the plowed furrows McElveen was boasting about—on the assumption that no one could ever check. By itself, the comparison could be seen as discrediting only the fire-plow graves, and not Turner’s, but it begins to show the treachery of the mental terrain.
Meanwhile, there was the newsreel photographer who eventually reached Rosewood on its last day of violence, Sunday, January 7. He (or they) came from the Hearst media empire, and left a tantalizing collection of at least five still photographs, all of them rather cryptic, but one showing a crowd of white onlookers, including women, looking down at bare earth with some almost imperceptible mounds marked by wooden stakes.
For fourteen years after 1982, those ghostly photos were explained only by captions in media that had bought them from the Hearst network and published them in 1923, the captions offering little information beyond lame guesses. Then in 1996 a researcher for ABC News Productions, working on a documentary by David Tereshchuk, combed through a neglected New York archive, finding the original field notes from the photographer on these shots. The notes clarified that the grave photo showed the graves of three people—which would match the Thursday night and Friday morning deaths of Sarah Carrier, Lexie Gordon, and Sylvester Carrier. Other evidence points to the same implication, that there really was a “mass grave” at Rosewood—if you consider three closely adjoining burials as a mass grave—and the total number of bodies interred there was three.
But if this was the “mass grave” that people were hearing about, then why does it so completely contradict what Jim Turner was sure he saw? What his vivid memory seems to match instead is the current of baseless inferences many whites were drawing from the report aboutt the fateful house containing eighteen people, some of them children.
Corroborated stories told of pious Walter Pillsbury, the sawmill superintended in Sumner, ordering up the commissary truck on Friday to go over to Rosewood and gather the black dead—of whom at that point there were three (while the two white dead, Wilkerson and Andrews, were celebrated as martyred lawmen and received full funerals). Pillsbury’s crew was not going to be digging a massive dumping pit, and even so, they would not have left any such pit open overnight, for sightseers like young Jim Turner to see the next day.
The cordiality showed to me by former Sheriff Turner and his wife displayed not a trace of defensiveness about any possible memory problems. “If you’d like more light,” Mrs. Turner said to me considerately after the tape was rolling, “you can sit here at the dining table if you’d like.”
However I did notice that as her husband answered my questions there was an elusive poverty in both the images he described and the number of words he used. His speech was not slurred but slightly labored, suggesting a struggle with illness.
In law enforcement he had been not only a sheriff but president of the Florida Sheriff’s Association. Yet at the same time he endured a scandal involving a moonshine still that was said to be planted on his property. Two other informants, learning who I had been talking to, offered guarded warnings.
“Jim Turner drank real bad,” said one, whose father had been a deputy sheriff. Another said the former sheriff had not only struggled with alcohol but was a serious diabetic. Both of these warnings were suggesting impaired believability, in ways not fully explained. The mention of diabetes opens a panorama of anecdotal information on the occasional side effect that is diabetic delusions or hallucinations.
In youth, by all accounts, Jim Turner was a likeable, extroverted Tom Sawyer type with a talent for talking, and especially for tall tales. This may be deeply irrelevant to assessing the considerate gentleman who was so obviously honest with me.
In this recap I have given far too little of the full range of evidence saying that no children were killed in the Rosewood violence, let alone babies. There were no candidates who could have gone into the mysterious pit at a never-found location.
I have no way to explain what Jim Turner knew that he saw. There are many clichés about pseudo-memory and filling in the blanks from imagination, and stories like that of French psychologist Jean Piaget, who only thought he remembered a kidnap attempt when he was a small child. But none of the science that I can find seems to explain the riddle of the fourteen-year-old boy at the brink of the pit.
____________
On Saturday, January 6, 1923, the home of the Hall family in Rosewood was still standing, Sam Hall would recall, as he recountied his trajectory from Friday.
There had been the Friday afternoon quitting-time escape from the mob at the Sumner lumber yard. After that, Hall said, the group of Rosewood lumber workers had spied crippled James Carrier on the path in the woods. And from there, as Friday night closed in, Hall said he detoured around Rosewood to Wylly, where he spent the night.
The next morning, Saturday, brought home the realization that his life in Rosewood was suddenly ended. The rescue train had removed the women and children. In Saturday’s dismal quiet, Hall thought of some possessions he had left in his room at home, and he went back for them.
Those possessions—new shoes and trousers—derived from a rite of passage. Until recently Sam had helped support his desperate widowed mother and siblings by doing what was considered children’s work in the Wylly turpentine groves. Up to age fifteen in that work he had worn short pants, marking him as a child. But as his fifteenth birthday approached he went to Sumner and was hired as a lumber stacker—man’s work, with its dangers and pride. One of the first uses of his new paycheck, he said, was to buy a pair of Black Grit pants and a pair of Endless Walker shoes.
In the process of retrieving them on Saturday, for his impending journey into an unknown fate, Sam found the Hall residence standing as usual. This house, a no-frills two-story saltbox without a front porch, reflected the grimness of his father Bacchus Hall. It was where Sam was born in 1907, and where, in 1919, his father Bacchus had died.
The house was north of the railroad and some distance away from it, out of sight beyond intervening pines. On his Saturday detour back to it, Sam did not run into any wandering white avengers. As he left there for the last time, hoping to hike to a turpentine camp at Lennon sixteen miles up the tracks, the family dog, Ten-Cent, tried to follow, and he sadly shooed it away.
Farther out in the woods in the direction of the Hall house, on the outer edge of what was considered Rosewood, the community’s former school superintendent for African American children, Ransom Edwards, had responded unlike his neighbors to the week’s crisis. On Thursday night he had refused to abandon his home, and in Saturday’s nervous interlude he was still there.
Ransom Edwards and his wife Julia had lived on their 27-acre farm for decades, after marriage on March 1, 1876, as Civil War Reconstruction was about to end. By 1923, elderly Julia Edwards was known as a sweet, quiet church woman, though in the week of violence, several people recalled, she had anxiously spread a frightening rumor that whites were coming “to kill out all the Carriers and Bradleys”—a story diametrically opposed to frantic rumors among whites, which said that a savage black uprising was threatening to kill available whites.
Once the fevers of mass panic were out of the box, memes of alarming information seemed to bounce free of their original context and recombine in new grotesques—as when the number 18, originally reported as the number of occupants sheltering in Sarah Carrier’s house, seemed to transmute dreamily, and 18 became the alleged number of corpses in a mass grave. The parlor game called “telephone,” showing how a whispered sentence can mutate from hearer to hearer, had found a morbid incarnation.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, as Rosewood had prospered modestly, supporting several black-owned businesses, Ransom Edwards had not only signed county paychecks for the community’s African American schoolteachers, but owned a store. Then as the main communal anchor, the Charpia cedar mill, had closed down and the Goins turpentine distillery faded, economics hit the other Rosewood businesses as well. Bills for purchases at Ransom Edwards’s store were left unpaid, said his grandson Willy Evans, who saw the books, and the store was forced to close.
Meanwhile, Edwards worked first as a millwright at the cedar mill, then after it closed he made do in a less skilled job, stacking lumber in Sumner, until retiring to his farm with its fruit trees in the yard. Along the way, Ransom and Julia Edwards, two pillars of frontier self-reliance, not only adopted a step-daughter, but later as she grew up and then suddenly died, they adopted her three children, one of whom was Willy Evans, cited above.
Writing in a beautiful, fluid hand, owning a collection of theological books, Ransom Edwards preached at times as a lay minister. He had made a journey with Rosewood from boom to bust, and apparently was not entirely pleased.
By 1923 the devout old sage had stopped going to church, his grandson said. He seemed alienated and aloof from the internal feuds and killings (including one in church) that had flared in the shrinking community—and on the night of January 4, 1923, the Thursday night of flight, he didn’t flee.
Perhaps as storekeeper John Wright’s Model T made the rounds that night to warn the distant McCoys, Wright had also passed the word to the Edwards farm, on that same far side of the community. Others seemed to respond almost automatically to the signs of a coming rampage, fleeing to the woods immediately, but on the Edwards farm the response was more methodical.
Some bedding and key possessions were packed into a wagon for Julia, then her husband transported her to a hiding place in the woods. And then, said grandson Willy and others, Ransom Edwards went back to the house alone, to stand guard through the night on the porch with a gun in his lap. Why this succeeded without a confrontation is not clear.
One story among whites said that some wanderers did stray into that corner of Rosewood, and one was a former employer, who exclaimed: “That’s Aunt Julia’s house! Leave it be! I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to Aunt Julia!”
But a competing story said that they simply found an old man asleep on the porch with a gun in his lap, and were either impressed enough, or amused enough, to pass on by. This is just a twisted fragment of a story, but it grew unintentionally epic, compressing a lifetime into a word.
“How’s it going, Uncle?” calls the amused but suddenly clement passerby.
The figure stirs, then mutters:
“I’m tired. I’m tired.”
______
\Willy Evans recalled coming back to the farm just after the cataclysm had ended, and finding the house untouched, its two upstairs bedrooms and long front porch remaining just as before. Not far away, he found that the similarly isolated but smaller home of elderly neighbors Jim and Luvenia Hall had also been spared by the week’s arson. It turns out not to be true that every single residence in what was considered Rosewood was put to the torch—though most and perhaps nearly all apparently did end that way.
In the center of Rosewood, the George and Maggie Bradley residence was reportedly spared because it was rented, having once been Ford’s Hotel and still belonging to whites. Hostilities in that area apparently remained so intense that the Bradleys never dared to return. At one point in the aftermath, storekeeper Wright reportedly drove to Gainesville to try and convince impoverished widow Mary Ann Hall to return to her twenty acres with her children, but by that time the children had enrolled in the university town’s rare school opportunities for African Americans, complete with a new black high school. A Hall daughter would eventually graduate there.
As to Ransom and Julia Edwards, along with grandson Willy, they continued refusing to abandon their home, and in spite of everything they moved back in, settling down again in the ghostly remains of what had been a community. However, said Willy, the lack of community support became too much for them, and eventually they too left, moving 150 miles south to the Florida town of Bradenton.
On Sunday, January 7, 1923, the Associated Press wire sizzled again, this time with an item running the next day in the New York Times. This announced the climax of the Rosewood drama:
LAST NEGRO HOMES
RAZED IN ROSEWOOD
Florida Mob Deliberately Fires
One House After Another
In Black Section
NEGROES HIDE IN WOODS
Authorities Now Believe Race Riots
Which Caused Seven Deaths
Have Come to an End
ROSEWOOD, Fla. Jan. 7 (Associated Press)—Twelve houses, all that remained of the negro section of Rosewood following the clash between whites and blacks on Thursday night, in which seven were killed, were fired by a crowd of white men here this afternoon and burned to the ground. The houses were fired, one at a time, while a crowd of between 100 and 150 men looked on without making an effort to extinguish the flames, according to Levy County authorities. All of the negroes were hiding in the woods, where they went late Thursday night after the clash.
The story was self-evidently composed at a distance by an off-site reporter on the phone, taking the word of the Levy County Sheriff’s Department, but it offers the only known summary of the final arson spree that completed the Rosewood eradication.
The report says that this arson spree, evidently number two after the smaller effort on Thursday night, was conducted “this afternoon,” meaning Sunday afternoon, January 7.
The number of houses burned, it says, was twelve—with no mention as to whether any of those were previously vacant structures. Since the sheriff’s department had already told the media that the earlier spree on Thursday night consumed eight houses (with only two of those known to be occupied), this leaves a provisional total of perhaps fourteen possibly occupied homes that the week destroyed.
And if the three homes of African Americans that are known to have been spared from arson (R. Edwards, J. Hall, G. Bradley) are added to this total, that makes seventeen African American residences accounted for, out of a pre-violence community total of perhaps no more than about twenty to twenty-two occupied African American households (a figure reached by updating the federal census of 1920 through use of survivor testimony and other evidence).
Hair-splitting about such numbers does not change the overall verdict: the community was permanently destroyed.
Into the 1930s three white households that were also spared would remain at the site, headed by John Wright the storekeeper and two brothers, Rob Ingram and Will Ingram.
__________
By Sunday afternoon, January 7, 1923, the morbid stillness of Rosewood had begun to attract a new type of activity. Church had let out, and people were accustomed to taking Sunday drives. White informants from both Cedar Key and Sumner would recall the moment when they were small children and were taken in the family automobile to gaze out the windows at a scene of recent renown.
Gawking at disaster sites was an old form of entertainment. In 1936, ruins left by a tornado in Mississippi brought an estimated 100,000 onlookers, until public announcements pleaded for them to stop clogging relief efforts, and a flatbed truck carrying gawkers overturned, adding new fatalities to the storm toll.
Between Friday and Sunday, beliefs about Rosewood among whites, especially at Cedar Key, seemed to flip from frantic fears of black uprising into mere curiosity about the battle debris. The presence of Rosewood sightseers is confirmed not only by testimony but by photographs. One shows white men, women and children standing cooperatively—posing for the shot—before a bare strip of ground, which is staked out as a series of three graves.
At least five such photos were taken by an unidentified cameraman working for International News Reel, part of the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. In 1923, newsreel crews were busy supplying splashy real-life movie footage to America’s 18,000 silent theaters, as warm-up before the main feature. Their taking of still photographs was less well known.
At Rosewood, the enigmatic Hearst presence produced no enduring movie footage that has ever been found, nor any written report beyond terse labels on the still photos. And the photos themselves are problematic, framed too tightly for background details that might corroborate them, though at least four of the five seem to be authentically from Rosewood.
While print journalists in 1920s Florida were under pressure not to spend time going to distant news sites, newsreel crews were the opposite, living for the first-hand glimpse. The Associated Press wire stories on Rosewood, though forming the only contemporary written record of the events, did not result from on-site observation or independent witness interviews, and thus are reduced almost to the level of rumor. The Hearst camera network was a bitter rival of the AP, arguably with even lower standards, but at least with an imperative to go to the scene.
Two of the Hearst photos are relevant to Rosewood myths. For instance: Did Sylvester Carrier escape miraculously from his last stand, even though officialdom agreed that the mob finally killed him? A photo seeks to answer this question. A solicitous Sheriff Bob Walker poses while holding out Sylvester’s notorious Winchester pump shotgun, ostensibly taken from him after death. The gun in the photo is indeed an old 1886-model six-shot (pumped from the trigger guard and not by a gun-barrel slide), but the photo alone doesn’t settle very much. The pose could be taken as an indication that Walker was in a cover-up, hiding Sylvester’s never-proven escape, though extensive other evidence says the escape story is wishful thinking. Walker was likely showing the gun as a default option. By Sunday, hasty burial apparently meant that the best evidence—Sylvester’s body—was unavailable for display.
The second photo, though a bit richer in evidence, is also inconclusive. This is the photo of the sightseers looking down at a mysterious stretch of staked ground. On January 21, 1923, the national weekly tabloid Grit ran this photo as a belated Rosewood vignette, captioned, “GRAVES OF THE COLORED VICTIMS.”
The sightseers in the photo are posed to feature a middle-aged white man in Sunday attire, giving a sense of authority to the shot. The poser holds an axe so that its head rests on one of the site’s waist-high stakes, as if the gentleman has just finished driving the stake into the ground. In all, there appear to be seven spindly, strange-looking stakes rising at intervals. And yet the Grit caption explains that “five colored persons lost their lives” at Rosewood. Evidently this excludes Sam Carter at the beginning because that was not directly part of the rampage.
But still unexplained are the stated numbers and the stakes. Could a photo touch-up man have helped the stakes a bit, making their number as depicted in the photo match a number stated in text sent out with the photo? That text said seven dead (ignoring that two of the seven were whites, buried elsewhere), and this is matched neatly by the seven stakes. Grit’s full story on Rosewood was only 63 words long, but forms a concise example of the uprising delusion:
GRAVES OF THE
COLORED VICTIMS
“Seven persons were killed during a race riot at Rosewood, Fla., and the village destroyed by fire, following an attack by Jesse Hunter, convict, on a white girl. Twenty colored persons, heavily armed, barricaded themselves in a house and for some time fought off the attacking white mob. Two white officers were killed and five colored persons lost their lives, but Hunter escaped.”
This story seems to be saying that the hunted criminal Jesse Hunter escaped from the house itself. Yet already a week old is the Gainesville Sun’s sheepish “We Were Misinformed” retraction of January 13—admitting that Hunter was never in the house and wasn’t even thought to be there, not even by Wilkerson and Andrews.
The 63 words also converts a house filled with terrified women and children into “twenty colored persons, heavily armed, barricaded themselves...” In fairness to Grit, these distortions could be viewed as merely good-faith condensations of what had already been said over and over by the most authoritative news voices in the land, notably the Associated Press.
It may be beyond the scope of any inquiry to ask whether this kind of national media illusion in the Jim Crow era was followed by complementary or even opposed illusions in the Civil Rights era, and on into the post-millennial Rosewood retrospective illusions of today. If racial illusions in America are not limited to one side or another in impassioned debate, but spread across the field, then who, even if there were to be inquiry into all of this, would be left as the objective audience?
In 1996, as mentioned, an ABC News Productions researcher, preparing for a Rosewood documentary on the Discovery Channel, combed a New York archive until finding the original photographer’s field notes for the International News Reel photographs. One notation said: “The photo shows the graves of the six persons.” Another: “six negroes were killed and were buried, two in each grave.”
This does not say mucfor the photographer’s sources of information. Of the six African Americans acknowledged here as being killed, two were buried elsewhere: Sam Carter with a formal funeral on Tuesday, and Mingo Williams twenty miles away in Bronson. This leaves four, but James Carrier, killed on Saturday, also seemed to receive a separate grave. However, deconfliction does seem to come, in the next note:
“graves of 3 of the six people.”
This refers to the photo with the mysterious stakes, and thus it sheds light on a stubborn riddle: Did the Rosewood events produce a mass grave? Here, a voice from the scene, that of the photographer, seems to be saying that it did—but that the mass grave contained only three people (and actually in three separate graves, the photo seems to show, along with the plural “graves” in the note).
There was the sequence. Killed on Thursday night and Friday morning were Sarah Carrier, Lexie Gordon, and Sylvester Carrier. They were relatively close together and accessible to the commissary truck dispatched by Cummer Lumber to pick up bodies. And the mission was to bury them, not to create a viewing pit. The grave site would not likely have been left open overnight, exposed to scavengers, just for the benefit of later onlookers.
If so, they would already have been covered over by Saturday morning when James Carrier was killed. A garbled wire story had James Carrier “killed on the graves of his mother and brother”—which demonstrably should have read “his sister-in-law and nephew,” meaning Sarah Carrier and Sylvester Carrier.
If the graves were covered over by Saturday morning, this also sheds harsh light on the reminiscence by former sheriff James Turner, who recalled that on Saturday he stared down into an open pit filled with men, women and children. And had there been a macabre multiplicity of mass graves—one to be seen by Turner, another to be photographed by the Hearst lens—then surely this would have thrilled the rumor mill. By Sunday the site was a tourist attraction, and the tourists seemed to amiably lead a nosy photographer to the most sensational photo location available—meaning the only “mass grave” site that there was, the one in the photo.
The real “mass grave” was no secret. Even curious children are visible in the photo of the graveside sightseers. What in a sense was “secret”—as in utterly invisible, fiendishly unverifiable—was the crowded pit in people’s minds.
________________
Also in the handful of Hearst photos is one showing the remains of a house that was burned down. In the foreground of the ashes is what appears to be a metal washtub. Sarah Carrier was said by her niece Minnie to cultivate red-leafed coleus plants on her front porch in a washtub. One can almost hear the chatty voices of sightseers helping the exotic newsreel man to use local interpretations of what he's seeing. At any rate, something shaped his notes on this house into a scribbled paradox: “ruins of two-story shanty.”
________________
One more of the Hearst photos has become the most famous of all, though it looks so generic that in the 1990s claims case there were questions as to whether it came from Rosewood at all. Most likely it did, but there is no way to be sure. This is the heavily published and republished photo that its creator labeled as “Negro house in flames.”
The reason that this shot has been the favorite for publication is that, despite its cryptic nature, it formidably tells a story. This house, unlike the grudgingly labeled “two-story shanty,” perfectly fits the cliché image of a hovel for sharecroppers or field hands. Its front porch is barely made of sticks, and if inside there are two rooms, this is only because the space in its one room has been partitioned.
Such dimensions are visible because in the photo the house is perfectly intact, yet at the same time thick smoke is billowing from the roof. The photographer has managed to arrive at just the moment when the photo can say, all at once: “Here is a Negro shanty,” and, “It’s burning.”
The cryptic aspect of the photo has seldom been analyzed in its hurried republications, but it derives from the loneliness of the shot. No human is there. And yet the fire has just been started, at just this magic moment. Where are the arsonists? Have they run off this quickly? Wouldn’t they want to linger and watch?
The dismal possible answer is that arsonists and tour guides may be gathered jovially all around the tripod, just outside the camera frame. The miraculous photo of the burning shanty raises the question as to how much of the arson on Sunday may have been inspired by a motivation known better to a later age, that of playing to the camera.
___________
No one seems ever to have been arrested, indicted or detained for any of the Rosewood violence, including murder, torture, and arson. The violent week’s increasing breakdown in law enforcement can be seen in a look at the earliest murder, that of Sam Carter on Monday night.
Coming at a time before full rampage conditions had arisen, the Carter murder received at least the pretense of a formal inquest, in the drugstore courtroom of Justice of the Peace L. L. Johns on Tuesday.
The verdict was murder by unknown hands, despite the fact that far and wide, apparently including men who were inside the courtroom on Tuesday, white male residents were privately telling of having been present in the mob at the scene of the crime, and were venting their disgust at the universally acknowledged murderer, Bryant Hudson. They were angry at Hudson not for trhe murder itself, but for drunkenly ruining an interrogation by torture.
That sequence helps demonstrate the breakdown because the Tuesday inquest was the last one. After the main Rosewood clash on Thursday night had killed two white nightriders, Poly Wilkerson and Henry Andrews, hundreds of white avengers poured into the Rosewood-Sumner area, and were only barely prevented from ransacking Sumner’s black quarters on Friday night. The five murders of African Americans on Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday occurred in a chaotic official void. Except for Mingo Williams, killed twenty miles away in a less mob-ridden area, the murders later in the week did not even receive death certificates until months later, in a mysterious update by a new justice of the peace, R. Machen Middleton.
There were boasts, rumors and legends claiming to name figures who were prominent in committing the Rosewood violence, but the claims tended to lead back to demonstrable falsehoods or other dead ends. Still, certain mentions would seem frequent enough to warrant a listing here. The most often cited names were Pat Taylor, Punk Hudson, and Mitch Wilder, all from the town of Cedar Key.
A sequel soon following the Rosewood week did bring some official action, of a sort. On January 16 a lynching occurred in the town of Newberry, forty miles north of Rosewood. The alleged crime was only the theft of a cow, but the Newberry area had been enflamed over reports of epidemic livestock theft at least since a mass lynching there in 1916.
Newberry’s apparent return to mob rule in early 1923, perhaps worsened by the Rosewood events, moved District Judge A.V. Long in Gainesville to urge the state governor to respond. Judge Long’s petition seemed to imply that his chief concern was the Newberry lynching only twenty miles from his courtroom, rather than the much larger Rosewood eradication at a safer distance of more than forty miles away; but Governor Cary Hardee lumped both incidents together, assigning a special prosecutor to lead a grand jury investigation of them both.
Special prosecutor George DeCottes came 90 miles north from his state attorney’s jurisdiction in Deland to conduct hearings. These seemed to last a total of two days—one day in Gainesville for the Newberry lynching, and one day in Bronson, the Levy County seat, on Rosewood. The hearings left no official record, and are known only from piecemeal mentions in newspaper articles. A number of witnesses were said to be called, both black and white, though no Rosewood survivor would recall knowing anyone involved.
The verdict was reportedly the same as in the inquest of January 2: death by unknown hands. No public elucidation emerged as to how the investigated events had occurred or what they entailed.
Florida officials may already have known at the time of that two-day hearing, in February 1923, that another large scandal, also in Florida’s Big Bend area of swamps and timber camps, was ballooning toward public exposure, to hit the newspapers in April. That was the slave-camp scandal in Dixie and Taylor counties, just across the Suwannee River from Levy County, a scandal known by the name of its most prominent fatality, Martin Tabert. Tabert was a vagabonding northern white youth hijacked and worked to death in a Dixie County logging camp, where conditions seem to have been worse than in the timber jobs of more settled Levy County.
At the same time that Governor Hardee’s administration was headed into the overnight growth and turbulence of the Florida Boom, it was grappling with multiple upheavals in Hardee’s home area, the Big Bend, consisting of the counties of Levy, Dixie and Taylor. There would be waves of national newspaper coverage and outcry—and many unanswered questions.
________________
Among the myths about Rosewood is another one that seeks to create perfect melodrama by deepening the tragedy. Often seen on the Internet today is the claim that land holdings left by Rosewood’s African American owners were confiscated after they were driven out. Some commentary has grown specific, claiming that the properties were confiscated through tax auctions, though this never occurred.
The largest black-owned parcels, belonging to the McCoys (114 acres), the Carters (80 acres), the Haywards (80 acres), and the Goins heirs (65 acres), were retained by their forcibly exiled owners until the full frenzy of the Florida real estate boom in 1924-1925. Then these parcels were sold to parties appearing to be outside investors, one of them from Ohio.
As things turned out, the boom never came to isolated Levy County, but for a moment there were hopes that it might. It could be wondered whether the first glimmer of such hopes might have risen in 1923 to help incite the Rosewood violence. Yet the parties rumored to be perpetrators of the violence seemed to have scant interest in future investing. Still, it is possible that a distant whiff of the boom could have been one more factor in rationalizations for racial cleansing, in the sense of clearing the way for dimly envisioned progress. But no one is known to have ever said or even implied anything like that.
Ensuing years would see various tentative efforts at real estate development in the forcibly depopulated area. An abortive subdivision tract on the old Carter property still makes a peculiar apostrophe in aerial photos. The former Goins parcel received a grass landing strip for small planes, used by visiting hunters in the 1950s, including TV actor Richard Boone. The area remained so isolated that the landing strip fell to drug smugglers and was confiscated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
In the mid-1920s when the larger Rosewood parcels were sold, heirs were brought together from distant points for their signatures. The process suggested family network cooperation and not a swindle or coercion. Naturally, there was still the underlying pressure to sell caused by the original eviction.
The smaller parcels also sold, though one of them not for years. Sam King, said to have fled from his four acres with his wife and small daughter just as the Thursday night arsonists were applying the torch, would die of a heart attack in the 1940s, and was felt to have worked himself to death trying to recover the level of security his family had lost. King reportedly advised his wife Ellen to continue paying taxes on their four acres, though the plot was far from her location in later years. Ellen King continued to keep her taxes current until 1952, when at last she gave in and sold to a white former neighbor still at the site, Will Ingram.
________________
Minnie Lee Mitchell was with Mama, the haunted figure that was 52-year-old grandmother Emma Carrier, when news came to them in Gaiuesville of how Emma’s husband James had been killed. Rumors contended that before mob execution the stroke-crippled hunter, James Carrier, was forced to dig his own grave. The family wondered numbly how he could have dug his own grave when one of his arms was paralyzed. They also noted that the newspapers said he was Sylvester Carrier’s brother, not his uncle.
Minnie watched the shock take its hold on her grandmother Emma, who on top of losing everything she had owned and worked for, was hit with her husband being killed this way. They had been married since December 23, 1886. At the turn of the century, when mushrooming new catalog houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were running their own clothing factories, large numbers of pelts and hides were shipped north to them, resulting in woodland profits. Sizeable houses were built and furnishings were bought by trappers and hunters in Rosewood, such as John Coleman, George Bradley, Haywood Carrier—and Haywood’s brother James Carrier.
The household of James and Emma Carrier had known many setbacks—the apparent autism of son Willard, the apparent panic disorder of son Aaron, and the death in childbirth of daughter Daisy, leaving Minnie and her brother Ruben to be raised by James and Emma. Less easily captured was the family affection that shone from their anecdotes. Shy but relentlessly disciplined Emma had the burden of heading the more challenged of the two contiguous Carrier households, while her stocky, confident sister Sarah won praise for her talents and those of her outgoing children.
Yet, even as full responsibility fell on Emma after James’s two strokes, she seemed unshakeable in her regimented household routine (Wednesdays for washing, Thursdays and Saturdays for sweeping the yard, rigorous demands that when the upstairs beds were made the corners must fall just right). Granddaughter Minnie, who adored her, almost literally called Emma a tower of strength: “She good as she is tall.”
Soon recovering from her two flesh wounds of January 4, Emma Carrier nonetheless began wasting away. A disciplined household that had held together the six minor children in her charge had vanished, and could no longer protect them. Emma Carrier’s pioneer self-reliance was now exchanged for the cramped charity of relatives. After she cooked dinner one night, Minnie would recall, she began to sicken. Within months of the 1923 dispossession she was gone.
__________________________________________
[End Phase 4 of the Events: Rampage]