Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire
In Atlanta one hundred years ago today, on Saturday morning, Sept. 22, at Marietta Street near Five Points, the Ku Klux Klan posted a skull and bones decorated red sign written in pig's blood saying, "The call. KKK action. Sunday. Come prepared. Death to informers."
A day earlier in the Atlanta News, the headline read, "It is time to act, men; will you do your duty now?"
By Saturday evening, a mass of 25,000 angry white people had assembled in what is today Woodruff Park. The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot was about to explode.
At the start of the twentieth century, Atlanta was a driving metropolis. It represented the enlightened view of what the south could become. More than any city in the southern United States, Atlanta flourished with a mix of white and black communities. Black business owners were openly present in Atlanta. Black leaders such as Alonzo Herndon ran a successful string of barber shops catering to whites; Wesley C. Redding had founded the Atlanta Loan and Trust as well as the European hotel, and David T. Howard, one of the wealthiest black men in Atlanta, was the owner of a funeral home on Piedmont Ave.
Though Atlanta was seen as an urban city and a new wave center of racial ease, it was also one of the most segregated cities in the country. With Jim Crowe laws thriving, blacks were hit hard with limitations and attacks on their civil rights- such as the poll tax, enacted to prevent poorer blacks from voting.
In 1906 Hoke Smith, owner of the Atlanta Journal, won the Atlanta governer's election. Smith, running on a platform of "black terror ruining the white south," would become one of the key figures in the riot to follow. Using the power of fear, Smith used his newspaper to create a fake threat of black violence in the city. During Smith’s campaign he proclaimed, "Folly for us to neglect any means within our reach to remove the present danger of Negro domination."
In August of 1906, the Atlanta Georgian published a three part series of editorials on "The Reign of Terror for Southern Women," threatening stronger means to end black crime. To follow, the Atlanta Constitution and Evening News papers intensified its campaign against what they called a "Negro crime wave," the focus on bi-racial crime in the black saloons and other establishments on Decatur Street. The majority of the stories they published about black men molesting white women were rumors, half-truths, or completely fabricated. Much like the fear of a slave revolt among the old plantation owners, the fear of Negro domination in Atlanta was rising. Stories and rumors circulated among the press of continuous black crimes against the "innocent white woman" were growing stronger, with state politicians fueling the flames.
Earlier in the year a white woman, Mae Dupree, claimed that a black man attacked and tried to kill her. She would later confess that she was not attacked, but that she had attempted suicide. On September 20th of 1906 a white farmer’s wife, Knowles Kimmel, accuses an unidentified black man of assault in Oakland City. This would prove to be one of the final sparks that ignited the already amassing gas.
The media provoked huge anger and hatred in its white readers— with stories, editorials, and cartoons warning of rising crime; threats of the rape of their mothers, wives, and daughters by black males; the disreputable saloons that encouraged drunkenness and licentious behavior in "brutish" men; and the desire of "uppity" blacks to achieve equality with whites. On September 22, after newspaper reports of four separate incidences of alleged assaults by blacks on white women circulated in Atlanta, mob violence finally erupted.
Extra editions of these accounts, sensationalized with lurid details and racial language (intended to inspire fear) circulated, and soon thousands of white men and boys gathered in Five Points. City leaders, including Mayor James G. Woodward, sought to calm the increasingly indignant crowd but failed to do so. By early evening, the crowd had become a mob. From then until after midnight, they surged down Decatur Street, Pryor Street, Central Avenue, and throughout the central business district, assaulting hundreds of blacks. The mob attacked black-owned businesses, smashing the windows of black leader Alonzo Herndon’s barbershop. Although Herndon had closed down early and was already at home when his shop was damaged, another barbershop across the street was raided by the rioters— and the barbers were killed. The crowd also attacked streetcars, entering trolley cars and beating black men and women; at least three men were beaten to death.
The city of Atlanta has done a lot to suppress the events of those three days. The horrors of the riot were ghastly. Mobs of thousands of white men would march through the streets of downtown, chasing down black men and women and beating them to death with clubs. Bodies of black individuals were carted off and dumped in front of the capital building. Beaten blacks were thrown off bridges onto railroad tracks; many blacks, jumping off high bridges voluntarily just to keep away from the angry mob. Some blacks formed groups in their neighborhood and armed themselves to protect their homes and families. The state militia was brought in to stop the riot, but only ended up taking away the weapons of the black mobs. People were running for their lives only to be jumped upon by mobs and left dead or dying in a pool of blood.
Here is one of the few personal accounts of the riot from Walter White, age 13 in 1906:
The unseasonably oppressive heat of an Indian summer day hung like a steaming blanket over Atlanta. My sisters and I had casually commented upon the unusual quietness. It seemed to stay Mother’s volubility and reduced Father, who was more taciturn, to monosyllables. But, as I remember it, no other sense of impending trouble impinged upon our consciousness.
I had read the inflammatory headlines in the Atlanta News and the more restrained ones in the Atlanta Constitution which reported alleged rapes and other crimes committed by Negroes. But these were so standard and familiar that they made—as I look back on it now—little impression. The stories were more frequent, however, and consisted of eight-column streamers instead of the usual two or four-column ones.
Father was a mail collector. His tour of duty was from three to eleven pm. He made his rounds in a little cart into which one climbed from a step in the rear. I used to drive the cart for him from two until seven, leaving him at the point nearest our home on Houston Street, to return home either for study or sleep. That day Father decided that I should not go with him. I appealed to Mother, who thought it might be all right, provided Father sent me home before dark because, she said, "I don’t think they would dare start anything before nightfall." Father told me as we made the rounds that ominous rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town. But I was too young that morning to understand the background of the riot. I became much older during the next thirty-six hours, under circumstances which I now recognize as the inevitable outcome of what had preceded.
One of the most bitter political campaigns of that bloody era was reaching its climax. Hoke Smith—that amazing contradiction of courageous and intelligent opposition to the South’s economic ills and at the same time advocacy of ruthless suppression of the Negro—was a candidate that year for the governorship. His opponent was Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which boasted with justification that it "covers Dixie like the dew." Howell and his supporters held firm authority over the state Democratic machine despite the long and bitter fight Hoke Smith had made on Howell in the columns of the rival Atlanta Journal.
Atlanta Journal on August 1, 1906, in heavy type, all capital letters, printed an incendiary appeal to race prejudice, Smith which declared:
"Political equality being thus preached to the negro in the ring papers and on the stump, what wonder that he makes no distinction between political and social equality? He grows more bumptious on the street, more impudent in his dealings with white men, and then, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the south... "
At the same time, a daily newspaper was attempting to wrest from the Atlanta Journal leadership in the afternoon field. The new paper, the Atlanta News, in its scramble for circulation and advertising took a lesson from the political race and began to play up in eight-column streamers stories of the raping of white women by Negroes. That every one of the stories was afterward found to be wholly without foundation was of no importance. The News circulation, particularly in street sales, leaped swiftly upward as the headlines were bawled by lusty-voiced newsboys. Atlanta became a tinder box.
During the afternoon preceding the riot little bands of sullen, evil-looking men talked excitedly on street corners all over downtown Atlanta. Around seven o’clock my father and I were driving toward a mail box at the corner of Peachtree and Houston Streets when there came from near-by Pryor Street a roar the like of which I had never heard before, but which sent a sensation of mingled fear and excitement coursing through my body. I asked permission of Father to go and see what the trouble was. He bluntly ordered me to stay in the cart. A little later we drove down Atlanta’s main business thoroughfare, Peachtree Street. Again we heard the terrifying cries, this time near at hand and coming toward us. We saw a lame Negro bootblack from Herndon’s barber shop pathetically trying to outrun a mob of whites. Less than a hundred yards from us the chase ended. We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing. Suddenly a voice cried, "There goes another nigger!" Its work done, the mob went after new prey. The body with the withered foot lay dead in a pool of blood on the street.
Father’s apprehension and mine steadily increased during the evening, although the fact that our skins were white kept us from attack. Another circumstance favored us—the mob had not yet grown violent enough to attack United States government property. But I could see Father’s relief when he punched the time clock at eleven P.M. and got into the cart to go home. He wanted to go the back way down Forsyth Street, but I begged him, in my childish excitement and ignorance, to drive down Marietta to Five Points, the heart of Atlanta’s business district, where the crowds were densest and the yells loudest. No sooner had we turned into Marietta Street, however, than we saw careening toward us an undertaker’s barouche. Crouched in the rear of the vehicle were three Negroes clinging to the sides of the carriage as it lunged and swerved. On the driver’s seat crouched a white man, the reins held taut in his left hand. A huge whip was gripped in his right. Alternately he lashed the horses and, without looking backward, swung the whip in savage swoops in the faces of members of the mob as they lunged at the carriage determined to seize the three Negroes.
There was no time for us to get out of its path, so sudden and swift was the appearance of the vehicle. The hub cap of the right rear wheel of the barouche hit the right side of our much lighter wagon. Father and I instinctively threw our weight and kept the cart from turning completely over. Our mare was a Texas mustang which, frightened by the sudden blow, lunged in the air as Father clung to the reins. Good fortune was with us. The cart settled back on its four wheels as Father said in a voice which brooked no dissent, "We are going home the back way and not down Marietta."
But again on Pryor Street we heard the cry of the mob. Close to us and in our direction ran a stout and elderly woman who cooked at a downtown white hotel. Fifty yards behind, a mob which filled the street from curb to curb was closing in. Father handed the reins to me and, though he was of slight stature, reached down and lifted the woman into the cart. I did not need to be told to lash the mare to the fastest speed she could muster.
The church bells tolled the next morning for Sunday service. But no one in Atlanta believed for a moment that the hatred and lust for blood had been appeased. Like skulls on a cannibal’s hut the hats and caps of victims of the mob of the night before had been hung on the iron hooks of telegraph poles. None could tell whether each hat represented a dead Negro. But we knew that some of those who had worn the hats would never again wear any.
Late in the afternoon friends of my father’s came to warn of more trouble that night. They told us that plans had been perfected for a mob to form on Peachtree Street just after nightfall to march down Houston Street to what the white people called "Darktown," three blocks or so below our house, to "clean out the niggers." There had never been a firearm in our house before that day. Father was reluctant even in those circumstances to violate the law, but he at last gave in at Mother’s insistence.
We turned out the lights early, as did all our neighbors. No one removed his clothes or thought of sleep. Apprehension was tangible. We could almost touch its cold and clammy surface. Toward midnight the unnatural quiet was broken by a roar that grew steadily in volume. Even today I grow tense in remembering it.
Father told Mother to take my sisters, the youngest of them only six, to the rear of the house, which offered more protection from stones and bullets. My brother George was away, so Father and I, the only males in the house, took our places at the front windows of the parlor. The windows opened on a porch along the front side of the house, which in turn gave onto a narrow lawn that sloped down to the street and a picket fence. There was a crash as Negroes smashed the street lamp at the corner of Houston and Piedmont Avenue down the street. In a very few minutes the vanguard of the mob, some of them bearing torches, appeared. A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, "That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in!" In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, "Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!"
The mob moved toward the lawn. I tried to aim my gun, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man. Suddenly there was a volley of shots. The mob hesitated, stopped. Some friends of my father’s had barricaded themselves in a two-story brick building just below our house. It was they who had fired. Some of the mobsmen, still bloodthirsty, shouted, "Let’s go get the nigger." Others, afraid now for their safety, held back. Our friends, noting the hesitation, fired another volley. The mob broke and retreated up Houston Street.
In the quiet that followed I put my gun aside and tried to relax. But a tension different from anything I had ever known possessed me. I was gripped by the knowledge of my identity, and in the depths of my soul I was vaguely aware that I was glad of it. I was sick with loathing for the hatred which had flared before me that night and come so close to making me a killer; but I was glad I was not one of those who hated; I was glad I was not one of those made sick and murderous by pride.Source: Walter White, A Man Called White (1948; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 5–12.
On September 24th, the newspapers report there were discrepancies in the number of deceased blacks. Sixteen was the number reported by the Atlanta Journal, but bodies were missing throughout the community. For example, on Saturday, five blacks had been assaulted in two different areas of the Atlanta city limits and were pronounced dead. Although some individuals did not know, witnesses did see cars rush in to carry the bodies away. A prominent black man stated that the bodies were removed from the city because some believed that the deceased would not receive the proper burials.
On the morning of the 25th, in Brownsville, a Black middle class suburb (where Clark University is located) students, faculty, and administrators armed themselves ready to protect their homes and their families. They opened the campuses to other residents of the Brownsville community. The militia and the Governor’s "House Guard" were sent in not to protect, but to take away the arms of blacks in Brownsville. The militia, police, and white civilian intruders fought with black residents in a bloody battle. One black man killed a policeman.
The result: "257 heavily armed blacks" were arrested and one killed. No whites were arrested.
After the Brownsville incident, both blacks and whites called for an end to the violence. Black leaders demanded that Atlanta Mayor Woodward, police, and militia protect the black community and compensate the victims for the rioters. The violence did finally ease and state militia continued to police the city in the aftermath.
You would be hard-pressed to find a lot of information on the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. The newspapers of the day did much to erase the memory of the violence in which they sparked. Nothing was mentioned in today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution.
