What led to the massacre
At the beginning of the twentieth century Atlanta was growing quickly — from about 89,000 people in 1900 to 150,000 by 1910. The Black population was among the fastest-growing parts of it, rising from roughly 9,000 in 1880 to 35,000 by 1900. Black Atlantans were building businesses, institutions and neighbourhoods even as Jim Crow law and custom closed in around them. The police and fire departments were entirely white.
The 1906 race for governor sharpened the tension. Hoke Smith, former publisher of theAtlanta Journal, and Clark Howell, editor and principal owner of theAtlanta Constitution, both wanted Black Georgians kept from voting. Howell held that the existing laws were enough; Smith campaigned on new measures to guarantee it. Smith won the primary in August.
Four daily papers were fighting a circulation war. Through the summer they ran story after story about Black men assaulting white women — lurid, exaggerated, or simply invented. The day before the massacre, the Atlanta Evening News asked its readers in print: “Shall these black devils be permitted to assault and almost kill our women, and go unpunished?” That winter, the stage play The Clansman had played the city.
September 22–26, 1906
On the afternoon of Saturday 22 September, the papers carried four new allegations of assault. The Evening News issued extra edition after extra edition, and each one drew a bigger crowd into the middle of the city, near the intersection later known as Five Points. Many of the white men there had brought weapons.
At about nine in the evening a group of young men attacked a Black bicycle messenger on Decatur Street. Within hours mobs were pulling people from streetcars at Five Points and beating them, dragging Black employees out of the Kimball House and other hotels, and destroying Black-owned businesses — among the first, Alonzo Herndon’s barbershop on Peachtree Street. A body was thrown from the Forsyth Street bridge. Estimates put ten to fifteen thousand people in the streets. Mob members laid the bodies of three of their victims at the base of the Henry Grady statue on Marietta Street, a monument to the newspaperman who had sold the world on the New South.
“I knew something was going on and came to the window … and there I saw a man strung up to the light pole. Men and boys on the street below were shooting at him until they riddled his body with bullets.”
Shortly after midnight Governor Joseph M. Terrell called out the state militia. Heavy rain between three and five in the morning ended the night.
It was not over. On Sunday the papers reported the militia in control while white vigilante groups moved into Black neighbourhoods; several communities, including Darktown, turned them back. A Black man was lynched in East Point. On Monday evening a posse of ten police officers and armed private citizens marched into Brownsville, the Black community on the south side that was home to Clark College and Gammon Theological Seminary, believing residents were arming themselves. In the gun battle that followed, Officer James Heard and George Union Wilder were killed. Three militia companies then occupied Brownsville, seized weapons, and arrested more than 250 Black men, including university professors.
Aftermath
On 28 September a Fulton County grand jury blamed the afternoon papers, finding that their “sensational manner” of coverage had “largely influenced the creation of the spirit animating the mob.” White and Black leaders met together, plausibly for the first time in the city’s history. As many as a thousand Black Atlantans left Atlanta altogether.
J. Max Barber, editor of the Black magazine The Voice, wrote anonymously to theNew York World placing responsibility on politicians, race-baiting newspapers and white criminality. A bank president who sat on the police commission summoned him and gave him a choice: the chain gang, or leave town. He moved The Voice to Chicago.
As governor, Hoke Smith delivered. A literacy test, administered at the discretion of white officials, was written into the state constitution by amendment in 1908, with a grandfather clause exempting whites. Most Black Georgians could not vote for the next half century. Georgia also became the first Southern state to pass prohibition, aimed squarely at the Decatur Street saloons. Black-owned business moved east out of downtown and built the district that became Sweet Auburn. Atlanta hired no Black police officers until 1948.
The massacre also moved the argument about how to respond to it. Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism lost ground to W. E. B. Du Bois, then a 38-year-old professor at Atlanta University, who came back from Alabama by train and sat on the steps of the dormitory where his wife and daughter lived with a shotgun across his knees. The Niagara Movement, which had met for the first time the year before, led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Walter White — thirteen years old in 1906, sitting in his front parlour on Houston Street with his father and a gun — would lead that organisation for a quarter of a century.
How it was forgotten, and found
For decades the massacre was glossed over. Franklin Garrett, long regarded as Atlanta’s official historian, gave it five pages in a two-volume, 2,072-page history of the city, and repeated the Chamber of Commerce finding that twelve people had died.
It was not closely re-examined until the civil rights era, and did not reach a wide audience until the turn of this century, when four books appeared in five years. On the centennial in 2006 a coalition of academics and activists organised a year of programmes, beginning with a funeral motorcade and a memorial service at George Union Wilder’s grave in South-View Cemetery. In 2007 the massacre entered Georgia’s public school curriculum. In 2019 community members collected soil from the sites. In 2022 three historical markers were dedicated. In 2023 researchers found the death certificates of Marshall Carter, aged thirteen, and Stinson Ferguson, aged twenty-five, and added two more names to the count.
The event’s name changed too. It was called the Atlanta Race Riot for most of a century. A riot is something a crowd does. A massacre is something done to people.