Rosewood (1997) on Netflix
Mann, a World War I veteran scouting land to buy, arrives in Rosewood, a mostly black town in Florida. A white woman's claim sends a posse from Sumner to investigate the community.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.2/109,480 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mann, a World War I veteran, comes to Rosewood, a small black town in Florida, looking for land to buy. There he meets the Carrier family: matriarch Aunt Sarah, her headstrong son Sylvester, and Sylvester's young cousin Beulah, called Scrappie. Aunt Sarah keeps house for James and Fanny Taylor, a white couple in the nearby town of Sumner. Fanny, who has been unfaithful to her husband, is beaten by her lover and tells townspeople a black man attacked her. Hearing that an escaped convict named Jesse Hunter is nearby, a posse from Sumner and other towns rides for Rosewood. Its black residents gather in a church to plan a defense, and Mann, afraid he will be blamed, clashes outside with John Wright, a white general store owner.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Rosewood (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Journalist Gary Moore, who reported the events in 1982, breaking open decades of silence, believed that Singleton's creating Mann, an outside character who inspires the citizens of Rosewood to fight back, was condescending to survivors, and he also criticized the inflated death toll.
- Singleton said the film "wasn't one of my more successful pictures box office-wise but I think it's one of the best I've done", noting Booty Call came out the same weekend and that he thought more Black folks were comfortable watching that film than Rosewood.
- Minnie Lee Langley, a survivor of the massacre, served as a source for the film's set designers, and Arnett Doctor, the son of another survivor, was hired as a consultant on the production.
- Officially the final death toll was eight people, two white and six black, but other accounts by survivors and several African-American newspapers place the number anywhere from 40 to 150.
- The production spent $11.7 million filming in Central Florida, with Singleton saying it accounted for 70% of the film's budget.
