Carrier was the nephew of Sarah Carrier, who did the laundry for Taylor. Searchers were led by dogs to the home of Aaron Carrier in Rosewood.

The mobs focused their searches on Hunter, convinced that he was being hidden by the Black residents. Law enforcement found out that a Black prisoner named Jesse Hunter had escaped a chain gang, and immediately designated him a suspect. The white mobs prowled the area woods searching for any Black man they might find. He also called for help from white residents in neighboring counties, among them a group of about 500 Ku Klux Klan members who were in Gainesville for a rally. The incident was reported to Sheriff Robert Elias Walker, with Taylor specifying that she had not been raped.įannie Taylor’s husband, James Taylor, a foreman at the local mill, escalated the situation by gathering an angry mob of white citizens to hunt down the culprit. The neighbor found Taylor covered in bruises and claiming a Black man had entered the house and assaulted her. On January 1, 1923, in Sumner, Florida, 22-year-old Fannie Taylor was heard screaming by a neighbor. Though it was originally settled in 1845 by both Black and white people, black codes and Jim Crow laws in the years after the Civil War fostered segregation in Rosewood (and much of the South).Įmployment was provided by pencil factories, but the cedar tree population soon became decimated and white families moved away in the 1890s and settled in the nearby town of Sumner.īy the 1920s, Rosewood’s population of about 200 was entirely made up of Black citizens, except for one white family that ran the general store there.

Rosewater insurrection