Bill DeYoung.com

'Rosewood' brings Florida tragedy to life

By BILL DeYOUNG

©1997 The New York Times Company

NEW YORK – John Singleton's "Rosewood" isn't Arnett Doctor's Rosewood."Rosewood," the motion picture, re–creates the 1923 events in Levy County, in which a mostly black town was obliterated by whites from a neighboring community over four murderous days. Directed by Singleton ("Boyz n the Hood," "Higher Learning"), the Warner Brothers film opens Feb. 21.

Doctor, whose mother was a child when the Rosewood massacre took place, is the spokesman for five of the six surviving residents and their families. Largely through his efforts, the Florida Legislature in 1994 made reparations, financial and spiritual,           to the Rosewood survivors. Doctor knows the Rosewood story – as close to the real, true story as 70–some years of survivors' dimmed memories can provide – better than anyone.

"The film is brutally passionate, and brutally accurate, and the essence of the story is reflected," Doctor said. "It is not a documentary, nor was it intended to be." Doctor was Singleton's executive consultant during production of "Rosewood" in late 1995. "Overall, I think the film does justice to what took place at Rosewood."

Doctor, Singleton and the cast of the "Rosewood" movie –– including Ving Rhames, Jon Voight and Esther Rolle – were in New York to discuss their joint venture with the nation's media.

Because the first–person accounts of Rosewood are sketchy and conflicting, Singleton said, he was forced to make certain concessions. "We tried to show as many (of) the true events as possible," said the filmmaker. "There's some things we left out, too – there's only so far you can go in a motion picture."

Some characters were combined, and certain elements changed or eliminated altogether. "With a documentary, you could spend 4–1/2 hours doing the exact thing," Singelton said. "At least in making this picture, it will spark discussion and more people will research the story of Rosewood."

The undisputed facts about Rosewood are these: On Jan. 1, 1923 a white woman in nearby Sumner claimed she'd been beaten by a black intruder. The residents of Sumner, a mill town, were friendly with their black neighbors, but there had always been an underlying racial tension.

The attack on Fannie Taylor was all it took for the simmering rage in the men of Sumner to boil over; an angry mob quickly formed and followed their bloodhounds up the railroad tracks to Rosewood.

Ostensibly, the mob – fueled by ignorance, moonshine and blood lust – was hunting a black escapee from a nearby chain gang, presumed to have done the deed; according to history, its real purpose was to exact revenge on Rosewood, where the people had nicer houses, tidier lawns and more community spirit than Sumner.

Several Rosewood men were lynched, others beaten; elderly women were shot in their yards. Many of the town's children hid, freezing, in the woods as the furious mob shot up and burned nearly every building in bustling, prosperous Rosewood. The children were spirited away to Gainesville by night on a train operated by sympathetic whites.

The only structure left untorched belonged to the town's lone white resident, shopkeeper Johnny Wright.

Most reports agree that Sylvester Carrier, great uncle to Arnett Doctor's mother, was killed in the attack, although Doctor believes he escaped to Louisiana and lived there until 1964, under an assumed name. Sylvester's mother, Sarah Carrier, was murdered on her front porch as she pleaded with the group to leave her family alone.

"Sarah Carrier was responsible for bringing into this world many of those guys in the mob," Doctor said. "She was a midwife, and she was also a domestic worker in the area. So many of those people knew her personally and supposedly respected her."

No one ever came back to Rosewood. "It would have been unthinkable for them to return to an area where law enforcement officials were actually part of the mob that had terrorized them," Doctor said. "There was no one to complain to – the governor, the attorney general and the local sheriff had all been aware of what transpired, and had not made an effort to contain it or stop it." All the land that Rosewood residents legally owned was sold the next year for unpaid taxes.

Doctor's mother, Philomena, had actually been working alongside her grandmother, Sarah Carrier, in Fannie Taylor's house the morning of the beating that started it all. She always contended – as did Sarah – that the married woman's attacker was in fact her lover. Her white lover.

In 1994, the Legislature formally acknowledged the wrongs done at Rosewood, issued a formal apology and awarded the legitimate survivors $150,000 each (an amount Doctor, who'd asked for millions, calls "pathetic.") Doctor said closure is still quite a ways off, although Singleton's provocative film can do nothing but open people's eyes.

In assembling his movie version of the tragedy, Singleton found he was without a hero – a strong, central figure. History regarded Sylvester Carrier well, but Singleton felt Sylvester just wasn't enough. The character of retailer Johnny Wright – who had in fact helped victims hide from the mob – was embellished for the film, but no way would "Rosewood" play with a white protagonist.

"We needed a character who could be the eyes and ears of the audience, and that's where Mann comes in," Singleton said. In the film, the character Mann, a drifter, rides into Rosewood just before the mob arrives, and ultimately becomes the story's hero. "It just makes the story flow better," he added. "I didn't want to make a straight docu–drama. This isn't a TV movie, this is an epic motion picture. So we had to have a character who could make it that."

The truth is in there somewhere. "Man," Arnett Doctor said, was Sylvester Carrier's nickname. "In Rosewood, they were identical. All the survivors who know Sylvester knew him as Man."

In time, Doctor came to accept Singleton's bit of revisionist history. "After seeing what the director did with the movie, I became somewhat comfortable with the portrayal," he said. "Because in my eyes, at the end of the movie, I got the impression that they actually became one individual."