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Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible.
— James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
“MY FIRST INTRODUCTION to the race question was in September 1906, when, with my father, I saw the beginning of the Atlanta Race Riot,” Walter White wrote many years later, looking back on his childhood. “In the course of that disturbance he and I saw seven men killed.”
The date was September 22, 1906, a Saturday. Walter was thirteen years old. The afternoon began with a discussion in the White family home, which stood on Houston Street behind a carefully painted white picket fence. Both Black and white families lived on this street. The White family consisted of nine “light-skinned Negroes,” as Walter put it — father George, mother Madeline, five sisters, an older brother, and Walter himself (he was the fourth-born). On most days Walter attended the nearby Gate City Colored School, after which he returned home to help his father — a mail carrier who worked from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. — on his route. On this particular day, however, there were rumors that violence was going to break out on the streets of Atlanta, that it would not be safe. Walter wanted to go. His father was against it, but his mother interjected.
It would be all right, Madeline said, as long as the boy was home before dark. “I don’t think they would dare start anything before nightfall,” she added.
George kept a rickety mail cart in a shed behind the family home, and a horse that pulled it. As they had on so many other days, father and son set out into the streets of Atlanta.
TRAVELING THROUGH THE CITY, Walter held the reins commanding the horse, so his father could jump in and out, piling mail bags into the back of the cart. All his life Walter would remember the smell of those mail bags, like glue and canvas. He often talked with his father during these rides about prayer and God, their voices punctuated by the sound of the horse’s hoofs and the wooden wheels rolling over macadam. Walter: “If God is omnipotent as you say He is, why doesn’t He just decree that each of us be free of sin and weakness?” George: “That is just my point. God is omnipotent, but He chooses to work through human instruments like you and me and every other human being on earth. Never forget that He needs your brain and heart to work His will.”
On this Saturday, however, Walter’s father spoke nervously of what might happen in Atlanta that night. The newspapers had been warning of a race riot for some time.
The cause of the trouble was rooted in a battle for Georgia’s statehouse, a gubernatorial primary election that was reaching its climax. Two candidates — Hoke Smith and Clark Howell — were locked in a political brawl with the vote nearing. Both candidates were Democrats; here in the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party, no Republican stood a chance. Thus the primary would decide which candidate would be the next governor. Each controlled one of the city’s major newspapers — Howell, the Atlanta Constitution and Smith, the Atlanta Journal — and both candidates were using the pages to enflame voters, in hopes of a big turnout.
Recently, the papers had begun to publish inflammatory reports of attacks by Black men on white women. Some of the stories were likely unfounded, some not. That very morning the Atlanta Constitution — Georgia’s most widely read newspaper — printed a front-page piece about a young white girl who allegedly had been assaulted by a Black man. The story began with a quotation: “I am the girl’s father, and there are few men who can appreciate my feelings who have not experienced what I have. I know the negro is now in the hands of the law out of my reach. If it possibly can be done, I beg that I be allowed to settle this case with the negro here and now.”
Atlanta was on the verge, but of what exactly, no one yet knew. Walter later recalled what he was seeing on the streets: “At first it was a gentle murmur of hatred. Then it began to swell. Papers were snatched eagerly from panting newsboys. Over the shoulders of each purchaser hung a group, standing on tiptoe to grasp the story of the latest outrage. The grumbling grew. Little flames of violent words shot up. . . . The entire city was as a huge boil.”
As the sun began to set, Walter was steering the cart toward a mailbox at the corner of Peachtree and Houston Streets when he heard a roar coming from nearby. Turning the corner, he saw a mob of white men chasing a limping Black figure. This is when he witnessed murder for the first time. He later described this moment: “Down he went, and a great bellow of hatred, of passion, of sadistic exultation filled his ears as he died.”
It was over in seconds. One person in the mob yelled, “There goes another nigger!” And the mob disappeared, giving chase.
Walter could hear screaming voices and shattering glass. He saw men rushing by bearing rifles and clubs. The horse pulling the cart grew twitchy and unnerved. By his own count, Walter saw six more men murdered on those streets. In the process, he experienced a kind of transformation, as the knowledge was born in him of the human capacity for blind rage and violence.
He and his father were struck by a searing irony. They were carrying mail, which might have helped to protect them, because even as the lawless mobs murdered without conscience, they were unlikely to injure government property. But what really protected George and Walter was their complexion. To the mob, especially in the fading sunlight, George and Walter appeared Caucasian. The color of their skin kept them safe.
When the streets turned dark, gunshots could be heard. All night Atlanta burned. At 11 p.m., for the first time in the city’s history, a “riot call” sounded — eleven strokes on the main fire bell summoning every policeman to duty. At midnight the fire bell rang again. “The fifteen slow successive strokes on the big bell were heard in all parts of the city,” the Atlanta Constitution reported.
In the morning Walter would remember waking safely in his home and hearing the sound of church bells. It was Sunday. The White family had a strict Sunday routine: 8 a.m. prayers in the family’s parlor, followed by a home-cooked feast for breakfast and services at the First Congregational Church. But this Sunday was different, for they knew the violence was not over. Morning newspapers across the country featured front-page banner headlines and eyewitness accounts of the bloodletting. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 20 BLACKS SLAIN IN ATLANTA RACE RIOTS. The Los Angeles Times: 30 NEGROES SLAIN, STREETS RUN BLOOD.
In the afternoon a friend of George White’s came to the house to warn that a mob was going to amass downtown and march down Houston Street, that night. The mob would be moving right past the Whites’ home.
“We turned out the lights early,” Walter remembered, “as did all our neighbors.” The family waited out the hours, the night strangely silent. Then they heard it coming. George told his wife to take their daughters — the youngest of whom was six — to the rear of the house, for protection in case stones or bullets came through the front windows. Walter’s older brother, George Jr., was away, so Walter and his father were the only males at home.
For the rest of his life Walter would tell the story of this moment. It was the springboard for his life’s purpose, and he would use it to create a mythology around himself. Sometimes the details would change, and sometimes the words in the dialogue would alter. But always there was a gun in his hands, given to him by his elder. “My father,” he recalled in one letter written in 1926, “who is an intensely religious man and who had never permitted a firearm in our home until that day, stood with me at the front window.”
When the mob appeared on Houston Street, Walter could see the white faces flickering in the flames of burning torches. A leader stepped forward in front of the family’s picket fence. When this man spoke, Walter recognized his voice; he was the son of a local grocer, from a store where the Whites had shopped for years.
“That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives!” the man yelled. “Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in!”
Walter remembered his father turning to him and speaking “in a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table.”
“You’re not to fire until they cross the edge of the lawn. When they get that close shoot and go on shooting as long as you can.”
WALTER WAS TOO YOUNG to understand what was happening in Atlanta, but he was wise enough to know that he was going to come of age in a new and more terrifying America than he had imagined. The world around him was changing, and as a thirteen-year-old, he would soon be forced to find his place in it. One can see him looking in the mirror, exploring the contours of his face, his blond hair and blue eyes. He knew he had a choice: to live his future as a Black man or a white one.
His parents were of the last generation of African Americans who could speak of the slave era from memory. His father was from Augusta, Georgia, his mother from the cotton-mill town of LaGrange. When they wed and had their first child, they settled in Atlanta, where, as Walter put it, “Mother characteristically plunged in on her lifelong war against every vestige of dust and dirt within range.”
At the time Walter was born in 1893, Atlanta was experiencing a relatively progressive racial harmony. African Americans could vote, and southern states had elected nearly two dozen of them to the US House of Representatives during the post–Civil War years, every one of them a Republican. As one of Walter’s older sisters later recalled, “Then, in Atlanta, as in many other Southern cities, white and colored people often were neighbors . . . good neighbors, too.”
Atlanta was the South’s booming unofficial capital. It was here, on September 18, 1895 (when Walter was two), that Booker T. Washington gave his Atlanta Exposition Speech, which came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise. As head of the Tuskegee Institute and the leading representative of Black America, Booker T. Washington struck a deal with white leaders: in exchange for basic education and due process of the law, African Americans would submit to a system of white supremacy and learn skills and trades that would make them useful to society. At the time, it was heralded as the key to a harmonious racial future.
The prevailing notion at the time was that people in Atlanta were making too much money to have time to worry about race. The historian Thomas Martin wrote in 1902 of Atlanta, “The white man and the negro have lived together in this city more peacefully and in a better spirit than in any other city, in either the north or the south.” When Walter walked Atlanta’s streets as a boy, he was struck by the affluence. Three blocks from his home stood the city’s first skyscraper, the recently completed Candler Building, named for the tycoon Asa Candler, founder of Coca-Cola. Nearby was Alonzo Herndon’s Barber Shop, owned by Atlanta’s wealthiest Black man, and the Gate City Drug Store, owned by the state’s first Black licensed pharmacist. Walter’s mother shopped at Rich’s, the city’s largest department store, where employees addressed her politely as Mrs. White.
The forces that would destroy the progressive South and spark the Atlanta riot of 1906 had already taken root, however. In rural communities across numerous states, an agrarian depression set in. At first it was rarely reported in newspapers, but as the depression grew worse, and as the upheaval threatened to encroach on cities like Atlanta, rural communities grew desperate. Some 90 percent of the roughly ten million Black Americans (about 9 percent of the nation’s population) lived in southern states, where white and Black families were now thrown into competition for basic resources. “I call that particular change a revolution,” wrote the Alabama historian William Garrott Brown, who lived through this depression. “And I would use a stronger term if there were one; for no other political movement — not that of 1776, not that of 1860–1861 — ever altered Southern life so profoundly.”
At the same time, the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision established the so-called “separate but equal” law, in 1896, when Walter was three. Homer Plessy was a mixed-race man who was removed from a whites-only train car. He sued, and the case rose to the Supreme Court, where justices created the separate but equal doctrine. Plessy v. Ferguson gave legal sanction to segregation. Soon there appeared separate public schools for whites and Blacks. Separate hospitals. Separate taxis, public halls, even cemeteries. In Atlanta the Grant Park Zoo, where Black families had taken their children for years, was suddenly off-limits.
Laws segregating streetcars appeared in North Carolina and Virginia in 1901 and in Louisiana in 1902. Soon the entire South followed. Walter’s parents were so light-skinned, Atlanta’s streetcars presented a challenge. When entering a streetcar, white people were to sit from the front to the rear, while Blacks were to sit from the rear to the front. Walter would remember seeing his parents wither under insults flung by strangers if they sat in the rear. But if they sat in the front, friends and acquaintances would accuse them bitterly of “passing.”
As far north as the nation’s capital, Whites Only and Colored Only signs appeared next to bathrooms, drinking fountains, and entrances to buildings. In courtrooms bailiffs used a “colored” Bible and a “white” Bible, depending on whose hand would be placed upon it. Many smaller stores and restaurants barred Black customers. At bigger department stores, Black people could no longer try on clothing or shoes; one had to draw an outline of a foot on a brown paper bag, so a clerk could choose the right shoe size, and all ...
