Atlanta 1906 race riot remembered: City’s bloody stain seen with new eyes

The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot is the closest thing to a race war that has ever happened in this city.

For four days that September, white mobs attacked black people in a fit of hysteria over exaggerated and erroneous reports of sex crimes against white women. Then blacks started fighting back. When the dust settled, at least two dozen people were dead, and Atlanta’s reputation as a paragon of New South moderation had taken a beating in the eyes of the world.

Now a group of Atlantans wants to commemorate the riot --- and try to learn from it --- on the occasion of its centennial.

The Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot first met a year and a half ago in the fellowship hall of old Ebenezer Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. This weekend, as the nation celebrates the King holiday, the coalition is beginning a series of public events leading up to an exhibition at the King National Historic Site in May and a symposium at Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Performing Arts in September.

Window on race relations

Organizers say they aren’t trying to shame Atlanta; they just want to deal with a significant but largely forgotten chapter of its past.

“Race relations are such an important part of this city,” says Andy Ambrose, deputy director of the Atlanta History Center and co-curator of the exhibition. “It’s important to explore all of that, positive and negative. Atlanta is more than what the slogans say.”

From its initial meetings, the coalition has grown to include 150 participants from an array of local universities, cultural institutions, faith groups and governments.

Some of the participants had never heard of the riot before they were invited to get involved. That didn’t surprise one of the group’s leaders, Saudia Muwwakkil, spokeswoman for the King site. “They never taught us about this in school,” the Atlanta native says.

That should change next year, when Georgia’s revised public school curriculum will require that the riot be taught in eighth-grade social studies.

Memories handed down

Not everyone has forgotten about the ugliness of 1906. In some old Atlanta families --- especially African-American ones --- riot stories have been handed down like hushed warnings.

At 77, June Dobbs Butts of Decatur is the youngest daughter of John Wesley Dobbs, one of Atlanta’s most prominent black leaders before the civil rights era and the grandfather of its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Dobbs was a newlywed living on Auburn Avenue when the riot broke out. To protect his home from the mobs that were rampaging through the city, he sat up for several nights, stationed behind his front door with a revolver in hand.

“My father always told us about the riot,” says Butts, who will be part of the panel discussion at 1 p.m. today at Javaology, a coffeehouse on Edgewood Avenue. “He called it ‘the horror.’ He was terribly angry about it. He never got over it.”

Rumors of crimes

The riot erupted on the night of Sept. 22, 1906, after several weeks of sensational press reports about black-on-white crime. A crowd formed around Five Points and started attacking black people at random --- barbers, streetcar riders, a Western Union messenger. The victims were shot, stabbed, bludgeoned. One was thrown to his death from the Forsyth Street bridge. Police and fire hoses were unable to stop the brutality.

“It was a pitched battle that lasted four hours,” says GSU historian Cliff Kuhn, who interviewed some of the last eyewitnesses and is leading a walking tour of riot sites at 1 p.m. Sunday in Woodruff Park.

Over the next three days, the disturbances spread to other parts of Atlanta, where black residents, who had smuggled guns into the city, started firing back.

A panicked exodus

In the aftermath, historians estimate, as many as 1,000 black Atlantans fled the city and never returned. White leaders convened a summit with black clergy and businessmen. But for the most part, the riot was swept under the rug. It was scarcely remembered half a century later when Atlanta billed itself as “the city too busy too hate.”

“The black community wanted to forget about the riot, too,” says Clarissa Myrick-Harris, a historian at Clark Atlanta University and vice president of One World Archives. “They wanted to move forward.”

Memorial considered

In a state teeming with Civil War markers, there is no state historical marker about the riot. Coalition members would like to see one commemorating the victims, but confirming their names --- or even their number --- has proved difficult. The coroner reported 12 deaths at the time, a figure historians regard as far too low. Three books about the riot published since 2001 place the toll between 25 and 50.

The coalition is not calling for a truth commission or a government inquest like the one that recently presented its report on a bloody 1898 race riot in Wilmington, N.C.

The group is patterning its observance on other communities that have used incidents of racial violence to kindle a dialogue on race --- groups such as the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee in Walton County, which organized to commemorate a notorious quadruple lynching in 1946.

No verdicts but history’s

Andrew Sheldon, an Atlanta jury consultant who helped win convictions in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, knows his involvement in the coalition will not lead to similar prosecutions. He’s interested in a broader sort of remedial justice this time.

“Every city that has had racial violence like this is still affected by it,” Sheldon says. “You see it in the patterns of segregation, in the attitudes, in the fears people feel on both sides. Something like this riot slips out of memory, and people assume things have always been the way they are. But there are reasons.”