Public Policy

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Rosewood, Florida reparations as a public policy model for sundown towns in the United States.
(Wheaton College; Norton, Mass., 2011-11-23T15:18:35Z) Eid-Reiner, Eric.
From 1890 to 1930, while likely thousands of racial cleansings took place in the United States, local mayors, sheriffs, governors, and other government officials rarely intervened. They routinely failed to protect black residents from losing their property, possessions, jobs, and community as these citizens were violently chased out of the places they had once called home. Such blatant government neglect of its responsibility to protect its citizens in the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, led the survivors and descendants of former residents to seek reparations from the state in the early 1990s, which they ultimately received. This work examines the various policy and political factors that contributed to the success of the Rosewood reparations and analyzes the prospects for similar approaches to be taken with regard to Forsyth County, Georgia, and Corbin, Kentucky, where the black population was forced out of more racially diverse communities.