TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — For 71 years, the survivors of Rosewood controlled their history. They guardedly discussed their stories only at family gatherings, haunted by the threat of retaliation in their rural Central Florida communities.
But in 1994, after the death of the last surviving witness, the families decided to speak up about the angry white mob that torched and destroyed the Black town in Levy County in 1923.
The painful details of the unpunished lynchings and vigilante violence went from being family secrets to the foundation for legislation awarding the first reparations paid by a state in the nation’s history to survivors of racial violence.
