In his youth, Richard Brown didn't fully understand why his sister lived in fear.
Mahulda Carrier was afraid of white men who approached her door. She tried to stay inside as much as possible. On family visits to Archer, she preferred to travel at night, when she felt she wouldn't be noticed.
Brown later learned Carrier endured the Rosewood Massacre, and preserving the memory of the tragedy eventually became part of his life's work.
A longtime activist, Brown died of natural causes at Shands at the University of Florida Saturday. He was 97.
Brown's niece Lizzie Jenkins, who had looked after him for the past seven years, remembers him for his dedication to the Real Rosewood Foundation, a nonprofit she helped found to preserve Rosewood history. Brown served as an honorary member of the foundation.
"Anything I wanted to do, he was right there to find out what part he could play to make sure my endeavor could happen," she said.
Born in Archer, Brown moved to Jacksonville during his childhood to live with his sister and attend better schools. It was then that he learned about what had happened years before, when violence broke out in Rosewood after his brother-in-law, Aaron Carrier, was accused of attacking a white woman.
The small town of Rosewood was located about a mile north of Sumner in Levy County. During the first week of January in 1923, racial violence left eight people dead and an entire town displaced after white rioters burned every building to the ground.
On the Rosewood Massacre:
Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.
That was less than 90 years ago, a tiny drop in the ocean of time. It is not time to speak in a detached manner of the unintended, positive consequences of slavery. Less than half a century ago, we lived in a segregated society. My political science teacher in high school was one of the first black students to attend what had formerly been an all-white public school in my county.