S2 Rosewood Introduction

An overview of this podcast and this season. Dreams of Black Wall Street examines the course of once-thriving predominantly Black communities that are both known by the moniker, Black Wall Street, as well as those that fit such a description. This was a period in which African Americans - only several generations removed from slavery - were on a quest for community and the promise of full citizenship. The right to be both politically engaged and at the very least try their hand at supporting themselves and their families while maintaining the right to seek out the proper means to do so. These communities are used as a glimpse into the Black experience of America during this era. While season 1 focused on the Tulsa Race Massacre in which the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Ok was destroyed, season 2 will focus on the once-primarily Black, rural, self-sufficient town of Rosewood, Florida. Rosewood was a bright spot of Black independence in Levy County Florida, that existed amid the dark shadows of the Jim Crow South. During the first week of January 1923, Rosewood became the site of a racially motivated massacre of a number of the town’s African American residents and the destruction of the rural hamlet. Accounts of the death toll vary, ranging between less than 10 people to more than 100. At the time, like incidents of a similar nature, the Rosewood Massacre was characterized as a race riot. Florida - and other parts of the country, especially the South, had been experiencing a particularly large number of lynchings of black men in the years leading up to the massacre. However, this isn’t just a story about the destruction of another Black community. It’s also about the decades long road to compensation. A long, complicated road fraught with emotional highs and lows that resulted in just a sliver of repayment for all that was lost in that tragedy.