Sources
Everything on this site traces back to something on this page. Where the record disagrees with itself, we show the disagreement rather than pick a side.
Students, teachers and journalists are welcome to use this list. If you find an error, or a source we have missed, tell us.
Start here
If you read one thing, read the first.
ScholarlyNational Center for Civil and Human Rights, “The Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906: A brief history”
Eight pages, twenty-one footnotes, every claim sourced. The best short account available.
Contemporary sources, 1906–1907
Written at the time. All are in the public domain.
PrimaryW. E. B. Du Bois, “A Litany of Atlanta,” The Independent, 11 October 1906
The original printing, page scans, free. Subtitled “Done at Atlanta, on the Day of Death, 1906.”
PrimaryAtlanta Evening News, 21 September 1906 — the editorial printed the day before
Microfilm, Georgia Archives.
PrimaryThe Atlanta Constitution, 23–25 September 1906
PrimaryFulton County Grand Jury presentment, 28 September 1906
Blamed the afternoon newspapers.
PrimaryJ. Max Barber, “The Atlanta Tragedy” and “Why Mr. Barber Left Atlanta,” The Voice, October 1906, 470–479
PrimaryRay Stannard Baker, “Following the Color Line: A Race Riot, and After,” The American Magazine LXIII:6, April 1907
PrimaryLe Petit Journal, 7 October 1906, and Le Petit Parisien, 14 October 1906 (Paris)
Two different covers, two weeks apart. Often confused for one another.
PrimaryWalter White, A Man Called White (Viking, 1948)
He was thirteen in 1906, on Houston Street.
PrimaryEvelyn Witherspoon oral history, interviewed by Clifford Kuhn, 13 March 1979, for Living Atlanta
Books and scholarship
ScholarlyMark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2001)
ScholarlyCarole Merritt, The Herndons: An Atlanta Family (University of Georgia Press, 2002)
ScholarlyAllison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875–1906 (University of Georgia Press, 2004)
ScholarlyGregory Mixon, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (University Press of Florida, 2005)
ScholarlyDavid Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
ScholarlyRebecca Burns, Rage in the Gate City: The Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (Emmis, 2006)
ScholarlyCharles Crowe, “Racial Violence and Social Reform: Origins of the Atlanta Riot of 1906,” Journal of Negro History, July 1968, 234–56; and “Racial Massacre in Atlanta, September 22, 1906,” JNH 54:2, April 1969, 150–73
The first serious modern re-examination.
ScholarlyJohn Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (University of Illinois Press, 1977)
ScholarlyGary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (Scribner, 1996)
ScholarlyFranklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs (Lewis Historical Publishing, 1954)
Included because of what it leaves out: five pages of 2,072, and a death toll of twelve.
Archives and repositories
ArchiveAtlanta History Photograph Collection, Atlanta History Center
Holds the six known images. Records geh_athpc_1044, 1090, 1106, 1107, 1117, 1121.
ArchiveDigital Library of Georgia
ArchiveGeorgia Archives, “Resource Guide: 1906 Atlanta Race Riots”
Record groups with call numbers. The richest militia file is RG 22-1-17, Unit 37: “370.6 Atlanta Riot Duty 1906.”
ArchiveAuburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History
ArchivedigATL, Georgia State University — “Veiled Visions: The 1906 Race Riot”
ArchiveFulton County Remembrance Coalition — Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 narrative
The source for fourteen of the sixteen names.
ArchiveEqual Justice Initiative, Community Remembrance Project
On the naming of the dead
How Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson were identified in 2023.
Journalism“Setting the record straight on 1906,” The Atlanta Voice