Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

WYTS: Atlanta Falcons. Original post here.

We're in the Deep South now. Guess what the theme of this riot is going to be? 

 

...Oh, how did you ever guess? Yup, it is the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.

On November, 11th 1864, General Sherman ordered Atlanta burnt to the ground during his March to the Sea, making "Georgia Howl". The occupying governments post-war had the opportunity to rebuild the South in vision they could. Their focus was mainly in breaking planter aristocracy power and turning the South industrial and urban. Atlanta, being a railroad hub, became a bastion of manufacturing (including a hot new product called Coca-Cola), middle class power, and city life. This was the "New South", a term coined in the city in 1874.

White supremacy was never really in much doubt by anybody except the most Radical - and correct - of Republicans. But still, Atlanta had a decent level of racial harmony, at least comparatively to the rural areas where sharecropping allowed a new form of slavery to persist for decades. A lot of the new business districts in Atlanta's Five Points had successful Black stores right next to white ones. A "Black elite" of successful bourgeoisie families thought they could earn their way to respectability. Booker T. Washington gave a speech in 1895 in Atlanta basically conceding to segregation, a year before Plessy v. Ferguson. However, he believed economic opportunities could solve the problem long term, even as they were losing power politically.

Washington and his “Atlanta Compromise” would end up looking painfully naive just a decade later. He was a smart man who did a lot for Black people. But there would never be a "live and let live" attitude with Jim Crow.

Reconstruction is marked traditionally as ending with the infamously crooked election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and the retreat of military occupation in the South. However, the full Jim Crow nightmare vision of the South in Jerry Jones’ living memory did not happen overnight. This was a process and it had to be built step by step, violence by violence. Segregation was still expanding into WWI, when President Wilson imposed it on Washington DC. That was relatively peaceful as these things go. In many places, such as Atlanta, Jim Crow was imposed with the death of at least 27 people and days of violence. Thus our story.

It begins with an intense 1906 gubernatorial battle between a moderate racist, Clark Howell, and a full-on piece of shit, Hoke Smith (who I talked about last year as one of the worst Americans in history). They were both newspaper owners, both making their case of different visions of white power as the centerpiece of the election. Howell felt a softer disenfranchisement with poll taxes and whites-only Democratic Party primaries were enough. Smith, backed by a firebrand populist, Thomas E. Watson, wanted more: clear legal impossibilities for Black voters to ever threaten Jim Crow. Watson had been a liberal reformer who even opposed lynching just a decade earlier, in case you're wondering how far and how quickly Georgian politics had shifted. By the autumn, Atlanta was a tinderbox getting hotter and hotter.

In September, a stage production of Thomas Dixon Jr's novel, The Clansman played in Atlanta, further inflaming things. (You might recognize that book title as the inspiration for the "landmark" film, Birth of a Nation, which would inspire the rebirth of the KKK in the 1920s - fun fact.) On Saturday, September 22nd, the Atlanta papers luridly reported sexual assaults of two white women, Ethel Lawrence and her niece, Mabel. It is not clear who did what, just that white pride assumed instantly that the perpetrator was Black. Men were soon roaming the streets ready to attack the first non-white face they saw. We don’t have to use a tinderbox cliché anymore. The correct metaphor now is something hotter, such as Hell.

The Atlanta Riots are one of the better-remembered and documented events, as far as racial pogroms go in the US. We can be reasonably sure of a timeline of events, where they happened, and have most of the names of the dead. It started small with bands of boys spontaneously attacking Black men downtown. These victims were random guys on the street or strangers unlucky enough to be on the wrong streetcar. By nightfall, there were tens of thousands of rioters, looking for any Black business to burn. For example, there was Alonzo Herndon's barber shop on Peachtree Street, which I've heard described as a kind of palace for well-to-do Black men to socialize. This place was a perfect example of Booker T. Washington’s ideal of compromise and Black success in the New South. The barbershop was destroyed, the New South would in fact be much like the Old South.

The riots continued into Sunday, but a lot of the initial energy had been lost after an early morning rainstorm. When the sun rose, the rioters resumed their attack into the Brownsville neighborhood. They were then surprised well-armed and determined resistance by Black men who had not fled the city already. A state militia sent into Atlanta to quiet things down ended up focusing on the Black defenders, getting into a gunfight with them. The fighting ended in a surrender of the victims, the militia rounding up about 250 innocent men. Those Black men were disarmed and arrested, but they were still alive.

By Monday the 24th, the violence was over. We can confirm 25 Black people were dead, 2 whites died in the violence as well. Some cite a number as high as 100 people were killed, but this is not confirmed. As for The Clansman, its next shows in its inter-city tour were either cancelled or secured by a heavy police presence. Black Atlanta largely moved out of the center of town to safer, segregated neighborhoods, notably Sweet Auburn.

Hoke Smith won his election in November and did everything he promised - an honest asshole though, right? A literary test was put into place to nearly completely disenfranchise the Black vote, with a grandfather clause so poor whites were not left out of the Solid South backbone of the Democratic Party. In 1908 Georgia put both measures into the Constitution as full Amendments, intending for this state to be forever linked with white supremacy.

A professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois - you may have heard of him - was so terrified to work in Atlanta he bought himself a shotgun after the riots. He was paranoid for weeks his family would be murdered one night. Du Bois never believed in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise. He wrote a poem called A Litany of Atlanta about the event. “Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked…this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil.” Du Bois would help found the NAACP in 1909.

Another witness to the event was Walter White (not that one), a future head of the NAACP. He was a fair-skinned boy and could have "passed" as white. He did not take that privilege. After witnessing the Atlanta Massacre, he wrote, "After that night I knew I never wanted to be a white man. I knew which side I was on."

The arc of history might eventually bend towards justice, but it would take decades of effort to change its course.