The Rosewood Massacre: History and the Making of Public Policy

Abstract

ON THE MORNING OF MAY 4, 1994, in a historic ceremony at the old capitol building in Tallahassee, Florida, Governor Lawton Chiles signed the first state legislation in the nation to compensate African Americans for past racial violence. Looking on were fifty survivors and descendants of families subjected to white violence over seventy years earlier in the small North Florida village of Rosewood. Also attending were several of the historians who had prepared the report, A Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, January, 1923, for the state legislature-the report that paved the way for the unprecedented compensation act.' Seldom is the work of historians so directly related to the outcome of the policy process. In the words of one of the compensation bill's principal sponsors, state Representative Miguel DeGrandy, The historians' report