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

Ready-made lesson plans

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR) publishes four free lesson plans on 1906 through its Learning Portal, alongside Reconstructing Atlanta, a virtual exhibition a class can visit from anywhere.

1. Setting the Stage: what caused the Atlanta Race Massacre.
2. What Happened in 1906: examining Atlanta's turbulent and resilient past.
3. Personal Stories: interacting with firsthand narratives.
4. A Commitment to Memory: remembering the people and events of 1906.

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 and the Grady statue. The tour takes each place in turn, with its history and a map. The free 1906 Atlanta AR app, for iPhone and iPad, works on site.