120 years later, Atlanta honors the lives lost in the 1906 Race Massacre
TheGrio...
Fulton County’s remembrance days seek to preserve the history of a violent attack that targeted Black residents and businesses.
In 1906, years before Tulsa became known as home to one of the deadliest massacres of Black men and women in United States history, a similar race massacre befell Atlanta.
Now the Fulton County Commission Board has established official days of remembrance for the Atlanta Race Massacre, as the four-day event from September 22, 1906, through September 25, 1906, resulted in the deaths of at least 25 Black Atlantans.
“The terror of 1906 accelerated the disenfranchisement of Black Atlantans and the expansion of Jim Crow segregation and drove thriving black families and businesses from their destroyed neighborhoods,” Commissioner Doug Barrett said on September 16, revealing a proclamation to the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition to honor the lives lost during one of Atlanta’s darkest chapters.
Yellow journalism utilized in The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution helped accelerate the massacre as top officials connected to the paper’s past and present believed that Black citizens shouldn’t have the right to vote, later spreading false accusations about Black men sexually assaulting white women and other forms of criminality.
The accusations ran counter to the actual progress and mobility of Black people in the city, with half a dozen Black colleges, a growing middle-class and Black men seeing progress in areas such as education and amassing a coalition of political power. A growing Black upper class became a major talking point in the governor’s race, and the fear of its growth was seen as a clear issue, according to Clifford Kuhn, a professor at Georgia State University.
“African-American men had attained the vote during Reconstruction, and now there was a broad consensus in the white community that if the black man sought equality in one sphere, in the political sphere, he would seek equality in other spheres, in particular the so-called social sphere,” Kuhn, who died in 2015, told NPR in 2006.
The amplified stories shared in the papers, as well as the Atlanta News, continued to stoke white fears of Black people. It would all come to a head during a period of four days in September 1906, leading mobs of thousands of white men to terrorize Black citizens, effectively shutting the city down.
Men and women were beaten and dragged from streetcars and businesses were vandalized. Mobs ventured into Black neighborhoods and despite retalitory efforts from Black men who took weapons in self-defense, a resulting shootout in Brownsville, an area present day known as the home of Clark Atlanta University, where one white police officer died and more than 250 Black men were arrested.
Following the massacre, The Journal and The Constitution attempted to call the incident a “riot.” Black press countered by calling the attacks, lynchings and harassment of Black citizens a massacre, a term that would grow in stature when documenting other race massacres of the early 20th century across the South.
Kuhn, who, along with Gregory Mixon, wrote about the massacre for the New Georgia Encyclopedia, noted that the massacre largely faded from public consciousness over time. Eventually, its remembrance would lead to the founding of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition and the incorporation of the massacre into Georgia’s social studies curriculum.
“Never underestimate the weight of a word,” the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition shared on Instagram.