Rosewood Massacre - Culture of Silence

Culture of Silence

Despite nationwide news coverage in both white and black newspapers, the incident, and the small abandoned village, slipped into oblivion. Most of the survivors scattered around Florida cities and started over with nothing. Many, including children, took on odd jobs to make ends meet. Education had to be sacrificed to earn an income. As a result, most of the Rosewood survivors took on manual labor jobs, working as maids, shoe shiners, or in citrus factories or lumber mills.

Although the survivors' experiences after Rosewood were disparate, none publicly acknowledged what had happened. Robie Mortin, Sam Carter's niece, was seven years old when her father put her on a train to Chiefland, 20 miles (32 km) east of Rosewood, on January 3, 1923. Mortin's father avoided the heart of Rosewood on the way to the depot that day, a decision Mortin believes saved their lives. Mortin's father met them years later in Riviera Beach, in South Florida. None of the family ever spoke about the events in Rosewood, on order from Mortin's grandmother: "She felt like maybe if somebody knew where we came from, they might come at us".

This silence was an exception to the practice of oral history among black families. Minnie Lee Langley knew James and Emma Carrier as her parents. She kept the story from her children for 60 years: "I didn't want them to know what I came through and I didn't discuss it with none of them.... I just didn't want them to know what kind of way I come up. I didn't want them to know white folks want us out of our homes." Decades passed before she began to trust white people. Some families spoke of Rosewood, but forbade the stories from being told: Arnett Doctor heard the story from his mother, Philomena Goins Doctor, who was with Sarah Carrier the day Fannie Taylor claimed she was assaulted, and was in the house with Sylvester Carrier. She told her children about Rosewood every Christmas. Doctor was consumed by his mother's story; he would bring it up to his aunts only to be dissuaded from speaking of it.

In 1982, an investigative reporter named Gary Moore from the St. Petersburg Times drove from the Tampa area to Cedar Key looking for a story. When he commented to a local on the "gloomy atmosphere" of Cedar Key, and questioned why a Southern town was all-white when at the start of the 20th century it had been at least half black, the local woman replied, "I know what you're digging for. You're trying to get me to talk about that massacre." Moore was hooked. He was able to convince Arnett Doctor to join him on a visit to the site, which he did without telling his mother. Moore addressed the disappearance of the incident from written or spoken history: "After a week of sensation, the weeks of January 1923 seem to have dropped completely from Florida's consciousness, like some unmentionable skeleton in the family closet".

When Philomena Goins Doctor found out what her son had done, she became enraged and threatened to disown him, shook him, then slapped him. A year later, CBS' 60 Minutes produced a story on Rosewood, narrated by Ed Bradley. Doctor called her family members and declared Moore's story and Ed Bradley's television exposé were full of lies. A psychologist at the University of Florida later testified the survivors showed signs of posttraumatic stress disorder, made worse by the secrecy. Many years after the incident, they exhibited fear, denial, and hypervigilance about socializing with whites—which they expressed specifically regarding their children, interspersed with bouts of apathy. Despite such characteristics, survivors counted religious faith as integral to their lives following the attack in Rosewood, to keep them from becoming bitter. Michael D'Orso, who wrote a book about Rosewood, said, "veryone told me in their own way, in their own words, that if they allowed themselves to be bitter, to hate, it would have eaten them up." Robie Mortin described her past this way: "I knew that something went very wrong in my life because it took a lot away from me. But I wasn't angry or anything."

The legacy of Rosewood remained in Levy County. For decades no black residents lived in Cedar Key or Sumner. Robin Raftis, the white editor of the Cedar Key Beacon, tried to place the events in an open forum by printing Moore's story. She had been collecting anecdotes for many years, and said, "Things happened out there in the woods. There's no doubt about that. How bad? We don't know.... So I said, 'Okay guys, I'm opening the closet with the skeletons, because if we don't learn from mistakes, we're doomed to repeat them'." Raftis received notes reading, "We know how to get you and your kids. All it takes is a match". University of Florida historian David Colburn stated,

"There is a pattern of denial with the residents and their relatives about what took place, and in fact they said to us on several occasions they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to identify anyone involved, and there's also a tendency to say that those who were involved were from elsewhere".

In 1993, a black couple retired to Rosewood from Washington D.C. They told The Washington Post, "When we used to have black friends down from Chiefland, they always wanted to leave before it got dark. They didn't want to be in Rosewood after dark. We always asked, but folks wouldn't say why."