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The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

September 22–26, 1906. At least twenty-five people were killed. Sixteen of them have names.

120th Anniversary · September 20–27, 2026

The 1906 Remembrance Exposition Week — Truth, Reconciliation, and Action

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The week

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Sixteen of the twenty-five have names.

Nine do not. The city coroner issued ten death certificates. Atlanta’s official history reported twelve deaths. The record is thin because it was made thin.

Read their names

What happened

On the afternoon of Saturday, 22 September 1906, Atlanta’s newspapers printed four unsubstantiated reports of assaults on white women, in edition after edition. By nine that evening a white mob had begun attacking Black Atlantans on Decatur Street. Before the rain stopped it at three in the morning, estimates put ten to fifteen thousand people in the streets.

The violence continued for days. In Brownsville, home to Clark College and Gammon Theological Seminary, police and militia arrested more than 250 Black men, including university professors.

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“Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Litany of Atlanta,” The Independent, 11 October 1906. Subtitled “Done at Atlanta, on the Day of Death, 1906.”

In production

Never Again — the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre documentary

Directed by Trent Frank, the film traces how Atlanta came to remember an atrocity it spent most of a century not talking about, through the work of two successive coalitions.

About the film

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