Note (return) — Chapter XV

Throughout the summer the heated campaign of Hoke Smith for the governorship capitalized the gathering sentiment for the disfranchisement of the Negro in the state and at length raised the race issue to such a high pitch that it leaped into flame. The feeling was intensified by the report of assaults and attempted assaults by Negroes, particularly as these were detailed and magnified or even invented by an evening paper, the Atlanta News, against which the Fulton County Grand Jury afterwards brought in an indictment as largely responsible for the riot, and which was forced to suspend publication when the business men of the city withdrew their support. Just how much foundation there was to the rumors may be seen from the following report of the investigator: "Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention in the newspapers, although one, the offense of a man named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot, two were cases of rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape, three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part of white women, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide."217 On Friday, September 21, while a Negro was on trial, the father of the girl concerned asked the recorder for permission to deal with the Negro with his own hand, and an outbreak was barely averted in the open court. On Saturday evening, however, some elements in the city and from neighboring towns, heated by liquor and newspaper extras, became openly riotous and until midnight defied all law and authority. Negroes were assaulted wherever they appeared, for the most part being found unsuspecting, as in the case of those who happened to be going home from work and were on street cars passing through the heart of the city. In one barber shop two workers were beaten to death and their bodies mangled. A lame bootblack, innocent and industrious, was dragged from his work and kicked and beaten to death. Another young Negro was stabbed with jack-knives. Altogether very nearly a score of persons lost their lives and two or three times as many were injured. After some time Governor Terrell mobilized the militia, but the crowd did not take this move seriously, and the real feeling of the Mayor, who turned on the hose of the fire department, was shown by his statement that just so long as the Negroes committed certain crimes just so long would they be unceremoniously dealt with. Sunday dawned upon a city of astounded white people and outraged and sullen Negroes. Throughout Monday and Tuesday the tension continued, the Negroes endeavoring to defend themselves as well as they could. On Monday night the union of some citizens with policemen who were advancing in a suburb in which most of the homes were those of Negroes, resulted in the death of James Heard, an officer, and in the wounding of some of those who accompanied him. More Negroes were also killed, and a white woman to whose front porch two men were chased died of fright at seeing them shot to death. It was the disposition, however, on the part of the Negroes to make armed resistance that really put an end to the massacre. Now followed a procedure that is best described in the words of the prominent apologist for such outbreaks. Said A.J. McKelway: "Tuesday every house in the town (i.e., the suburb referred to above) was entered by the soldiers, and some two hundred and fifty Negroes temporarily held, while the search was proceeding and inquiries being made. They were all disarmed, and those with concealed weapons, or under suspicion of having been in the party firing on the police, were sent to jail."218 It is thus evident that in this case, as in many others, the Negroes who had suffered most, not the white men who killed a score of them, were disarmed, and that for the time being their terrified women and children were left defenseless. McKelway also says in this general connection: "Any Southern man would protect an innocent Negro who appealed to him for help, with his own life if necessary." This sounds like chivalry, but it is really the survival of the old slavery attitude that begs the whole question. The Negro does not feel that he should ask any other man to protect him. He has quite made up his mind that he will defend his own home himself. He stands as a man before the bar, and the one thing he wants to know is if the law and the courts of America are able to give him justice—simple justice, nothing more.