In the four decades following the Civil War, Atlanta had emerged as the
economic engine of the region, and city boosters liked to tout it as
the Gate City of the New South, a place of racial tolerance and
business-first progressive attitudes. The city was home to the
country’s highest concentration of educated African Americans, and a
thriving community of black colleges, businesses, and churches
flourished—despite discrimination and Jim Crow laws that restricted
black Atlantans’ access to schools, parks, streetcars, and public
places. But in the summer of 1906, racial tension simmered in Atlanta
as a vicious Democratic gubernatorial campaign waged. Hoke Smith,
former publisher of the
Atlanta Journal, took on four rivals, including
Clark Howell, editor of the
Atlanta Constitution. Pushing a platform of
African-American disenfranchisement, Smith, aided by segregationist Tom
Watson, crafted a campaign message that equated African-American
political power with black male sexual dominance, playing to white
Southerners’ basest racial prejudices. At the same time, both the
Journal and
Constitution, along with local dailies the
Atlanta Evening
News and
Atlanta Georgian, published sensationalized reports on what
they called a series of sexual assaults on white women by black men
(virtually all of which were overblown accounts or outright
fabrications).
The tension came to a head on Saturday, September 22, 1906, a month
after Smith’s landslide primary victory. Local papers—in particular the
News—published increasingly vitriolic “extras” alleging multiple
assaults in that single day. By evening, thousands of white men and
boys gathered in downtown Atlanta, their tempers inflamed. In the mob
hysteria that broke out, at least 5,000 white men and boys ran wild
through the streets of downtown Atlanta. They bludgeoned African
Americans to death on the street and in streetcars, shot blacks at
point-blank range in a barbershop, ransacked and destroyed businesses,
knifed at least one man to death, and fatally threw another off the
Forsyth Street viaduct—after stoning him. In one of the most macabre
demonstrations of rage, the rioters stacked three corpses of black
victims at the base of the Marietta Street statue of Henry W. Grady,
the legendary newspaper editor who had lauded Atlanta as the capital of
a “New South.” The police had no control of the city. When the mayor
sounded the riot call shortly before midnight, officers returned to
headquarters, leaving the streets un-patrolled. The governor did not
call in state militia until after the alarm was sounded, and troops did
not arrive in Atlanta until close to 2:30 Sunday morning.
On September 23, newspapers reported at least a dozen deaths. The
Atlanta riot become national news and in their Sunday papers, readers
from New York to San Francisco read front-page stories about the events.
Over the next three days, sporadic fighting occurred in pockets of the
city. More troops came; commanders dispatched them throughout Atlanta
to quell white residents’ fears, not protect African Americans. The
mayor declared total prohibition, and businesses and schools closed.
African-American residents—among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, and
John Wesley Dobbs—were armed and ready to protect their homes and
families. A raid of Brownsville, an African-American community
southwest of Atlanta, resulted in the arrest of 257 blacks, among them
Gammon Theological Seminary President W.E. Bowen.
On Tuesday, September 25, a select group of African-American business
men and clergy—including Alonzo Herndon, founder of Atlanta Life
Insurance, and Henry Hugh Proctor, pastor of First Congregational
Church—met with the mayor, fire chief, and other white leaders who
agreed to offer protection and some level of safety, and in turn asked
the handpicked group of elite blacks to use their influence to urge
African Americans to comply with the tough law-and-order measures being
implemented. Later that day, more than 1,000 Atlantans, the majority
white but also a few prominent blacks, met at the courthouse, where
they signed a resolution condemning the mob violence.
More than 1,000 African Americans left Atlanta in the weeks immediately
following the riot. Between September and year-end 1906, a pair of
newly formed organizations—the Atlanta Civic League, comprised of 1,000
whites, and the Colored Cooperative Civic League, with 1,500 black
members—worked to restore calm in the city and ease racial tension.
Delegates from each League gathered for a series of unprecedented
interracial meetings. On December 9, the Chamber of Commerce issued the
official report on the riot, claiming that only 10 blacks and two
whites had been killed. The report clearly blamed the events on the
“tougher element” of the city and exonerated the “better classes” of
both races from any culpability. Looking back 100 years later, it could
be argued that the cooperative efforts following the riot set the stage
for Atlanta’s later emergence as the “city too busy to hate,”
establishing a tradition of negotiation among the city’s power brokers
of both races. But, over the next decades, the residential, social, and
commercial segregation in the city deepened.
What happened during those days in September 1906 marks a shameful
chapter in white Atlanta’s history and a painful one for black Atlanta.
Its impact is etched into the city’s streets and into Atlantans’
collective experience. For better or worse, it shaped the city as it is
today.
Adapted from
Rage in the Gate City: The Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (Second Edition, University of Georgia Press, 2009) and “Four Days of Rage,”
Atlanta magazine, September 2006, both by Rebecca Burns