This is a story based on an actual incident, an American tragedy that everyone involved tried to forget or deny…

During the first week of January, 1923, Rosewood, a flourishing black town in central Florida, was burned to the ground by whites from the neighboring, less prosperous, town of Sumner. Fueled by a white woman’s falsified story that she was assaulted and beaten by a black stranger, a mob of Sumner men declared war on their unsuspecting neighbors. Many of Rosewood’s inhabitants were murdered in cold blood and scores more were driven from their beds into the surrounding dank woods, never to return to their homes — or their secure way of life — again. And for more than 70 years Rosewood’s history and destruction were kept a secret, never discussed by the survivors.

Yet not everyone gave in to either savagery or panic during that horrifying week. A strange and unexpected alliance between two men, one black and one white, brought about a daring rescue that carried dozens of terrified women and children out of the dark Florida swamps to safety.