For teachers

The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre has been part of Georgia’s public school social studies curriculum since 2007. This page collects what you need to teach it from the record itself.

Primary sources

All of these are in the public domain and free to reproduce in a classroom.

• W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Litany of Atlanta” — written within weeks. Original printing.
• The Atlanta Evening News editorial of 21 September 1906 — printed the day before. Useful for teaching how a newspaper can cause an event it then reports.
• The Fulton County grand jury presentment, 28 September 1906 — the city’s own finding that the papers were to blame.
• Walter White’s account — he was thirteen, sitting in his front parlour with his father and a gun.

Questions worth asking

1. Why did the event get called a riot for almost a hundred years, and what changes when it is called a massacre?
2. The coroner issued ten death certificates. Atlanta’s official history reported twelve deaths. Researchers count at least twenty-five. How does a city end up with three different numbers, and who benefits from the smallest one?
3. Two victims’ names were printed in 1906 and again in 2006, and were still not counted until 2023. What does it take for a name to be counted?
4. Four newspapers were competing for readers. What did that competition have to do with what happened on Decatur Street?
5. Only six images of the massacre are known to survive, and none shows it happening. How do you study something that was barely photographed?

Take the class into the city

The downtown sites sit within a short walk of one another — Five Points, Decatur Street, the Grady statue. Where it happened has each location with directions. The free 1906 Atlanta ARapp works on site.