Veiled Visions

The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations

David Fort Godshalk

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807876848
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

In 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come. Nationally, the riot radicalized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. Du Bois's confrontationist stance and diminishing the accommodationist voice of Booker T. Washington. In Atlanta, fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with black elites, establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South without national intervention. Paired with black fears of renewed violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated black social divisions and repeatedly undermined black social justice movements, leaving the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation. Analyzing the interwoven struggles of men and women, blacks and whites, social outcasts and national powerbrokers, Godshalk illuminates the possibilities and limits of racial understanding and social change in twentieth-century America.

Chapter One: Atlanta: Junction of Everything Finest and Most Foul

THE RISE OF Atlanta as a regional rail hub laid the foundation for the city’s breathtaking postbellum commercial expansion. By 1906, twelve rail lines radiated out of Atlanta, linking this “Gate City” with a broad hinterland of cotton fields and pine forests and annihilating the geographic and psychological spaces separating it from the world’s financial capitals. Between 1895 and 1905, annual bank clearings nearly tripled to approximately $186 million. Business leaders, largely southern in origin, enthusiastically embraced this expansion and tirelessly trumpeted their city’s advantages.¹

Outside the business community, many early twentieth-century residents openly acknowledged that the city’s rapid commercial growth had created new economic inequalities and undermined old cultural and social sureties. Whether longtime residents or recent migrants, many black and white Atlantans were struck by the growing sense of social anonymity that they experienced in a city whose population more than doubled between 1890 and 1910, to nearly 155,000 residents. As was the case in rapidly growing cities across America, the sheer scope and swiftness of Atlanta’s transformations overwhelmed traditional mechanisms for maintaining order and triggered fears of moral and social chaos. For local white commentators, two distinctive anxieties particularly stood out. As black migrants streamed into the city and black social progress grew more visible, many whites became uncertain of traditional racial identities and boundaries. Concurrently, growing wage work among once independent yeoman farmers and their female dependents appeared to threaten white fathers’ and husbands’ social status and patriarchal authority. For many whites, these twin images of white women and “strange” black men adrift became powerful metaphors for the social disruptions and cultural dislocations wrought by Atlanta’s growth. The visible commingling of the two groups in public spaces throughout the city stirred up many white men’s most profound fears of racial and gender disorder.

BY THE EARLY 1900s, Atlanta had emerged as both a commercial and a manufacturing center. The city’s thriving wholesale trade distributed consumer and agricultural goods throughout the Southeast. Atlanta’s role as a nexus between southern cotton plantations and northern factories facilitated the S. M. Inman Company’s emergence as the world’s largest cotton-trading firm. Banks, law partnerships, and national insurance firms directed the city’s surging number of financial transactions. The city’s rail connections also encouraged national corporations to establish regional offices there. Although industry lagged behind commerce, the city’s manufacturing production was valued at approximately $33 million by 1910. Cotton remained king in manufacturing and commerce. Increasingly, however, lumber mills, furniture companies, metal foundries, machine shops, and fertilizer plants arose both to process the raw materials pouring into the city and to service the railroads. This city of Coca-Cola was also a laboratory for still other elixirs, concocting more than $1 million worth of patent medicines in 1900.²

Atlanta’s business leaders understood that the railroad and their city’s economic expansion were increasingly pulling them into the broader currents of world commerce. In keeping with this cosmopolitan vision, Chamber of Commerce leaders issued a stream of reports, relentlessly trumpeting the city’s possibilities in western and northern journals as well as in view books and city guides. They touted their white population as principally composed of the “best elements of the Southern States, with an admixture of the enterprising and progressive from the North and West.” More than any other asset, local boosters advertised the “Atlanta Spirit”—“a spirit of transcendent energy, which surmounts all obstacles and builds even on disaster the fabric of success,” a spirit of orderliness and unselfishness that purportedly encouraged citizens to transcend conflicts and disagreements in service of their metropolis’s long-term growth.³ Atlanta’s unique public spirit, so business leaders had boasted since Reconstruction, rendered the city godly and safe from the labor and racial strife associated with its competitors. In 1902, Thomas Martin ignored an 1889 Atlanta lynching and countless similar incidents in neighboring counties to brag that the city had never witnessed mob violence or any of the other “bloody scenes which have saddened the history of other communities.” Local residents also described Atlanta as a “city of churches,” and, so one white minister claimed, never in history had there existed a metropolis “where the Church of God has a more potent and acknowledged influence upon the population.”⁴

Broad and Peachtree Streets as seen looking southward from the Candler Building’s seventeenth floor, ca. 1906. Peachtree is on the left and Broad is on the right. (Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center)

Chamber officials, in addition to pursuing investors and new businesses through their bold advertising campaign, also courted tourists. In 1906 alone, Atlanta secured more than twenty-five national conventions and attracted close to 80,000 visitors who spent approximately $200,000 in the city. In advertising their metropolis, chamber officials were enriching Atlanta’s fortunes as well as their own. With outside firms and wealthy newcomers competing for commercial and residential property, real estate schemes substantially augmented the wealth of the city’s richest families. Writer Thornwell Jacobs later recalled how “thousands of dollars were made on vacant lots over-night. Everybody was in the real estate business.” At the same time that Atlanta businessmen were courting northern and western money, their own financial investments were simultaneously spreading outward. After completing the seventeen-story Candler Building on Peachtree Street in June 1906, Coca-Cola tycoon Asa Candler turned his attention to constructing similarly impressive skyscrapers in Kansas City, Baltimore, and Manhattan. With Coca-Cola factories stretching across the country and advertisements touting the drink in national magazines, Candler recognized that the railroad (and his own financial interests) inseparably joined Atlanta with a larger national and global economy. Many chamber officials shared Candler’s assumption that their city could convince others that it was a truly modern metropolis only if its businesspersons erected mansions and skyscrapers and embraced the outlook and mannerisms of their New York and Chicago counterparts.⁵

Peachtree Street business district above Five Points as seen looking northward, ca. 1907. The Candler Building, the tall white structure to the right, constituted the northern boundary of the downtown business district. (Library of Congress)

DESPITE ITS ECONOMIC expansion, Atlanta remained a metropolitan oasis surrounded by a desert of farms, woods, and small towns. Less than a mile beyond the city’s streetcar lines lay piney forests interrupted only occasionally by isolated farms. The very railroads transforming Atlanta were also linking the state’s overwhelmingly rural population with an international economy and serving as the advance guard of a radically new culture and social fabric. Night and day, trains thundered through Appalachian passes just to the north, rumbled by one-mule farms and 10,000-acre plantations in the cotton belt, and probed the monotonous piney woods and sugarcane fields in the state’s southwest corner. Rail travel obliterated the cycles of work and rest that had long given rural and agricultural life its peculiar rhythms, and it deposited in country stores and post offices novelties from the world economy—copies of the Atlanta Constitution, bottles of Coca-Cola, packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and cartons of ready-made clothing.⁶

Both black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and white journalist Ray Stannard Baker, traveling through the cotton belt in the early 1900s, noted occasional signs of vitality and prosperity. The two men admired the accomplishments of a small minority of black Georgian landowners (approximately 12 percent of a population numbering more than 1 million in 1900) who together possessed approximately 1.4 million acres assessed at more than $28 million. In Dougherty County, Du Bois was especially heartened by his introduction to Jack Nelson, “a great broad-shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial,” who owned 650 acres, a small store, and “a neat and tidy home nestled in a flower garden.” Despite such occasional indications of economic health and black progress, what ultimately struck both men was the “forlorn and forsaken” appearance of mansions now deserted by once proud plantation owners and the sullenness and gloom of the region’s propertyless majority. They also recounted stories of whites beating and lynching black tenant farmers, threatening them with imprisonment, and chasing them down with bloodhounds.⁷

These signs of stagnation and social conflict were symptomatic of still broader transformations that had for more than four decades been sweeping agricultural regions throughout the state. The financial disruptions initiated by the Confederacy’s collapse posed immediate challenges to cotton belt slaveholders, who reeled under the financial and social turmoil associated with emancipation as well as the economic crises resulting from invasion and defeat. In the Civil War’s aftermath, they faced growing difficulties obtaining favorable loans and controlling a free black labor force that was determined, despite being landless, to wring out as much freedom and income as possible. To the north of the cotton belt, once proudly independent white yeomen similarly suffered the economic devastations associated with the war and the constriction of credit. In the 1870s and 1880s, these cash-strapped farmers devoted ever greater acreage to readily marketable cotton in order to reap the cash returns necessary to secure loans. Thus compelled by financial desperation and seduced by the new consumer products transported by the railroads, Georgia’s farmers became increasingly enmeshed within a global economy. Each year they gambled their farms and futures on the fluctuating world price of cotton. With precipitous declines in the price of the commodity during the 1890s, growing numbers lost their property to creditors, as did many former slaves who had acquired land following emancipation. Indeed, between 1880 and 1910, the number of Georgia’s tenant farmers more than doubled. Even those who retained title to their land gradually saw their incomes decline before cotton prices rebounded at the turn of the century.⁸

Whether payments were made in cash or cotton, the fraction of a tenant’s crop or income that went to the landholder or furnishing agent rose in direct proportion to declining cotton prices. Landholders typically skimmed still more money from powerless black tenants by charging their borrowers exorbitant interest rates or selling them staples at grossly inflated prices. Consequently, even in years of high cotton prices, the majority of tenants barely broke even or finished the year in debt. Wage laborers, the lowest class of agricultural workers, received subsistence wages without the potential of accumulating a windfall in a year of high yields and favorable cotton prices.⁹

Discord infused the landlord-tenant relationship. The relative mobility and independence of black tenants frustrated white landowners, who continued to view slavery as their lodestar. In the early 1900s, state legislators from the region secured passage of a series of loosely worded vagrancy and peonage laws that compelled African Americans to accept employment or face jail. These laws also provided landholders with a claim on the labor of debtors so absolute that they could literally force tenants to remain on plantations or even sell indebted tenants to other farmers. In the tense cotton belt, the ever present threats of lynching and white violence both diminished black challenges to the authority of white landowners and discouraged black protests against mistreatment. Between 1880 and 1930, mobs killed at least 202 victims in this region of the state. Blacks also chafed under a system that provided dishonest proprietors with unlimited opportunities to fleece their tenants. Du Bois was shocked at the rage that he encountered among many black tenants, particularly a “big red-eyed black” mired in debt, “beginning with nothing, and still having nothing.” This tenant, hearing of a neighbor’s lynching, told his interviewer, “Let a white man touch me and he dies. … I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran.”¹⁰

THE ILL TREATMENT that blacks encountered in the violent cotton belt, the inadequacies of schooling for blacks there, and the tenants’ distrust of their white landlords—all combined to encourage black migration to cities and villages. At the turn of the century, growing numbers of black migrants chose to pursue their new lives in Atlanta. According to census figures that probably undercounted a sizable black floating population, the number of African Americans in the city increased by more than 27 percent between 1890 and 1900—from fewer than 28,117 to 35,727. Most of these migrants were young single men and women between eighteen and twenty-five years old.¹¹

When they arrived in Atlanta, black men and women confronted a discriminatory job market that generally reserved factory and clerical positions for whites. Since white employers almost completely excluded black women from mill and office work, by 1900 more than 90 percent of all black female wageworkers were employed in the domestic service sector. White prejudice consigned many black men to chronic unemployment in Atlanta and other southern cities. The majority of black men who did secure jobs worked as common laborers, as servants and waiters, and as porters, helpers, draymen, hack drivers, and teamsters. In 1900, just over 60 percent of all black male workers labored in these occupations alone—jobs often marked by low pay and extended periods of unemployment and underemployment. Sizable numbers of blacks also worked as carpenters, masons, machinists, and construction workers. These relatively skilled workers were marginalized in white-dominated industries that usually hired whites first and relegated African Americans to only the least desirable jobs. To the consternation of white competitors, black men dominated the barber profession, outnumbering whites by a two-to-one margin and often serving a white clientele. Black men also accounted for nearly 38 percent of the city’s 166 bartenders.¹²

Black workers engaged in myriad strategies to raise money and protect their families. Both single mothers and extended families often pooled their resources by sharing houses and child care responsibilities. Domestic workers and other laborers established both formal and informal labor unions in search of better wages and working conditions. Many African Americans sought economic security and advancement through secret societies, fraternal orders, benevolent societies, and other cooperative organizations that raised capital for institution building and life insurance benefits. Men and women secured supplemental income by opening lunchrooms and illegal juke joints, by peddling eggs or flowers, and by laboring in cotton fields on the city’s outskirts.¹³

Despite African Americans’ hard work and ingenuity, Georgia’s labor economy often split black families and prevented black men from permanently settling in one place. Underemployment led many black men either to hustle for day jobs on downtown street corners or to leave their wives and children for extended periods in search of employment in other locales. Saloons and poolrooms offered convivial meeting places for men with nothing else to occupy their time, while craps games and gambling dens offered hopes (often dashed) for fast money. There was a demand for black male workers on itinerant railroad crews and in rural lumber mills and turpentine camps, particularly in southwest Georgia. These sites provided neither job opportunities for women nor environments conducive to child raising. Ironically, then, the “vagrant” and “strange” black men that whites saw “loafing” downtown or “roaming” the countryside were often seeking work or returning to their families.¹⁴

A select group of elite African Americans achieved a measure of respectability and wealth as educators in Atlanta’s prestigious black colleges and as ministers, teachers, and journalists. In addition, a small group of black business owners and aspiring capitalists were as much on the individual make as their white counterparts. No black individual better embodied the city’s rags-to-riches possibilities than formerly enslaved Alonzo Herndon, who by 1904 had become the proud owner of three downtown barbershops. His flagship operation on Peachtree Street near Five Points employed an all-black workforce to groom an all-white clientele that included the city’s movers and shakers. Like his white customers, Herndon recognized that re...