January 7, 1923: A violent, racially motivated conflict in North Florida kills at least 8 people, and the town of Rosewood is abandoned and destroyed.
Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident, because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter.
A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. For several days, survivors from the town hid in nearby swamps until they were evacuated to larger towns by train and car.
No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black and white residents; none of them ever moved back, and the town ceased to exist.
Sixty years after the rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived by major media outlets when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. The survivors and their descendants all organized in an attempt to sue the State for failing to protect Rosewood's black community.
In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report on the incident. As a result of the findings, Florida compensated the survivors and their descendants for the damages which they had incurred because of racial violence.
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January 7, 1923 was a Sunday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
