`  The term ``massacre,`` titling this article, misrepresents the incident being described. this term was used by none of the actual Rosewood participants, whether victims or perpetrators (they spoke of a ``race riot`` or even a ``race war,`` or simply ``that thing at Rosewood.``) The ``massacre`` usage emerged vaguely in exaggerated local legends in later decades, then after the incident's rediscovery by mass media in 1982 it was used as a shorthand term while knowledge of what had actually happened at Rosewood in 1923 was still fragmentary. In public forums, the term was introduced by the Florida journalist who discovered the Rosewood incident, Gary Moore, in his expose article of July 25, 1982, in the St. Petersburg Times, where he was a staff writer. It was also used a year later when Moore took the still-coalescing Rosewood evidence to the television program ``60 Minutes`` and was background reporter on a segment airing Dec. 11, 1983.  Ironically, Moore later reported that resources furnished by CBS News allowed him to trace a number of new survivors of the incident whose generally agreeing depiction conclusively contradicted impressions of a classic massacre. Moore said there was discussion of this at 60 Minutes taping on-site at Rosewood, but the audience requirements of television seemed to preclude adjustment from the original, legend-based impression of the incident. The resulting 60 Minutes script, apparently written by field producer Joel Bernstein and voiced by commentator Ed Bradley, said at its opening, ``perhaps as many`` as 40 people were killed at Rosewood (a barely justifiable gloss of the changing ambiguities in the early evidence), but the script closed with a flat assertion: ``40 people died here,`` which was known at the time to be false. The real death toll, resulting not only from informant descriptions and (sometimes questionable) death certificates but from extensive tracing of community residents, was eight, of whom six of the dead were black and two white. This was not an impulsive or bigoted assumption but the repeated result of testing the possibilities from a number of different perspectives, by successive examiners ranging from university historians to the Florida Department of Law Enforcment, and the result agreed closely with survivor consensus. During this process over the course of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Moore himself abandoned the term ``massacre`` and spoke against it, as shown by his update article of March 7, 1993, in Tropic, the Sunday supplemental magazine of the Miami Herald. By then the case was receiving new national publicity in the Rosewood claims case in the Florida Legislature, which assigned a team of historians from the State University System to review the evidence. They, too, carefully avoided the ``massacre`` terminology, titling their widely quoted report of Dec. 22, 1993: ``A Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida.`` The term ``massacre`` is generally understood to mean a mass mowing-down of targets at a single stroke, whether a small number as in the ``St. Valentine's Day Massacre`` or hundreds or thousands in the landmark massacres of the world. The week-long Rosewood incident, by contrast, involved a series of individual homicides: Sam Carter killed Jan.1; Sarah Carrier killed Jan. 4 in an apparent target panic during a nightriding aggression; Poly Wilkerson and Henry Andrews (whites) killed a short time later on Jan. 4 as a home invasion was repelled; Lexie Gordon killed in a spree shooting elsewhere in the wee hours of Jan. 5; Sylvester Carrier killed after a series of firefights as daybreak came on Jan. 5; Mingo Williams killed 20 miles away around noon on Jan. 5; and James Carrier killed on Jan. 6.  The Rosewood incident of January 1-7, 1923, was a very serious case of racial injustice and mob violence, but sensationalized terminolgy cheapens this solemnityand, indeed, insults the suffering of victims of real massacres worldwide.  Rosewood was almost a complete secret when unearthed in 1982, owing to the fitful phases of racial controversy in American history. After it came back into public prominence, a number of other such bygone cases were unearthed across the South and beyond, especially by journalist Elliot Jaspin (Bury Me in the Bitter Waters, 2008). Jaspin, complaining that preoccupation with the Rosewood case was tending to obscure the prevalence of racial de-population incidents elsewhere, suggested useful terminology for the phenomenon in general. Taking into consideration the misleading governmental implications of the term ``ethnic cleansing`` (from the Balkans in the 1990s), Jaspin has suggested for incidents such as Roseewood the term ``racial cleansing.`` This also answers those who might object to a more technical-sounding but less impactful term: ``forced de-population.`` It is perhaps a measure of general avoidance of this topic in American culture th