Never Been a Time (8 page)

But the worst riot of the period took place in 1906 in the commercial capital of the Deep South, and it was a pivotal event in the struggle between Booker T. Washington and more militant black leaders who felt the future of their race had been betrayed for a handful of dubious coinage by the Atlanta Compromise.

During Reconstruction, blacks had established themselves economically and politically in Atlanta and, despite the steady march of Jim Crow across the South in the last decades of the 1800s, by the turn of the century Atlanta had a black elite, a strong black middle class, and many substantial black businesses and institutions. Indeed, it seemed to be fulfilling Booker T. Washington's dream of a “New South” where black economic success would prove that capitalism could trump racism. “The Negro merchant who owns the largest store in town will not be lynched,” he assured blacks.
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Atlanta held six black private colleges, including prestigious if financially
struggling Atlanta University. Most of its faculty was white and had come from Yale, although the intellectually demanding school also boasted a Harvard-educated black professor—W. E. B. Du Bois, who had come to Atlanta University late in 1897 and had completed
The Philadelphia Negro
there. Over the years, the more Du Bois experienced daily life for a black man in the Jim Crow South, whether as a college student and rural schoolteacher in Tennessee or as a Georgia-based scholar whose research took him deep into the rural South, the more he came to realize the profound blows racism had dealt blacks. Increasingly, he felt the need to be not just a student of the race, but an advocate, indeed a fighter, for it. In reaction to a ghastly lynching on the outskirts of Atlanta—a black farmer who killed a white man during an argument was set afire and a mob of two thousand white men, women, and children fought over pieces of his scorched flesh as souvenirs—he said in 1899 that “one could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”
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Du Bois placed himself at the center of a movement of self-described “New Negro” men and women who espoused black pride and a constant struggle to assert black rights. Blacks, Du Bois proclaimed, “must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” Increasingly, Du Bois spoke and wrote in public opposition to Tuskegee Institute founder and president Booker T. Washington. Washington's presence in Atlanta was powerful despite his not living there because his nonthreatening notions of black progress were agreeable to the white Atlanta power brokers with whom he had close contact.
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In his passionate
The Souls of Black Folk
, a 1903 collection of essays on race, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a devastating attack on Washington and his policies, saying that the Atlanta Compromise “practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races” and had sown the seeds “for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” Washington's “doctrine,” Du Bois wrote, had resulted in the “disenfranchisement of the Negro,” the “legal creation” of a “status of civil inferiority for the Negro,” and the “steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.” The Atlanta Compromise, he concluded, was a prescription for “the suicide of a race.”
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Du Bois and the Boston journalist William Monroe Trotter, both in
their thirties, became the leaders of a group of blacks, including educators, clerics, writers and journalists, doctors and lawyers, most of them urban Northerners, who stood in opposition to Washington's “Tuskegee Machine.” In 1905, Du Bois went North to join Trotter and other anti-Washington blacks in a conference on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and the “Niagara movement” was born. Du Bois was elected to the top post of general secretary. The movement's Declaration of Principles—written in great part by Du Bois—stated, “The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives criticism; needs help and is given hindrance, needs protection and is given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone. This nation will never stand justified before God until these things are changed.”
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The declaration condemned “two opposite classes of men”: employers for “importing ignorant Negro American laborers in emergencies, and then affording them neither protection nor permanent employment” and labor unions for “proscribing and oppressing thousands of their fellow toilers, simply because they are black.” But the most radical element was its emphasis on unyielding black protest to effect change. The declaration asserted, “The voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.”

In the years before the 1906 riot, Atlanta grew rapidly in population as blacks and whites left farms and small towns and crowded into the city. Between 1900 and 1910, the population of the commercial and manufacturing boom-town rose from 89,000 to 155,000, with blacks making up between 35 and 40 percent of the total. Poor blacks and whites competed for work, and blacks were often forced into the most menial jobs. Many men of both races were unable to find work. Inevitably the crime rate went up, and thieves, pimps, and prostitutes ruled the streets of some poor neighborhoods—both white and black—particularly after dark. Arrest records suggested that poor blacks were committing a disproportionate number of crimes, and the race as a whole was excoriated in sensationalist newspaper stories.
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There were frequent racial skirmishes and attacks on blacks in the streets. A riot nearly broke out in 1905 between blacks and whites at a theatrical
production of Thomas Dixon's notorious, inflammatory novel
The Clansman
, which portrayed hooded white vigilantes as Reconstruction-era heroes rescuing a screaming white woman from black rapists. (A decade later,
The Clansman
would become the most popular silent film of all time,
The Birth of a Nation
, and would again arouse whites to antiblack rage in cities and towns across America, including East St. Louis.)

For many months leading up the 1906 gubernatorial election, Atlantans were bombarded with antiblack propaganda by two white candidates competing for poor white voters and the crucial support of the Georgia populist Tom Watson, who once had courted black votes but now had revealed himself as an open and virulent racist. Watson set the hysterical tone of the election, calling for complete disenfranchisement of blacks and screaming in his eponymous propaganda magazine, “What does civilization owe to the negro? Nothing!
Nothing!
NOTHING!”
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One of the gubernatorial candidates was Clark Howell, the editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
, and the other, Hoke Smith, was the former publisher of the
Atlanta Journal
. Those dailies and other less respectable white-owned newspapers, in a frenzied circulation war, regularly splashed across their front pages highly exaggerated stories of black crime, particularly the “assault” of white women by black men. The verb “assault” in headlines may have referred to something as minor as an alleged purse snatching or even accidental contact on a crowded downtown street. But the implication was inevitably sexual to white readers who were alert to such matters. And hysterical news stories about “ebony devils” and “ravished white women” created an atmosphere in which white women were quick to see all black men as potential rapists.
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The racial fear that permeated Atlanta in 1906 was dramatically described by a white woman who, in the wake of the riot, told investigative reporter Ray Stannard Baker of “a really terrible experience one evening a few days ago” on a downtown street:

I saw a rather good-looking young Negro come out of a hallway to the sidewalk. He was in a great hurry, and, in turning suddenly, as a person sometimes will do, he accidentally brushed my shoulder with his arm. He had not seen me before. When he turned and found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a
human countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened, called for help, and accused him of insulting or attacking me. He stood still a moment, then turned and ran down the street, dodging into the first alley he came to. It shows, doesn't it, how little it might take to bring punishment upon an innocent man.
¹⁴

In mid-August of 1906, Du Bois and a large contingent of black men from Atlanta took part in the second meeting of the Niagara movement, fully aware of the militant symbolism of their gathering place: Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of John Brown's bloody 1859 raid on the federal armory in the buildup to the Civil War. The concluding statement of the conference, written by Du Bois, proclaimed, “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political and civil, and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America. The battle we fight is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave.” Back in Atlanta, the race-baiting
Georgian
denounced “Negro tirades” and “Negro platitudes and resolutions against the injustice of the South,” calling on black leaders to return to Washingtonian accommodation, stop making so much noise about lynching, and focus on the subject that was “pulsing in the aroused and indignant veins of Southern manhood”—rape. Otherwise, the paper warned, it was inevitable that black schools, churches, and other institutions would be destroyed.
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On August 22, Hoke Smith won the only gubernatorial election that mattered, the Democratic primary, and announced that as governor he would take steps to disenfranchise all blacks. But the daily papers did not let up on the sensationalist coverage of black crime. On the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, Atlanta newspapers put out multiple extra editions chronicling a series of four alleged assaults by black men on white women. The
Atlanta Evening News
issued five separate editions, devoting the top half of the front page to a series of alarming new headlines:

 

TWO ASSAULTS!
THIRD ASSAULT!
FOURTH ASSAULT!

 

The shouts of news boys spread the alarm throughout downtown Atlanta. “The whole city,” reported Ray Stannard Baker, “already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic.”
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It turned out that none of the four cases involved rape; one was a report of a black peeping tom, another of a woman knocked down by a black man running from her back yard, and the other two seemed be cases of pure racial fright. But that didn't seem to matter. “The news in the extras was taken as truthful,” Baker reported, “for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigation.” It was payday and thousands of men were downtown with money in their pockets, many of them spending the afternoon in the saloons that were thick in the Five Points area, the bustling center of the city, where black Atlanta met white Atlanta beneath towering new buildings. By evening a mob of ten thousand whites, mostly young men, was milling around downtown, vowing vengeance on blacks.

As the sun went down, the mob surged down Decatur Street—which was lined with black saloons—attacking men and women in the streets. Spreading out through downtown, the rioters stopped streetcars by yanking loose their overhead trolleys and pulled black passengers out to be beaten and killed. They swarmed over black neighborhoods, beating and shooting residents and destroying homes and businesses. An African American bootblack was jerked out of the shop where he was shining the shoes of a white man and kicked and beaten to death. Barbers and clerks were pulled out of their shops and beaten and stabbed. Blacks were hung from lampposts and their bodies used for target practice. Police did little to stop the riot. “Had the Police Department opposed a determined front to the mob at the inception of the riot,” a grand jury later determined, “all serious trouble could have been averted.” The state militia was called in about midnight, but the mob did not relinquish control of the downtown streets to the soldiers until a drenching rain began to fall about two in the morning.

The next two days, with police and militia patrolling downtown streets, white mobs armed with shotguns, clubs, and crowbars invaded black neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, including a mostly middle-class suburb called Brownsville with two black colleges. By then many blacks had armed themselves, and in some areas they fought back against the white mobs and managed to send them into retreat. When a policeman was shot to death in
one black neighborhood, three companies of armed militia men were sent in and arrested 250 blacks.

When the three-day riot was over, at least two dozen blacks and two whites were dead. Witnesses, black and white, said the rioters had been mostly working-class young men and teenagers, although more prosperous-looking whites were seen cheering the whites on. And thousands of other citizens of Atlanta, who were “swept along by curiosity with no intention of crime,” one reporter observed, “added by their mere presence to the ferocity of mob leaders.”
¹⁷

The riot, in Booker T. Washington's symbolic hometown, shattered the essence of the Atlanta Compromise—the notion that, as blacks succeeded in the economic realm, “friendly whites” would come to respect them and grant them the rights they deserved. In many cases, it was precisely the successful blacks, their property, and their institutions that came under attack.