I grew up hearing my father talk about “the race riot of nineteen aught six” long before I could understand his old-fashioned words. And though that unprovoked massacre of countless black people in the streets, shops, and homes of Atlanta no longer dominated our family’s dinner conversation when I came along in 1928, the detritus of racial hatred from four days of senseless and random violence remained imbedded in Daddy’s peripheral vision. As a newlywed of three months, my father spent each night of the riot crouched at the front door, gun in hand, ready to defend his loved ones....

When W. E. B. Du Bois came to Atlanta in 1897, he encountered a city of contrasts. As a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois worked at a gorgeous campus on one of the area’s highest hills, surrounded by a cluster of colleges and seminaries. Atlanta was home to the highest concentration of educated African Americans in America.¹

One of Du Bois’s fellow professors was Adrienne Herndon, a Boston-trained actress whose husband, Alonzo, a former slave, opened a number of successful barbershops and shrewdly invested in real estate, becoming the wealthiest black resident of Atlanta. The Herndons and Du Bois...

Here is the story that Annie Laurie Poole told.¹

By ten on the morning of July 31, 1906, it was already brutally hot and she decided to take a detour and pick some melons on the way to her neighbor’s place. She would offer Mrs. Cheshire a melon or two, take some home, and maybe enjoy one as she walked. A particularly fertile cantaloupe patch flourished off the side of Hapeville Road, which led from the Poole family property to the Cheshires’ farm.

Annie Laurie scrambled down from the road to the melon patch and started to pick the fruit,...

James and Crandal Poole’s plan to douse Frank Carmichael’s body with oil and set it aflame was not an original notion. Ritual cremation was common practice after a lynching—a term that in 1906 applied to not only hanging but also to any form of death by vigilante justice. Before burning a victim’s corpse, members of lynch posses often claimed body parts as souvenirs. Sometimes, this dismemberment was carried out while the victim was still alive. Fingers and toes were particularly popular keepsakes.

Even the most horror-hardened Atlantans had been shocked seven years earlier by the grisly 1899 lynching of...

The outcome of the board meeting held Tuesday, August 7, 1906, surprised few in attendance. With little debate, Fourth National Bank’s directors elected James Warren English Jr. to be vice president, awarding him the spot left open by the resignation of Walker P. Inman. It could be said that nepotism worked in his favor: English’s father, James Warren English Sr., had founded Fourth National and groomed his namesake in the family businesses—brick manufacturing and banking. But the younger James W. English had plenty of credentials in his own right. After all, he was president of both Palmer Brick Company...

Georgia Hembree and her husband, Richard, lived about a mile beyond Battle Hill, an area southwest of downtown Atlanta that had been the site of some of the fiercest fighting during the Civil War. Richard earned his living as a truck farmer, an occupation whose quaintly antiquated name simply meant he grew vegetables and plants to be traded at market, allowing him to “have truck” by bartering with other vendors.¹

The Hembree place was not too far from Georgia’s parents’ home, and early on the morning of August 15, while the air was still cool, she left the truck farm...

As he packed for the journey from Atlanta to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, J. Max Barber, the zealous young coeditor of Voice of the Negro, knew he would be helping to make history. He would be joining an Atlanta contingent of W. E. B. Du Bois supporters headed to the second conference of the Niagara Movement.

A summer earlier, Barber had traveled with Du Bois to the first Niagara Movement meeting, a gathering of black intellectuals and leaders during which Du Bois outlined a radical mission: to organize and protest the accommodationist stance on race relations advocated by Booker T....

Forty years after the Civil War ended, the scars of battle lingered not only in the psyches of Atlantans, but on the terrain of the city itself. Remnants of battle sites were still detectable throughout the growing metropolis. A few miles east of downtown, in the area called Copenhill, old earthen trenches, commonly known as “breastworks,” were visible even though the wooded area was dense with tall trees and thick underbrush.

Walter Lawrence, the England-born owner of West View Floral Company on Peachtree Street, moved his wife, Annie, and children from Whitehall Street in the crowded downtown retail district to...

On Sunday, August 26, Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor, pastor of First Congregational Church, delivered a sermon calibrated for political, if not spiritual, effect. The message was not intended so much for the church members sitting in the pews that night, as for the white newspaper editors, to whom he had already sent a copy. Using the text from the second chapter of Genesis, in which Adam declares of Eve, “This is now the bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman,” Proctor exhorted his listeners to remember that the protection of womanhood was the duty...

There had been consternation about the cost of a banquet ticket. A front-page editorial in the Atlanta Independent called the $1.50 price “blood money” and groused that it was simply too much for “a cold sandwich, a little salad, and a glass of ice tea.”¹ But in the end the fee did not seem to deter many people from attending the final event of the 1906 convention of the National Negro Business League. Five hundred guests arrived at the elegant neoclassical entrance of the Georgia Building in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park for the dinner, which capped off four days of festivities...

Few middle-class Atlantans of either race publicly questioned whether the men accused of sex crimes reported in the local press over the summer of 1906 had actually committed them. Instead, Atlanta’s bourgeoisie speculated on how much more crime might be percolating in the city’s bars, brothels, and saloons. The Journal’s editors opined: “It has been a fact that the negro clubs and restaurants which have only been disguised dives of the worst class, have fostered and engendered criminals of the lowest species.” The Constitution reported, “the police … have found that idleness breeds viciousness and say that the loafing vagrants...

For weeks, Randolph Rose, president of the R. M. Rose Company, and Jack Reynolds, manager of Phoenix Advertising and Decorating, huddled in secret, planning the R. M. Rose float for the Labor Day parade. Rose wanted something extravagant and original, and Reynolds, known for creating eye-catching window displays in Peachtree Street storefronts, eagerly helped. Randolph Rose and his father, Rufus, helmed a company that manufactured “medicinal whiskies.” Savvy promoters, the Roses ran advertisements in papers ranging from the Constitution to the Independent, touting liquors that they vowed could safely treat any family member’s ailment. (The Georgian, a staunch prohibitionist paper,...

William Jennings Bryan and his wife, Mary, arrived at the Atlanta train station early on the morning of Thursday, September 20, and were immediately hustled to their suite at the Piedmont Hotel—rooms 112 and 113, the most elegant available.

After they settled in, the Bryans called room service and ordered breakfast: watermelon, steak, soft-boiled eggs with mayonnaise sauce, two orders of waffles, and sliced tomato. The perennial presidential candidate’s breakfast choice pleased Atlanta observers. “Mr. Bryan first thought of trying cantaloupe, but the Georgia germ just at this time asserted itself and cantaloupe was scratched from the order and...

Well after midnight, the guests at the William Jennings Bryan “dollar dinner” spilled out of the Piedmont Hotel in search of cabs and drivers. They were oblivious to the commotion that had caused Terrell to leave the fund-raiser. Until they saw the next day’s paper, they would be unaware of another dramatic event that had unfolded just a few blocks away—at the Courtland Street home of eighteen-year-old Orrie Bryan.

Orrie, her mother, and two sisters, Erin, thirteen, and Tommie, eleven, sat in the front room of their home at 232 Courtland Street while her father, the Reverend Thomas L....

Over breakfast on the morning of Saturday, September 22, subscribers to the Constitution learned of a new indication that the Ku Klux Klan might still be operating in the city. The newspaper reported a KKK threat, not against blacks, but against a white city councilman, Walter Taylor, who had initiated an investigation into local butcher shops, deeming their operations unsanitary. A threatening letter, written in beef blood on parchment and signed with the initials “KKK,” had been sent to the lawmaker’s home. Taylor, on the advice of a friend, turned the letter over to the press, and the Constitution reprinted...

Late on the afternoon of Saturday, September 22, as thirteen-year-old Walter White got ready to accompany his father, George, on the postal rounds, he overheard his parents whispering in the front part of their house on Houston Street. The subject of the conversation was whether or not Walter should ride with his father. Walter was curious; he always helped with deliveries on Saturdays, and he wondered why his parents sounded so anxious. As he crept closer to listen, he heard his mother say, “I don’t think they would start anything before nightfall.”¹

Who would be starting what? Walter begged to...

On Sunday morning, Walter White and his father cautiously made their way outside and walked to Peachtree Street to see what condition the city was in. They saw tatters of shirts, caps, and jackets that had belonged to black victims of the mob—now hanging from lampposts and street signs, totems of the massacre displayed “like skulls in a cannibal’s hut,” as Walter would later write.¹

During the Sunday service at First Church, worshippers talked of the riot and nothing else. Less than half of the congregation was present; most black Atlantans would stay home for days. Already, rumors spread...

When the riot broke out, professor W. E. B. Du Bois was in Alabama conducting research for a sociology project. As soon as the news of the violence reached him, Du Bois got on the first train back to Atlanta, where his wife, Nina, and his daughter, Yolande, were at home in their rented house on the Atlanta University campus.

As the train made its way across Alabama and West Georgia, Du Bois composed a poem decrying the tragedy. In the call-and-response format of a classic church hymn, “Litany of Atlanta” was a cry of anguish laced with bitter recognition...

At the same time that police arrested dozens of Brownsville residents, a select group of black leaders prepared to meet with the mayor and city council.

The meeting had been requested by black leaders, chief among them presumably Alonzo Herndon, whose Peachtree Street barbershop had been vandalized. Although he’d opened for business on Monday, few employees came to work and even fewer customers made their way downtown for barbering services. And now on top of tragedy at work and a potential business disaster, Herndon faced a crisis at home; his wife, Adrienne, was threatening to leave Atlanta and take their...

Sitting in the public meetings and listening as black leaders hammered out the terms of an alliance with whites and negotiated the uneasy terms of a truce that traded protection for accommodation, Max Barber was seething, infuriated by the blithe manner in which whites continued to place blame for the deadly events on blacks.

As he listened to an unending chorus of accusation against a class of blacks universally labeled as “criminal,” Barber, the young coeditor of Voice of the Negro, was driven to take action. His fury had been ignited a few days earlier when, the day after the...

In October, two men associated with the riot went to trial.

Alex Walker, a black man accused of shooting Officer Heard in Brownsville, was sentenced to life in prison, based on circumstantial evidence—largely the testimony of a white officer who claimed to have spotted him among a crowd of more than fifty the night the shooting took place.

George Blackstock, who had been seen by a number of reliable witnesses attacking Mattie Adams and her family in their restaurant, and who had set out to Atlanta from Oakland with the stated intention of hurting blacks, was fined four hundred...

The official report on the riot was completed on Sunday, December 9. Its release was accompanied by a carefully orchestrated biracial public relations campaign staged from the pulpits of Atlanta’s influential churches and devised in the boardrooms of its leading businesses.¹

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Charles Hopkins had organized a group called the Atlanta Civic League. With the help of a small committee that included Walter Foote, Luther Rosser, George Muse, A. B. Steele, and Robert Maddox, Hopkins invited fifteen hundred of the “best citizens” to join an organization designed to improve race relations, safety, and law enforcement in the...

On February 7, 2006, more than fifteen thousand mourners crowded into the massive sanctuary of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, a suburb of Atlanta, to pay their respects to the recently deceased Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The memorial service, which went on for more than six hours and was nationally and internationally televised, was attended by president George W. Bush and ex-presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. There were songs and tears and long speeches, as one after another, politicians, ministers, and civil rights...