Rosewood Incident Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

rosewood Incident - Essay ExampleIt just served as the ready cause for the incident. To venture a little further, it was a pretext for the manifestation of malice and fury that were already in store. That the grand jurys investigation ended up finding insufficient conclusion to prosecute the persecutors adds insult to injury and establishes a clear case of racial chauvinism shamelessly front crawl into the system of criminal justice. Had the crusade of people like Ida B Wells and Dyer for anti-lynching legislations been successful, probably the Rosewood cataclysm could clear been averted. It was less than a decade ago, in 2005, that the US Senate could ap audition a resolution of defense to lynching victims and survivors2 and, like a posthumous award, it poorly reflects on the commitment of previous federal governments towards the underlying rights of its own citizens. It exposes the true historical legacy of a society and a nation that claim to have been conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ____________ 1Ron Olson. US History (1865 Present) From reconstructive memory through the Dawn of the 21st Century (Franklin Lakes (NJ) The Career Press, 2007), 89. 2James D Unnever et al. A Theory of African American Offending Race, Racism and Crime (New York Routledge, 2011), 43. With over 300 African Americans being brutally murdered, a substantial community having become extinct and an entire town having been reduced to charred remains by appalling atrocities outflank over a weeks time, the bone-chilling Rosewood pogrom continues to be an indelible stain on humanity. It had not been very long ago that the assistance of about a third of a million blackamoor men3 (who, however, were deemed unqualified for full citizenship) as soldiers was found acceptable in a so-called fight against the fascist powers, World War I. The alleged charge of the white womans rape was a enigmatical one because there was a version t hat attributed the root cause of the charge to an extra-marital affair. It goes on only to prove that the motive of the attacks had more to do with a xenophobic attitude and irrational animosity (towards blacks who were perceived as their tormentors) prevailing in the white community, which in turn were propagated by media propaganda and white supremacist doctrines. The incident deserves to be condemned in the strongest terms because it besidesk for granted the truthfulness of a white womans statement by default, suffer as it did in the case of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates versus nine black-youths4 in 1931. The people heterogeneous in the atrocities as well as the jury men were too quick to believe and too prejudiced to try to view facts objectively. It was a damage beyond compensation and reparation. Going by the dominance that justice delayed is justice denied, the $2.1 million compensation package5 announced by Florida state in 1994 to Rosewood survivors evokes no good feeli ngs. Justice in the sense of bringing culprits to book alone can repent a crime but not restitution. ____________ 3Walter C Rucker et al. Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (Westport Greenwood Press, 2007), 1. 4Sr. William A James. The kowtow Color Syndrome (Lincoln iUniverse, 2003), 121. 5Rosewood Tells Story. Jet Magazine, 24 March 1997, 59. It must be viewed with furbish up that it took sixty years6 for the Rosewood horror to capture the nations attention fortuitously, thanks to Gary Moores initiative, and 70 years for a legislation to be made.