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For his fourth movie, a still-not-yet-30 John Singleton went in a direction in which he hadn’t yet gone and never would again. Rosewood (1997) — a powerful, fictionalized account of the racist massacre that basically destroyed the eponymous, majority-Black Florida town in 1923 — marked both the first and last time he’d explore historical drama and the Western, and remains one of his best-realized works. 

It stars Ving Rhames as Mann, a composite, essentially symbolic character who arrives in town by horse at the beginning of the film, his sights set on land acquisition. He immediately connects with the Carriers, a well-to-do family that gains new importance to him after one of their own, Scrappie (Elise Neal), becomes a love interest. (Fast friendships are also formed with Sarah, the wizened Carrier matriarch played by Esther Rolle, and her strong-willed son Sylvester, played by Don Cheadle.) 

Not long after Mann’s arrival, though, the superficial tranquility between Rosewood’s Black and white communities starts to fracture. Fanny (Catherine Kellner), a white local, has falsely claimed that she was raped by a Black man in an attempt to obscure her affair with a white man (Robert Patrick) who one day beats her so severely that she can’t think of a cover story to offer her housekeeper husband (Loren Dean). Sarah and her granddaughter actually witnessed the aftermath of that beating, but understandable fear prevented them from intervening or sharing what they’d seen with others. 

By the time Sarah is ready to share the truth, racist furor has moved far past a breaking point. A mob composed not just of white Rosewood residents but also those from Sumner, a neighboring town, has gathered around her house, thinking she’s harboring the made-up culprit. A delusional quest for justice is escalating into what will soon become a full-on pogrom. 

Jon Voight and Ving Rhames in Rosewood.

Initial reports estimated that the ultimate death toll amounted to two white people and six Black people. Later testimonials from eyewitnesses, though, placed the number somewhere around 100 residents. Stretching the movie out to nearly two and a half hours, Singleton opts not to make a film almost all about the violence at its center, nor does it unhandily sermonize or conclude, as many movies involving racist history supported by a major studio do, that events like this are relics of the past whose ramifications are removed from our present. Rosewood surveys how the recognition of a Black person’s humanity within a white system is largely contingent on deference — which is then vulnerable to violent suppression when challenged — and how racist violence can so easily swell because those who perpetrate it can move without anxiety over punishment. (In Rosewood, police join the mob, too.) 

Before Rosewood descends into mass violence, Singleton does a terrific job establishing the undercurrent of tension ever-present in the town and in the closeby Sumner. Race relations are outwardly placid, but in the air of this pastoral spot of land you feel the queasy understanding that the moment a Black person oversteps an implicit white supremacist bound, violent retaliation can just as quickly descend. There are a handful of white characters in Rosewood that support their Black neighbors (a general-store owner played by Jon Voight and his family is particularly compassionate), though Singleton doesn’t simplify them into or angelicize them as white-savior figures when they lend a hand. They’re never sandpapered so that we don’t look at them with skepticism; Singleton ensures the Black characters are always central to the story.

Rhames does some of his most unforgettable work in Rosewood: reticent but not inscrutable, tough but never coarse. But despite his excellence, his character is also responsible for one of my few quibbles with the movie. Mann, who isn’t real, can at times be drawn like an action lead, reinforcing the Hollywoodian idea of there needing to be a brawny hero in an abnormally perilous situation so that a difficult story is a little more swallowable and even thrilling at times. (A late-in-the-movie train escape is effectively put together but also shot and staged so much like a garden-variety action sequence that it feels at odds with the nuanced frankness of everything predating it.) Rosewood is so finely tuned elsewhere, though, that these faults feel less like failures entirely and more like underthought areas you wish lived up to the gradated consideration practiced nearly everywhere else.