I just saw the movie this week. I'm sorry to say the film was a disappointment, historically, and especially the fictional character, Mann, with rope burns around his neck, and his trick horse! The true story didn't have a superhero with a well-trained horse at the Rosewood massacre. Many of the events, violence based hate crimes, which took place in Rosewood, did actually happen though, at Rosewood, and in many towns and cities in America, Post WWI. As you can see and hear the tone in the Sylvester character, and the "white townies" portrayed, America wasn't ready for equality, or even separate but equal. I saw the children as hope; most of the adults were trapped in that behavior. PBS, or the History Channel, should have made the movie, or else edit the fiction out of the movie for a 45 minute version, an hour with commercials.

Wow, this is American Shindler's List, except no Academy Awards. A reminder that the US - a greatest world teacher of justice had had the practical Nazism on the life stage the way deep into the XX century when most of their today 'pupils' among the world countries already had parliamentary democracies. It seems that US constitution has never really matched its legal performance in practice. Good movie, excellent casting. I love Ving Rhames and John Voit performance, also Don Chiedle and Michael Rooker, very good character matching achieved. I also respect a movie making without usual Hollywood softeners. Pretty authentic and shocking. By the way, I bumped into this movie by coincidence as I had never heard about it before.

Aunt Sarah: N__gger is just another word for guilty.Compelling but deeply flawed, this very interesting tid-bit of history will most likely pull at your heart-strings like a rabid baboon trippin' on LSD. The story is set in a small town named Rosewood in 1920s Florida. It's mostly a black town that borders Hicktown, USA. When a white woman makes up a story about how she was raped by a black man, the majority of the white community gets all crazy, violent and KKK and begin to massacre every black person they lay their eyes on. Ving Rhames, best known for playing Marsellus 'Ass-Raped' Wallace in Quentin Tarantino's innovative masterpiece 'Pulp Fiction', brilliantly portrays Mann. Mann's a bad-ass motherf__cker with a big-ass shotgun and a heart of gold. He helps the black community fend off the racist would-be trailer trash that wants to kill them. The best and most intricate performance of the film comes from Jon Voight who plays a white shop-owner/black sympathizer who finds himself caught in the middle of everything. Don Cheadle also has a small role in which he shines. 'Rosewood' is compelling, graphic and true-to-life, but the film suffers from tediously cliché plot turns and some cheesy if not bland dialogue. All in all, it's a pretty good film that if not anything else will teach you about a little-known but extremely devastating racist massacre that took place on American soil some 80 years ago. Grade: B

I am white and grew up in the county where this really happened. I remember as a child driving by the place where this community was. There was a small sign that was put up by the Florida DOT that said "Rosewood" but there was nothing there. I asked my mother why and she was unsure what to tell me. Then when this movie came out I realized what had happened. I began asking the elderly people I knew, but they did not want to talk about this except for my ex-husband's step dad. He remembered being a boy and the mob trying to get his father to join them. He refused to participate and was threatened for the future of his family. I am also ashamed to say that race relations have still not gotten a lot better here. In 1969 when I was in kindergarten, I remember being sent home due to race riots in the high school. I now live in California, and I know some people found the movie distressing. Unfortunately the south has a subculture of violence even to this day. The actors did an excellent job on this film. I am so glad that the filmmakers had the courage to take this story on. People tend to think of Florida as an integrated state because of Miami and Orlando, but central and northern Florida is still very racist. For example the African-Americans still call the whites by names such as "Mr. John" or "Miss Ellen". Then little town I grew up in ,Williston, still has the African-Americans living on one side of the railroad tracks and the whites on the other "better" side. There are some whites that are very decent people and some blacks that are of very poor character. I keep waiting and praying for the day when a person will "be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" in the words of the great Martin Luther King JR. PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE!! If Americas can take the violence that is in video games and stupid horror movies they should be able to take the true portrayal of man's inhumanity to man in this most wonderful film!!