Erasing Rosewood’s history
Some versions of the death toll claim that hundreds were slain. Moore says all the records he has examined show the total as eight. That includes the two white men who fell on the Carriers’ front porch while trying to invade the house and the six Black people who’d done nothing to invite the bloodshed.
Some of the Black residents who’d bolted from Rosewood made it onto a passing train and rode north to Gainesville. Some went further, leaving the state to relocate to Chicago or New York.
A month after the massacre, a prosecutor convened a grand jury investigation into what had happened. The grand jury concluded its work after just a day, claiming it could find no eyewitnesses willing to testify.
After a few years, Wright, the shopkeeper, contacted several former residents to encourage them to return to what had become a ghost town. But few were interested in returning to a place full of such horrific memories. Some survivors even changed their names, afraid of being tracked down by vigilantes.
When Moore showed up in Cedar Key in 1982, he had no inkling of what he was about to uncover. He just wanted to write a feature story about gator hunters, or something similar.
But then a woman he was chatting with blurted out that Cedar Key was an all-white town. When he asked why, she refused to say. Instead, she sent him to an avid local historian who lived in a former church.
After introducing himself and making small talk, Moore asked the white historian why Cedar Key had no Black residents. Moore recalls her abruptly dropping her pleasant manner. Her eyes narrowed.
“I know what you’re digging for,” she snapped. “You’re trying to get me to talk about that massacre.”
Gradually, he pulled an exaggerated version of the story out of her. Following the directions she gave him, he drove to the scene of the attack, where he found a few mobile homes occupied by white people but little else. One of the residents told him they had heard something vague about Rosewood and added that children at play sometimes found spoons or bits of crockery.
Stunned, Moore drove 45 miles to dig through historical records at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Librarians there assured him that no such event had occurred. They had never heard of it.
But he found one brief mention in an article in the Florida Historical Quarterly, which in turn led him to check newspapers from 1923. In their pages, he found a trove of information.
“It was in newspapers coast to coast while it was going on,” Moore says. But in the early 1980s, few of these archival stories were readily available outside of a handful of libraries.