SOURCE: Cottrol, Robert J. Review of Rosewood, by John Singleton. American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1998): 636–37.

In the following review, Cottrol offers a positive assessment of Rosewood.

If historical films serve an important historical purpose, they do so not because they accurately reproduce the details of the past in ways that satisfy specialists: few do. Instead, films serve history by reminding audiences ignorant of, indifferent, and increasingly even hostile to considerations of past events, of the way people not unlike themselves lived in other times. By that standard, Rosewood directed by John Singleton, is a very valuable effort indeed. The story of the destruction of a prosperous black township in northern Florida in early 1923 provides the occasion vividly to tell three stories remembered today by few Americans, black or white. The first is a story of black achievement in the face of overwhelming adversity in the Jim Crow America...