Development and Demise of Rosewood

Chapter 2 presents a history of Rosewood beginning with a brief overview of previous research into the town’s past. Most of the research takes place in response to a statewide conversation in the early and mid-1990s. Growing media attention encouraged Floridians to grapple with the meaning of Rosewood’s destruction in the past and present. The attention encouraged the state legislature to compensate the survivors and descendants of the massacre; that compensation represents the primary example of reparations granted to African Americans in the United States. To better understand the events of 1923, Florida’s state legislature commissioned a group of historians to investigate and write a concise history of the town and its destruction. The resulting report, based on four months of research, remains the authoritative treatment of the 1923 riot. The report, a few articles, a popular book, and a Hollywood movie all contribute to public knowledge and representations of Rosewood. González-Tennant’s overview of Rosewood’s history adds to previous research by offering a comprehensive look at similar events in American history. González-Tennant contextualizes Rosewood within broader social trends beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing until today.

Excavating Rosewood’s Past

In Chapter 4 González-Tennant discusses a novel approach to the archaeological investigation of documents, personal testimony, and material remains that supports an intersectional investigation of the 1923 Rosewood race riot. The use of GIS realizes historical archaeology’s ongoing goal of developing a unique approach to documentary evidence. The combination of property deeds, census records, artifacts, and oral testimony creates a more nuanced picture of Rosewood as a living community with more than a half century of history. The use of these data allows the author to reconstruct historical property ownership for Rosewood for more than fifty years beginning in the 1870s. The resulting GIS, based on historical properties research and other data, supports a diachronic analysis of race, class, gender, and kinship as a form of landscape analysis. The ability to reconstruct the town’s historical landscape results in previously unpublished information about Rosewood’s development and offers intriguing clues regarding its destruction.

Studying Racial Violence in America

The primary goal of The Rosewood Massacre is to shed a light on the deep temporal connections between past racial violence and modern social inequality. González-Tennant’s approach involves a multidisciplinary study of racial violence and a new investigation of the destruction of Rosewood, Florida. This is not a study of a single moment or even the destruction of a single community, which was not truly destroyed, but rather displaced. Instead, it is a search for answers to the question of how culture, society, and violence intersect across time and space. González-Tennant’s study of Rosewood draws on additional datasets to construct an interpretive framework that begins with a case study—a microhistorical study—and builds toward a theory offering a fuller explanation of how ordinary citizens turned on their neighbors in terrifying ways. While previous studies of Rosewood accurately record approximate numbers of African Americans living in the area prior to the riot and present a broad review of the town’s development, they do not construct a detailed history of the town’s development through time. Collecting such information is difficult in rural settings. No maps or city directories exist for Rosewood due to its relatively remote location and low population density. We require new methods to explore the development of such rural contexts. In Rosewood, the use of geospatial mapping to analyze and interpret hundreds of property deeds demonstrates the development of a particular pattern of African American homeownership, and the role it played in contributing to the town’s destruction.

Theorizing Racial Violence in American History

In Chapter 3 González-Tennant explores ways intersectionality helps explain the deep connections between past and present forms of racial violence. Intersectionality frames social inequality as the result of intersecting and uneven power relations. While intersectionality is central to critical race theory and Black feminism, its adoption by historical archaeologists remains limited. Intersectionality is useful for an archaeology of race riots because it provides a different lens for examining race and society. The perspective of intersectionality also speaks directly to more than a century of scholarship examining lynchings and race riots. A brief introduction to the literature demonstrates two alarming trends: the treatment of lynchings and race riots as separate phenomena and the inability or disinterest of previous research to satisfactorily connect past racial violence to modern social inequality. González-Tennant’s approach to researching the connections between past violence and modern inequality draws on works from a range of closely related disciplines to illuminate these connections.

Collaborative Archaeology, Social Justice, and Digital Heritage in Rosewood

In Chapter 6 González-Tennant discusses ongoing experimentation with new media technology to make historical research accessible to a wider public. The mixed-methods approach González-Tennant describes in earlier chapters continues through a discussion of the ways digital technologies are changing public outreach. González-Tennant describes the use of virtual-world environments, digital storytelling, and the Internet to translate academic research into public knowledge. The use of these emerging technologies is framed within a collaborative practice, and their use in Rosewood demonstrates how such approaches facilitate new engagements between archaeologists and stakeholders. The use of these technologies occurred in response to engagement with survivors, descendants, and their advocates. It has also produced engagements with property owners in Rosewood and other interested members of the public in Levy County and beyond.

Racial Violence in American History

In the final chapter González-Tennant discusses the future potential of an archaeology of race riots. Ongoing research into Rosewood holds great promise for public dialogue and racial reconciliation. González-Tennant discusses possibilities of transplanting the methodological and theoretical approaches he has used to other contexts. While not offered as panaceas, these approaches can assist other historical researchers investigating similar events in a variety of settings. One tragic reality of American history is that case studies like that of Rosewood exist all around us. The methodological approaches González-Tennant explores here offer ways of recovering these hidden histories and making them accessible to a broader public than is typically the case with such research.

Intersectional Violence in Rosewood and Beyond

Chapter 5 returns to intersectionality and the ways it relates to the multidimensionality of violence in Rosewood and beyond. The 1923 Rosewood race riot is just one event among hundreds of race riots and thousands of lynchings that occurred in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the history of American lynchings and race riots remains hidden from most people, that is changing as communities find numerous ways to memorialize these uncomfortable histories. In this chapter González-Tennant examines the complex ways visible forms of violence interact with structural and symbolic forms through time. Charting these interactions between the late nineteenth century and today identifies the time immediately following World War I as a pivotal moment in intersectional violence and U.S. race relations. Postwar instability triggered unprecedented levels of racially charged collective violence and explains how specific locations like Rosewood provide important insights allowing us to better understand how changing forms of violence affect communities through time.