tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16711557.post115863247013613565..comments2024-03-24T20:40:46.666-04:00Comments on Pan-African News Wire: A Century Later: The 1906 Race Terror in AtlantaPan-African News Wirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10958190577776906688noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16711557.post-1158632950102667672006-09-18T22:29:00.000-04:002006-09-18T22:29:00.000-04:00DEADLINE: How Atlanta's newspapers helped incite t...DEADLINE: How Atlanta's newspapers helped incite the 1906 race riot<BR/><BR/>By Jim Auchmutey<BR/>The Atlanta Journal-Constitution<BR/><BR/>Published on: 09/17/06<BR/> <BR/>When civil rights demonstrations embroiled Atlanta during the early 1960s, the institutional memory of another disturbance decades before tugged at the men who ran the city's newspapers.<BR/><BR/>The press, they knew, had been implicated in the worst racial carnage in Atlanta history: the 1906 race riot.<BR/><BR/>"All of us at the paper were acutely aware of it," remembers Eugene Patterson, who became editor of The Atlanta Constitution when Ralph McGill rose to publisher. "Mr. McGill and I talked about it. As race relations were heating up again, some of the old-timers around the paper would remind us that this had occurred and that we needed to pay close attention so it didn't occur again."<BR/><BR/>Patterson was curious about what the Constitution and others had published in 1906, so he dug into the morgue and did some reading. What he found was column after column of overheated stories about black men threatening white women and worse.<BR/><BR/>"It was terribly sensational," he says. "There was no excuse for it. It was incendiary."<BR/><BR/>This week, as the centennial of the riot is commemorated in a series of events around the city, there will be no shortage of discussion about the causes of the bloodshed that swept Atlanta a century ago. Academics will debate about race-baiting politics and class tensions and gender roles, but one cause is as obvious as a screaming headline.<BR/><BR/>"The real spark was newspaper coverage of black sex crimes," says David Fort Godshalk of Shippensburg University, author of a 2005 book about the riot, "Veiled Visions."<BR/><BR/>Atlanta in 1906 was a fast-growing city of 115,000 with a reputation for progressive leadership. Even then, it was seen as a black mecca —- within the constrictions of the time. The city was rigidly segregated. Lynchings were not uncommon.<BR/><BR/>Atlanta's four daily newspapers reflected the era to a fault:<BR/><BR/>--The morning Constitution, founded in 1868, was known as the voice of the New South thanks to the editorship of the late Henry Grady.<BR/><BR/>--The Journal (1883) was the leading evening paper and stressed local news and crime coverage. (Both papers were under different ownership then; the current owners, Cox Newspapers, bought the Journal in 1939 and the Constitution in 1950.)<BR/><BR/>--The evening Georgian, a new entry, was the showcase of editor John Temple Graves, a tub-thumping orator who had suggested castrating black rapists.<BR/><BR/>--The Evening News, another upstart, was the scrappiest of the four and was trying to copy the lurid tabloid style of some of the New York papers.<BR/><BR/>Two black publications also plied their trade in the city: the weekly Atlanta Independent and the monthly Voice of the Negro.<BR/><BR/>In the months leading up to the riot, the Journal and Constitution were locked in a political dogfight in which each paper had a dog. The front-runner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary was lawyer Hoke Smith, a kingmaker who had once owned the Journal and counted the paper's editor as his campaign manager. His chief rival, Clark Howell, was editor and principal owner of the Constitution.<BR/><BR/>Their contest hinged on race. Smith played to whites by proposing laws to disfranchise blacks. Howell said such measures were unnecessary because so few blacks could vote anyway.<BR/><BR/>There was an unmistakable sexual undertone to the debate, says Atlanta magazine editor Rebecca Burns, author of a new book about the riot, "Rage in the Gate City."<BR/><BR/>"The message boiled down to this: If you give black men the vote, they're eventually going to want to be with your wives and daughters."<BR/><BR/>As the campaign reached a head in the late summer of 1906, a series of alleged sexual assaults seized the newspapers' attention. That August and September, the press trumpeted a dozen "outrages" by black men. Historians agree that perhaps two-thirds of the cases were unfounded and did not involve crimes.<BR/><BR/>Nevertheless, the stories almost always made the front page, and the suspect's race was invariably noted in the headline:<BR/><BR/>Girl Jumps Into Closet To Escape Negro Brute<BR/><BR/>Bold Negro Kisses White Girl's Hand<BR/><BR/>Half Clad Negro Tries To Break Into House<BR/><BR/>The text routinely referred to suspects as "fiends" and "black devils."<BR/><BR/>"All of the papers carried these stories," Godshalk says, "but the Evening News and the Georgian really went overboard."<BR/><BR/>Fanning the flames<BR/><BR/>The News was particularly obsessed. Editor Charles Daniel applauded lynchings and called for reviving the Ku Klux Klan. He offered a reward for the capture of one assailant, got himself appointed a special deputy sheriff and proposed a News Protective League of vigilantes to defend white women.<BR/><BR/>On the third Friday of September, as the papers hyped another incident, the News ran an editorial headlined: "IT IS TIME TO ACT, MEN."<BR/><BR/>They acted the following day. <BR/><BR/>On Saturday, Sept. 22, downtown was crowded with people come to town for the weekend. Through the afternoon and evening, newsboys from every paper except the Constitution hit the sidewalks with extra editions about four new assaults. The stories were based on flimsy reporting —- one woman called police because she had seen a black man outside her window and become frightened —- but that hardly mattered.<BR/><BR/>Mobs of whites began to attack black people on the streets. The violence spread and continued off and on for four days. At least 25 people —- almost all of them black —- died. A thousand black residents fled the city.<BR/><BR/>The newspapers denounced the mob, but none of them examined their role in goading it into action. The Constitution at least considered the possibility.<BR/><BR/>"The tragic climax of Saturday night was conclusive evidence of the power of the press over public sentiment," the paper mused, distancing itself from the fulminations of its evening brethren.<BR/><BR/>Nor did any of the papers seriously question whether their reporting on black crime had been founded on fact instead of prejudice and hysteria.<BR/><BR/>"The papers all basically blamed black people for what happened," Burns says.<BR/><BR/>Other dailies were more skeptical.<BR/><BR/>"Atlanta," The New York Sun commented, "is in greater danger from the brutal license of yellow journalism than the lust of the negro."<BR/><BR/>In the aftermath of the riot, two Atlanta publications —- one white, one black —- paid for their actions. One became scapegoat, the other a martyr.<BR/><BR/>J. Max Barber, editor of the Voice of the Negro, was infuriated when he read a piece in The New York World blaming the riot on "a carnival of rapes" by black men. But he wasn't surprised when he saw the name of the author: the Georgian's Graves. Barber fired off a telegram in response that was published in the World under the signature "A Colored Citizen."<BR/><BR/>Barber wrote that craven politicians and irresponsible newsmen, not black criminals, had caused the riot. But he also claimed that some of Hoke Smith's followers had blackened their faces and staged assaults in an effort to arouse support for their candidate.<BR/><BR/>Atlanta leaders were enraged by the unfounded charge. The telegram was traced to Barber, and he was told to either retract his statement or face prosecution for slander.<BR/><BR/>"I did not care to be made a slave on a Georgia chain gang," Barber wrote. So he fled to Chicago with his printing press and eventually settled in Philadelphia, where he became a dentist and a stalwart in the local NAACP.<BR/><BR/>Some escape censure<BR/><BR/>As for the scapegoat, at least there was a degree of justice involved. Within a week of the riot, a Fulton County grand jury censured the evening dailies for their scurrilous extras, singling out the News by name. The paper ran the story a day late under the disingenous head: "The News Condemned For Publishing News."<BR/><BR/>But it wasn't just the grand jury that was sore at the News. Atlantans cooled to the paper and its circulation dropped. That winter, creditors forced the business into receivership and its carcass was snatched up by its onetime bitter rival, the Georgian.<BR/><BR/>"The News became the whipping boy," says historian Gregory Mixon of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, author of "The Atlanta Riot." "I think all four papers should have been censured."<BR/><BR/>In 1939, former Ohio Gov. James M. Cox bought and closed the Georgian. Only two Atlanta newspapers —- the Journal and Constitution —- survived long enough to learn the lessons of 1906.<BR/><BR/>MORE ON THE RIOT<BR/><BR/>A panel discussion on race and the media will be held next weekend as part of the centennial events planned by the Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. Participants include Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker and Atlanta magazine editor Rebecca Burns, author of a new book about the riot, "Rage in the Gate City." 9 a.m. Saturday at the Atlanta University Center's Robert W. Woodruff Library. <BR/><BR/>http://www.1906atlantaraceriot.org<BR/><BR/>THE RUN-UP TO RIOTING<BR/><BR/>Newspaper reports, often on the front page, were considered the spark of the 1906 race riot. The Constitution, in condemning the evening newspapers, wrote: "The tragic climax of Saturday night was conclusive evidence of the power of the press over public sentiment."Pan-African News Wirehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10958190577776906688noreply@blogger.com