Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 29, 1994                   TAG: 9401290108
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TALLAHASSEE, FLA.                                LENGTH: Medium

71 YEARS AGO, AN OUTRAGE; TODAY, A CALL FOR PAYMENT

Before it was over, the drunken mob had wiped out the mostly black hamlet of Rosewood, torching houses, a store and a church. At least eight people died in the weeklong rampage in 1923, including two white mob members.

Blacks always have suspected that Taylor had a fight with her white lover and lied to cover it up. But that didn't save Rosewood. Only a green road sign marks where the hamlet once stood.

Now, more than 70 years later, Florida's Legislature will decide whether to pay $7 million in reparations, and thereby become, scholars say, the first state to compensate victims of racial violence.

"We were eradicated, killed, assaulted. We had our livelihoods as it relates to our spiritual and economic assets taken from us," said Arnett Doctor, whose mother survived. "It's only right, just and proper that we should be compensated for it."

Rosewood was a community of a few hundred people. Most of the men worked in the turpentine business or were farmers. In the early 1980s, some survivors and their descendants started holding annual reunions and decided to seek restitution.

The House of Representatives last year commissioned five scholars from three universities to piece together what happened, at a cost of $50,000. They made their report in December.

Eleven survivors and 45 descendants would share the $7 million under a bill now set for debate as early as next week. Gov. Lawton Chiles recently threw his support behind the bill.

"It is appropriate, right and overdue that the loss of homes and property be compensated," Chiles said. "It will serve as evidence that Floridians remember and condemn those horrible events."

The seeds of Rosewood's destruction were sown on Jan. 1, 1923, when Taylor was beaten unconscious in her Sumner home.

Taylor's black maid claimed she'd seen a white man visit Taylor on several occasions, including that day. But just about everyone in the white community believed Taylor's story about a black intruder. Some news accounts at the time claimed she also was raped and robbed.

Sheriff Robert Elias Walker gathered a posse and a pack of bloodhounds to search for an escaped black prisoner suspected in the attack.

A group of whites confronted Sam Carter, a black man who they believed helped the attacker flee. When he didn't confess, Carter was "tortured and his body was riddled with bullets and then hanged from a tree," the scholars said.

By the next day, a mob estimated at 400 to 500 had descended upon Rosewood. They split up to search the hamlet. Violence escalated two days later when a group of whites approached a house with about 15 to 25 blacks inside.

Two white men who stormed the house were shot and killed. Two blacks inside died in the gun battle. The others fled during a lull in the shooting.

The mob proceeded to burn houses and other buildings in the settlement and killed at least three other blacks.

The escaped prisoner never was found.

A grand jury probe one month after the massacre concluded it didn't have enough evidence to indict anyone.

"The failure of elected white officials to take forceful actions to protect the safety and property of local black residents was part of a pattern in the state and throughout the region," the scholars wrote. "Rosewood was a tragedy of American democracy and the American legal system."