African-American
woman "weeps as she clutches infant after white policeman rescued the
child from a teargas-filled home.... Woman's hysteria, it was feared,
might have touched off a new outbreak, but the rescue of four children
inside the house calmed the crowd." Atlanta Riot, 1966.
African-American woman "weeps as she clutches infant
African-American
woman "weeps as she clutches infant after white policeman rescued the
child from a teargas-filled home.... Woman's hysteria, it was feared,
might have touched off a new outbreak, but the rescue of four children
inside the house calmed the crowd." Atlanta Riot, 1966.
Between
September 24 and September 26, 1906, white mobs killed dozens of Black
Atlantans, wounded scores of others, and inflicted considerable property
damage. Known thereafter as the Atlanta Race Riot, or the Atlanta Race
Massacre, the event was one of a series of violent conflagrations that
erupted in southern cities during the dawn of the Jim Crow era.
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 adopt 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 of a Black elite in
Atlanta also contributed to racial tensions in the city. During
Reconstruction (1867-76), Black men gained 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 the Black working class, and
especially from the 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 campaigns 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 sexual violence
against white women.
The candidates for the 1906
governor’s race played to white fears of a Black upper class. In the
months leading up to the August election, both Hoke Smith, the former
publisher of the Atlanta Journal, and Clark Howell, the editor of the
Atlanta Constitution, were in the position as gubernatorial candidates
to influence public opinion through their newspapers.
Smith,
with the public support of former Populist Thomas E. Watson, inflamed
racial tensions in Atlanta by insisting that Black disenfranchisement
was necessary to ensure that Blacks were kept “in their place”; that is,
in a position inferior to that of whites. Since receiving the right to
vote, Smith argued, Blacks also had sought economic and social equality.
By disenfranchising Blacks, whites could maintain the social order.
Howell,
on the other hand, claimed that the Democratic white primary and the
poll tax were already sufficient in limiting Black voting. Instead,
Howell emphasized that Smith was not the racial separatist he claimed to
be, and he charged that Smith had in the past cooperated with Black
political leaders and thus could not be relied upon to advance the cause
of white supremacy.
In addition to the political
debates waged in the Journal and the Constitution, other newspapers,
especially the Atlanta Georgian and the Atlanta News, carried stories
throughout the year about alleged assaults on white women by Black men.
The media provoked anger and hatred in its white readers—with stories,
editorials, and cartoons warning of rising crime, the danger to white
women of rape by Black men, the disreputable saloons that encouraged
drunkenness and licentious behavior in “brutish” men, and the desire of
“uppity” Blacks to achieve equality with whites. These sensationalist
stories heightened white paranoia to the breaking point by late
September, when mob violence erupted.
The Massacre
On
the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, Atlanta newspapers reported
four alleged assaults on local white women, none of which were ever
substantiated. In a series of extra editions published throughout the
day, the papers added lurid details and evermore inflammatory language,
and soon thousands of white men and boys gathered downtown in protest.
City leaders, including Mayor James G. Woodward, sought to calm the
increasingly indignant crowds 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 assaulting Black men and women. Finally, the
militia was summoned around midnight, and streetcar service was
suspended. The mob showed no signs of letting up, however, and the crowd
was dispersed only once a heavy rain began to fall around 2:00 a.m.
Atlanta was then under the control of the state militia.
On
Sunday, September 23, the Atlanta newspapers reported that the state
militia had been mustered to control the mob; they also reported that
Blacks were no longer a problem for whites because Saturday night’s
violence had driven them off public streets. While the police, armed
with rifles, and militia patrolled the streets and guarded white
property, Blacks secretly obtained weapons to arm themselves against the
mob, fearing its return. Despite the presence of law enforcement, white
vigilante groups invaded some Black neighborhoods. In some areas
African Americans defended their homes and were able to turn away the
incursions into their communities. One person who described such
activity was Walter White, who experienced the riot as a young boy. The
incident was a defining moment for White, who went on to become
secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), and he later described the event in his 1948 memoir A
Man Called White.
On Monday, September 24, a group of
African Americans held a meeting in Brownsville, a community located
about two miles south of downtown Atlanta and home to the historically
Black Clark College (later Clark Atlanta University) and Gammon
Theological Seminary. The group was heavily armed. When Fulton County
police learned of the gathering, they feared a counterattack and
launched a raid on Brownsville. A shootout ensued, and an officer was
killed. In response, three companies of heavily armed militia were sent
to Brownsville, where they seized weapons and arrested more than 250
African American men. Meanwhile, sporadic fighting continued throughout
the day.
Aftermath
On Monday and Tuesday, city
officials, businessmen, clergy, and the press called for an end to
violence, because it was damaging Atlanta’s image as a thriving New
South city. Indeed, the massacre had been covered throughout the United
States as well as internationally. Fears of continued disorder prompted
some white civic leaders to seek a dialogue with Black elites,
establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream
northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South
without national intervention. Paired with Black fears of renewed
violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated Black social
divisions as the Black elite sought to distance itself from the lower
class and its interests, leaving the city among the most segregated and
socially stratified in the nation.
Newspaper accounts
at the time and subsequent scholarly treatments of the riot vary widely
on the number of casualties. Estimates range from twenty-five to forty
African American deaths, although the city coroner issued only ten death
certificates for Black victims. Most accounts agree that only two
whites were killed, one of whom was a woman who suffered a heart attack
on seeing the mob outside her home.
There were other
consequences of the riot as well, both locally and nationally. Its
aftermath saw a depression of Atlanta’s Black community and economy. The
riot contributed to the passage of statewide prohibition and Black
suffrage restriction by 1908. It discredited for many Black leaders the
accommodationist strategy of Booker T. Washington among the leadership
of Black America, and gave new legitimacy to the more aggressive tactics
for achieving racial justice epitomized by W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote a
powerful poem, “The Litany of Atlanta,” in the riot’s wake. Although it
had a profound effect on many of those who experienced it, the riot was
forgotten or minimized for decades in the white community and ignored
in official histories of the city.
“I want to take you back only
as far as the Africa of a few hundred years ago. That’s when millions of
Africans were forced from their homelands, brought to America, and
enslaved. Some of the enslaved were midwives.”
African American
women who experienced infant death described intense feelings of loss,
guilt, and isolation. These negative emotions affect their physical and
psychological health.
Black women experienced infant loss at a
rate of 10.8 deaths per 1,000 live births compared to a rate of 4.6 for
White women and ranging from 3.6 to 9.4 per 1,000 for other racial and
ethnic groups. This significant disparity in rates of infant death is
largely attributed to greater rates of preterm birth and low birth
weight for Black infants
Although several studies have documented
racial disparities in infant mortality rates, non-Hispanic Black women’s
experiences of infant loss are not well documented in the literature.
Because the participants in this study self-identified as African
American women, where appropriate, the words used in this article will
be consistent with the women’s descriptions instead of the CDC’s
categories for race and ethnicity.
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