The Tulsa Race Massacre has garnered national attention in the last year and in the wake of America’s racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. The massacre led to the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921, as well as the death of over 300 people, despite records at the time of only 36 people dying.
The reckoning surrounding the Tulsa Race Massacre gained so much momentum that President Joe Biden made a speech to commemorate the 100th anniversary this year:
But in Atlanta, a race massacre as bad did not garner the same national attention. The horrific nature of the Tulsa Race Massacre was unfortunately not an anomaly for race massacres in the time period, at the height of Jim Crow and the height of the Ku Klux Klan.
Atlanta has a history of downplaying racial tensions. It has a slogan as the “city too busy to hate” because of the business importance of the city but there’s plenty of hate in Atlanta’s past. I spent four years living in Atlanta and researching civil rights cold cases in the surrounding region.
Like in Tulsa, the Atlanta “race riot” was catalyzed by allegations of assaults by Black men on white women. However, Gregory Mixon and Clifford Kuhn in the New Georgia Encyclopedia say the causes of the massacre went deeper than that: in the 26 years before the massacres, the Black population in Atlanta was rising drastically, from 9,000 Black citizens in 1880 to 35,000 Black citizens in 1900. The overall population of Atlanta was rising significantly as well, and elite white leadership in the city “feared the social intermingling of races.”
As a result, Kuhn and Mixon say de jure segregation increased during the Jim Crow era, as fears of Black citizens in Atlanta taking the jobs of working-class white workers grew. In Atlanta, the Black elite had grown during reconstruction, with Black men becoming more involved in politics, building businesses, and accumulating wealth.
A class divide started to build between the Black elite and the Black working class. In particular, saloons on Decatur Street in Atlanta were stereotyped as part of the Black working class and unemployed Black men, and these establishments were caricatured as reasons for rising rates of crime and sexual violence against white women.
So what made 1906 a particularly bad year for race relations? Well, in 1906, a gubernatorial race played on insecurities and fears surrounding race, particularly around the Black elite upper class.
Hoke Smith vs. Clark Howell
Both editors of the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution (which eventually merged into the Atlanta Journal-Constitution we know today) were running for office and weaponized their newspapers for their political advantage.
The editor of the Atlanta Journal, Hoke Smith, said Black people needed to be “kept in their place” and he and the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Clark Howell, had a race to see who could essentially be the most hateful against Black people.
In particular, every major newspaper stoked fear of alleged assaults from Black men on white women, none of which were substantiated. Walter White, the future head of the NAACP who was 13 at the age of the riots, said this was “one of the most bitter political campaigns of that bloody era.”
White remembers Hoke Smith as a “contradiction,” a very courageously economically liberal champion against child labor and railroad rate discriminations, but simultaneously an advocate of the “ruthless supression of the Negro.” Smith also did not have the backing of the state Democratic machine, like Howell, which put Smith at a competitive disadvantage.
Smith then allied with radical Populist Thomas E. Watson. Watson had previously tried to unite the Black and white working-class voters of Georgia against elite industrialists. Even by 1948 standards, when White recalled this memory, Watson was regarded as “a dangerous radical” by conservatives. Both Democrats and Republicans feared Watson and his two bids for president in 1896 but failed abysmally.
This led Watson to turn from an ideal of “interracial decency” to a campaign of outright racism. He allied with Smith and denounced his previous platform that white and Black farmers had the same struggles and the same enemy, and he had to reassure poor white farmers that by hating Black people, they would serve their own interests.
White recalls Watson saying the n-word more than any other political candidate in an effort to stoke racial resentments and fears. In an August 1, 1906 edition of the Atlanta Journal, the paper put out the following incendiary statement:
Other papers took the cue from the Atlanta Journal: headlines about allegations of Black men raping white women sold newspapers beyond what they imagined before. Incendiary, provocative headlines like “BOLD NEGRO KISSES WHITE GIRL’S HAND” and “HUNDRED LASHES AND ‘23’ FOR SQUEEZING LADY’S ARM” were not the exception, but the norm.
The riot
Saturday, September 22, 1906 was a particularly distasteful time for Atlanta’s press, where four alleged assaults were reported by Atlanta’s newspapers of Black men assaulting white women. According to Kuhn and Mixon, these accounts were so sensationalized and inflammatory they were not only meant to inspire fear, but revenge.
Thousands of white men gathered in downtown Atlanta, seeking justice. The mayor tried to calm down the crowd, but he failed in doing so. Soon, the crowd became a mob, intent on destroying Black-owned businesses and the saloons on Decatur Street. The mob started to attack businesses, and then targeted Black victims in general at random.
Kuhn also highlights the horrific ways Black people were killed: clubbed to death, beaten to death, choked to death. The barbershop of Alonzo Herndon, the rich founder of Atlanta Life Insurance Company as the owner of one of the best barber shops in the South, was destroyed. Fortunately, Herndon was gone for the day, but his barbers were killed by the mob. Herndon was seen as a threat due to his economic success and accomplishments, especially to the white working class.
The mob then went to streetcars and killed Black men and women, killing at least three Black men.
Soon, however, many Black citizens armed themselves and fought back when white mobs entered their communities, effectively ending the riot. A militia was summoned and the crowd started to disperse.
That Monday, after the riots were over, a group of armed Black men held a meeting in Brownsville, where Clark Atlanta University currently is. Fulton County Police learned about the gathering, and raided Brownsville due to trepidation over a counterattack on the white community in Atlanta. The raid led to a shootout, the death of an officer, and the arrest of over 250 Black men.
Legacy
The riots were covered both nationally and internationally, and city officials begged for the riots to stop not only because of the human carnage, but the damage to Atlanta’s burgeoning reputation. Attempts at reconciliation between white leaders and the Black upper class failed, and Atlanta grew into “mong the most segregated and socially stratified [cities] in the nation,” according to Kuhn and Mixon. Many Black businesses left mixed-race neighborhoods and went into majority-Black neighborhoods, leaving the Black community to suffer economically as a result.
In Atlanta’s Black leadership community, the accommodationist approach of Booker T. Washington lost credibility in favor of W.E.B. DuBois’s “more aggressive tactics for achieving racial justice.” DuBois wrote a poem called “A Litany of Atlanta” in commemoration of the events. Many Black citizens in the city started to arm themselves in self-defense, including DuBois:
Today the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 is largely forgotten, in an effort by city leaders to protect the city’s reputation. DuBois formed the NAACP three years later, and White would join the organization in 1918. White would play an instrumental role in the NAACP and would hire Thurgood Marshall on the NAACP’s legal staff.
The injustice of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre would galvanize a larger civil rights movement. Hoke Smith would win the gubernatorial election, implementing literacy tests and grandfather clauses to restrict Black voters from voting.
We can clearly see Atlanta is not, as the slogan goes, a “city too busy to hate.” Like Tulsa, it must also reckon with its brutal past.
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This post was previously published on Frame of Reference.
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