A century ago, a false accusation sparked the destruction of the Florida community

A hundred years ago, central Florida was home to a town called Rosewood.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

In January 1923, Rosewood was wiped off the map by a week of mob violence, then erased from history by people who didn’t want to talk about what had happened to the town’s primarily Black residents.

But in 1982, a white newspaper reporter named Gary Moore started asking questions in nearby Cedar Key. At last, everything that had been hidden began to come out.

“I called my editor and told her that I had a story about a whole community vanishing,” Moore says. “She was shocked.”

Multiple versions of what happened exist, including a recounting by director John Singleton in a 1997 movie starring Don Cheadle, Ving Rhames and Jon Voight. This account reflects what Moore has found in 40 years of tracing documents and interviewing survivors and their descendants.