A new movie about the destruction of a mostly-black Florida town of Rosewood in 1923 provides a horrifying view of an incident all too common at that time.
C omparing a film with the book it is based on is always somewhat unfair.
It shows us the tragedy of the town of Rosewood in bloody and horrifying detail. That triumph was well documented in the book, Like Judgment Day, by Michael D'Orso. As the film shows. Rosewood was a mostly-black town in western Florida. In 1923, it was virtually obliterated in a wild orgy of racial violence, violence touched off by a rumor that an African-American man had raped a white woman.