7 thoughts on “TBT: Rosewood (1997)

  1. Oh we watched this in high school. I remember being fascinated by it. I definitely need to rewatch it!

  2. Thanks for bringing this to light… I think it’s a good reminder that plenty of people have been working to tell these stories for a long time. I was 11 in 1997 so I have no idea if it got a lot of attention at the time or not, but while I’m not sure I’m up for it right now, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Looks like it was done with a lot of care and, as you noted, great costumes by the amazing Ruth Carter.

  3. I only caught the tail end of the movie on TV. Did see artifacts from Rosewood the town in the African American History Museum in DC.

  4. I read an article a few months ago about how for a long time no one remembered this even happened because all the survivors of the massacre tried to never speak of it again. They didn’t want to have to relive the memories of what happened and so it sort of slipped out of the general consciousness for 70 years. I think I would have to be in the right mental headspace to watch this but it looks really well done so I’ll have to give it a try sometime.

  5. Yes, I saw this movie not long after it came it. It still stays with me, and often when I talk about race relations, I allude to and quote this movie. It was interesting to read that Ruth Carter felt that this project was both personal and documentary. When I watched this movie, everything looked just right like peeking into old family photo albums. John Singleton gave a lecture at my college years ago, and he was particularly proud of Rosewood. This is a movie that definitely deserves to be more widely seen.

  6. The Rosewood massacre was a terrible, terrible thing. As for the movie, I could live with the fictional black hero but it was monumentally unfair to turn a white man who protected black people from the lynchers into a villain.

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