The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot: A Brief Summary
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 (Emmis Books, 2006) and “Four Days of Rage,” Atlanta Magazine, September 2006, both by Rebecca Burns