Elected officials in Florida did not ease race relations. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905–1909) suggested finding a location out of state for blacks to live separately. Tens of thousands of blacks moved to the North during and after World War I in the Great Migration, unsettling labor markets and introducing more rapid changes into cities. They were recruited by many expanding northern industries, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, the steel industry, and meatpacking. Florida governors Park Trammell (1913–1917) and Sidney Catts (1917–1921) generally ignored the emigration of blacks to the North and its causes. While Trammell was state attorney general, none of the 29 lynchings committed during his term were prosecuted, nor were the 21 that occurred while he was governor. Catts ran on a platform of white supremacy and anti-Catholic sentiment and openly criticized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) when they complained he did nothing to investigate two lynchings in Florida. Catts changed his message, however, when the turpentine and lumber industries claimed labor was scarce; he pleaded with blacks to stay.[2] By 1940, 40,000 blacks had left Florida to find employment, but also to escape the oppression of segregation, violence, and disfranchisement.[1]
When U.S. troop training began for World War I, the idea of black soldiers receiving combat instruction alarmed many white Southerners. A confrontation regarding the rights of black soldiers culminated in the Houston Riot of 1917. German propaganda encouraged black soldiers to turn against their "real" enemies: American whites. Rumors reached the U.S. that French women had been sexually active with black American soldiers, which University of Florida historian David Colburn argues struck at the heart of Southern fears.[2] Colburn connects growing concerns of sexual intimacy between the races to what occurred in Rosewood: "Southern culture had been constructed around a set of mores and values which places white women at its center and in which the purity of their conduct and their manners represented the refinement of that culture. An attack on women not only represented a violation of the South's foremost taboo, but it also threatened to dismantle the very nature of southern society."[2] The transgression of sexual taboo subsequently combined with the arming of blacks to raise fears among whites of an impending race war in the South.
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