                            THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996               TAG: 9602020130
SECTION: DAILY BREAK              PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT
                                             LENGTH: Short :   38 lines

THE ROSEWOOD MASSACRE IT WAS A BLACK TOWN IN A WHITE PLACE AT A WHITE TIME: WESTERN FLORIDA, 1923. IN JUST A FEW DAYS, A TERRIBLE, SWIFT RAGE LEFT THE TOWN RUINED AND ABANDONED.

For more than half a century the Rosewood Massacre - the racially motivated destruction of a small black community on the Gulf Coast of Florida in the winter of 1923 - remained wrapped in myth and mystery, unrecorded in history books, mentioned only in whispers by those who had been there.

Seventy years after that attack, in the winter of 1993, a handful of the survivors, long scattered across the state, came together and faced the Florida state legislature, filing a multimillion-dollar claims bill for the homes and land they and their families had lost a lifetime ago.

The story of that bill, of those families, and of a debate that captured the attention of an entire nation, is told in ``Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood,'' written by Virginian-Pilot reporter Mike D'Orso and published this week by Grosset/Putnam.

Today, in the first of three excerpts, the story of that fateful week in 1923 is told.

[This excerpt is not available electronically. For complete text, please see microfilm.] MEMO: Story and photos from ``Like Judgment Day,'' by Michael D'Orso.

by CNB