|
|
|
The riots that broke out in Atlanta, Georgia between
1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that
included several hundred lynchings each year.
September 22-24, 1906 is the 100th anniversary of
the Atlanta Race Riot. In Atlanta, the Coalition to Remember the
1906 Atlanta Race Riot
has planned a series of initiatives and events to increase public
awareness of this shameful episode in the city’s history and inspire
Atlantans to appreciate differences as opportunities to build
community.
During the summer of 1906, white fears of African
Americans’ increasing economic and social power, sensationalized
rhetoric from white politicians, and unsubstantiated news stories
about a black crime wave created a powder keg of racial tension
in Atlanta. The powder keg exploded on the night of September
22nd in what became known as the Atlanta Race Riot.
Over five days at least ten black people were killed
while Atlanta’s police did nothing to protect black citizens,
going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while
allowing whites to remain armed. White mobs killed dozens of blacks,
wounded scores of others, and inflicted considerable property
damage.
On the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, Atlanta
newspapers reported four alleged assaults upon local white women,
none of which were ever substantiated.
These newspaper reports were the catalyst for the
riot.
The New
Georgia Encyclopedia summarizes additional causes of the
riots as follows:
By the 1880s Atlanta had become the hub of the
regional economy, and the city's overall population soared from
89,000 in 1900 to 150,000 in 1910; the black population was
approximately 9,000 in 1880 and 35,000 by 1900. Such growth
put pressure on municipal services, increased job competition
among black and white workers, heightened class distinctions,
and led the city's white leadership to respond with restrictions
intended to control the daily behavior of the growing working
class, with mixed success. Such conditions caused concern among
elite whites, who feared the social intermingling of the races,
and led to an expansion of Jim Crow segregation, particularly
in the separation of white and black neighborhoods and separate
seating areas for public transportation.
The emergence during this time of a black elite
in Atlanta also contributed to racial tensions in the city. During
Reconstruction (1867-76), black men were given the right to vote,
and as blacks became more involved in the political realm, they
began to establish businesses, create social networks, and build
communities. As this black elite acquired wealth, education, and
prestige, its members attempted to distance themselves from an
affiliation with the black working class, and especially from
the unemployed black men who frequented the saloons on Atlanta's
Decatur Street. Many whites, while uncomfortable with the advances
of the black elite, also disapproved of these saloons, which were
said to be decorated with depictions of nude women. Concern over
such establishments fueled prohibition advocates in the city,
and many whites began to blame black saloon-goers for rising crime
rates in the growing city, and particularly for threats of black
sexual violence against white women.
Additionally, the candidates for the 1906 governor's
race played to white fears of a black upper class. They inflamed
racial tensions in Atlanta by insisting that black disfranchisement
was necessary to ensure that blacks were kept "in their place";
that is, in a position inferior to that of whites. By disfranchising
blacks, whites could maintain the social order.
Walter White, the future head of the NAACP grew
up in Atlanta and was 13 years old during the 1906 riots. What
follows are excerpts from his memoirs
of how he and his father defended their home from white rioters.
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.
Fuel was added to the fire by a dramatization
of Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman in Atlanta. (This was later
made by David Wark Griffith into The Birth of a Nation, and
did more than anything else to make successful the revival of
the Ku Klux Klan.) The late Ray Stannard Baker, telling the
story of the Atlanta riot in Along the Color Line, characterized
Dixon’s fiction and its effect on Atlanta and the South as “incendiary
and cruel.” No more apt or accurate description could have been
chosen.
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 barbershop 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 hubcap 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.
over the years, the collective public memory of
this act of terrorism has faded, but fears that arose from that
violence have continued and have fed the racial attitudes that
segregate our city. Coalition sponsored activities meant to restore
the memory and move toward reconciliation include: an exhibit
at the MLK Historic Site gallery, curriculum material about the
riot in area schools, artistic expressions and a community-centered
symposium sponsored by local colleges and universities.
Suggested Reading
Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta,
1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001).
Charles Crowe, "Racial Massacre in Atlanta,
September 22, 1906," Journal of Negro History 54 (April
1969).
Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together:
Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2004).
David F. Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta
Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Gregory Mixon, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class,
and Violence in a New South City (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2005).
|
Home |
|
|
|
Your comments are always welcome.
Visit the Contact
Us page to send e-Mail or Feedback
or Click
here to send e-Mail to [email protected]
If you send us an e-Mail message
we may publish all or part of it, unless you tell us it
is not for publication. You may also request that we withhold
your name.
Thank you very much for your readership.
|
|
|