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The Atlanta Race Riot MASSACRE of 1906
by Sheri Barrera-Disler
About 9 PM on Saturday, September 22, 1906, in response to newspaper reports of four white women being raped, allegedly by African American men, mobs of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 white men and boys began roaming the streets, attacking anyone with brown skin. They pulled people off streetcars, beat and stabbed them, and hung them from lampposts. The mob invaded hotels and dragged Black employees into the streets. They shot black people and mutilated corpses, throwing one off the Forsyth Street bridge. The violence continued until after midnight, when the governor called out the state militia and a downpour dissipated the mob. (I prefer to think of this downpour as God’s tears at the inhumanity of the white men to the Black people). Historians estimate that at least 25 people perished – and perhaps many more.
Responding to the massacre, W. E. B DuBois, the noted civil rights activist, writer, first Black recipient of the PhD from Harvard, and then professor at Atlanta University, wrote the following:
A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. 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. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance! “A Litany of Atlanta.”
Brief Backstory: In 1906, Atlanta was a boomtown and home to six Black colleges and a growing middle class of Blacks. Atlanta’s Black population was growing rapidly with competition for jobs, housing, and political power. Racial tensions were already high following the 1905 publication of The Clansman, a book that glorified the KKK and would lead to its rebirth. Finally, 1906 was an election year, and Atlanta’s four daily newspapers were waging a circulation war among their white readers, stoking racial tensions with half-truths and outright lies.
For many decades, the horrible acts described above, perpetrated by whites against Blacks, was called The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, but modern historians more accurately now refer to the event as The Race Massacre of 1906. In the decades prior to the historical review, the massacre was forgotten or glossed over in civic memory, as many such acts have been.
It was not until its 100th anniversary in 2006 that the event was publicly marked by various Atlanta groups. The next year, the Atlanta Massacre was made part of the state's curriculum for public schools.
Personal Response: When I was contemplating writing this piece, I knew nothing about this pivotal event in the history of our city. I was also saddened those other atrocities, such as the 1921 Tulsa (OK) Massacre and the massacre in Rosewood, Florida (1923), were deleted from the history I was taught. It is important that we as Christians learn the truth. Ephesians 4:25 says: “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.”
Drawn from https://www.civilandhumanrights.org/the-atlanta-race-massacre-of-1906/. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre.
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