Hit Factory

Rosewood (+ Sinners)

Added 2025-06-20 17:54:22 +0000 UTC

We went exceptionally long on the late John Singleton’s undersung period western Rosewood, a film (and filmmaker) whose fingerprints are all over Ryan Coogler’s recent box office sensation, Sinners. Rosewood tells the story of an independent Black township in Florida and the barbaric racial violence it faced in 1923, incited by a white woman’s false accusation of assault and the Klan-assisted mob that followed. It’s believed that over 100 Black citizens were murdered during the attacks, though the true number has never been properly counted.

Despite the brutality, the legacy of Rosewood was forgotten—suppressed for nearly 60 years by both those who endured it and those who carried out the violence—until investigators uncovered the truth. That reckoning ultimately led to a 1994 vote in the Florida State Legislature to pay reparations to the survivors and their descendants.

In Singleton's hands, the story of Rosewood becomes a rich, downtempo historical epic of properly grave tone; a film that never shies away from the violent realities of Black life in America's south in the early 20th century, the racial animus stoked by class anxieties and lingering slavery era resentments, and the complicity of white audiences and their ancestors in carrying out the violence that shaped our country's past and present.

We discuss Singleton's inimitable capacity to juggle the rhythms of mainstream studio moviemaking with the formal radicalism of a Black story told with limited equivocation and compromise, as well as how blockbuster moviemaking primes us for absolution rather than honest reckoning. Then, we explore the rich character work within the film, how Singleton utlizies the embellishments of genre and archetype to root Blackness in a cinematic history linked conspicuously to white supremacy, and the refreshing stroke of having "no good white guys" in the movie. Finally, we relate the film to Coogler's latest, where it achieves a similar filmic mastery as well as where we feel it falls short of Singleton's vision.

Read The Rosewood Massacre at Esquire Magazine

Watch The 1983 Rosewood Massacre segment from 60 Minutes

Read Robert Daniels on Sinners at Roger Ebert

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