Fake news and fading views: A vanishing archive of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre

The city

Atlanta has a tremendous history, growing from a rail hub to a financial and cultural capital in the United States. By 1906, the population was almost double its numbers of 15 years prior. According to the US Census Bureau, blacks made up 38.8% of Fulton County residents. A bustling city of opportunity, Atlanta was ripe for financial gain. The more upwardly mobile black residents of this former slave state became, the more their white neighbors grew increasingly uneasy with the notion of abandoning their long-held cultural values—rooted in maintaining authority and superiority over blacks—to accommodate a more diverse community. At the same time, the city prioritized commerce as the key to its growth and development, striving to keep its racism ingrained enough to keep order and control, yet organized enough to avoid negative press (Godshalk, 2006).

Such a large, well-educated, civically engaged black population forced the powerful whites of the city to cut deals with influential black leaders who could communicate to their constituents that they could have a place of their own as long as they kept their place. Booker T. Washington offered such an endorsement of cooperation in what would become known as the Atlanta Compromise speech which suggested tolerance for segregation and discouraged activism stating, “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly” (Washington, 1895: 3). Washington’s philosophy, prioritizing trade skills over social change, was welcome as far as white elites were concerned. Atlanta had an image to uphold. Journalist Henry Grady long touted his philosophy of Atlanta as the capital of the “New South” where economic interests—with a white supremacist agenda—took priority above all else (Burns, 2006). This provided enough space for Atlanta to be home to W.E.B. DuBois, the first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard while ensuring his life was highly regulated by segregation.

In 1906, Five Points was a prominent site of 3 days of murderous violence against black residents resulting in significant loss of life and property. With no definitive death toll, conservative estimates range from 25 to 40 black deaths and two white—one of which, a heart attack believed to have been induced by the sight of the mob violence (Kuhn and Mixon, 2005). While the massacre was documented in local, national, and international press, remembering seems a complicated task for Atlanta. A turn to the archive produces conflicting coverage of the causes and aftermath as well as efforts to commemorate the massacre’s legacy at its centennial in 2006.

The papers

The 1906 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial campaign between Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell and former Atlanta Journal owner Hoke Smith was a fight for who could appeal more to whites via promises of black disenfranchisement and strengthening Jim Crow. Smith and Howell used their respective outlets to shape popular opinion around the race issue through dueling articles debating their positions on negro rights, each accusing the other of being too liberal (Korobkin, 1990). The Journal and Constitution were mainstream papers with less sensational reporting than their more tabloid-like branches, The Atlanta Georgian and Atlanta Evening News. On 22 September 1906, the front page of The Atlanta Georgian morning paper asks, “Negro Clubs the Cause of Assaults?” The second edition announces, “Police Begin Work Against Negro Clubs.” By the Sporting Extra Edition that evening, the Georgian reports “Burly Negro Attacks White Woman but is Frightened Off,” stating a “mob of seventy men is now in pursuit” (The Atlanta Georgian, 1906a). Rebecca Burns (2006), author of Rage in the Gate City illustrates the scene:

By ten o’clock that night, downtown Atlanta resembled a lower level of hell. Thousands of whites swarmed the streets and attacked blacks on sight. Over the next three days, Atlanta was the scene of intermittent and senseless violence. State militia troops, summoned by the governor to quell the riot, were preoccupied with protecting whites from feared retaliatory attacks rather than safeguarding the African Americans, who were hunted down in their homes, schools, churches, and businesses. (p. 5)

Compelled to provide some context, I leave the description of the event there, taking my cue from Saidiya Hartman (1997) as not to “reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering . . . perpetrated under rubric pleasure, paternalism, and property” (p. 4). It is not my aim to provide a detailed description of the violence that ensued. The victims of the massacre, not fully identified or accounted for in the official record, were not an afterthought to their loved ones. Their deaths were not the totality of the lives they lived. How do we tell their story? We can’t. All that knew them are dead. Gone. Hartman again comes to mind:

The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since [the] dead are unable to speak). It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive. (2008b, p. 12)

Writing with and against the archive presents to me as a call to disrupt institutionalized notions of the proper. It is a practice not solely limited to writing alternative accounts or highlighting the violence contained within the institution. This practice always grapples with the tension between the “Books of Empire” and the precarious archives of communities that “are made of relationships and of sometimes intense, and at other times only casual, investments” (Raengo, 2021: 10). On the one hand, the archive, the academy, the museum, represent sites of power—regulating notions of legitimate records, intellectualism, art. On the other hand, blackness disrupts the priorities of these sites where the co-optation of fields of study demands compliance with institutional structures and its ways of studying, teaching, thinking, knowing, and expressing. Such demands are violent attempts to have us participate in our own destruction (Sharpe, 2016). Wake work as a practice writes with and against the archive as a form of black study—not to be confused with black studies. Black study is “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you . . . and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing” (Moten and Harney, 2013: 11).

The institutions that comprise the official record minimalize black life to inventory or foodstuff for Western civilization to thrive. Black life is violently suspended between erasure and carefully curated inclusion. The Atlanta Georgian demonstrates this with their exclusion of black accounts of the massacre while including black voices in the service of antiblackness. The Georgian reported the day after the violence ended, “Leading Negro Pastor Appeals to His Race” (The Atlanta Georgian, 1906b), printing a letter from Rev. James Bryant urging the black Atlanteans to stop the violence and return to their lives of subjugation:

As a member and leader of the race, I beg that you cease all violence and lawlessness. We all, white and colored alike, deprecate the outbreak of violence and vengeance in our city, as well as the shameful causes of which it was the effect. And now it is the indispensable duty of the negro as well as the White man to pour water on the flames and help to bring order out of chaos, and peace out of confusion . . . The good people of this community, the mayor, police force, and militia are doing their best to protect us as well as themselves, and it is our duty to assist them, by controlling ourselves and restraining those over whom we have influence. I therefore urge that you return to a faithful performance of your duties; do not carry firearms; do not interfere with people in passing; be courteous and faithful; stay indoors at night; be peaceable; keep your tongues; subdue your passions; possess your souls in patience; divorce yourselves from criminals; obey and uphold the law, and the good people will protect you.

Writing with and against the archive was practiced by black voices in media uninfluenced by the white power structure. In addition to the Atlanta Independent, The Voice of the Negro, an Atlanta-based monthly journal with a national readership of 15,000, offered passionate rebuttals to the mainstream press. The Voice of the Negro’s post-riot issue was deeply critical of the structure of white supremacy that instigated the violence, including the media:

As to the cause of the recent outburst of race hatred in Georgia, any honest and thoughtful man who analyzes the facts must see that the riot was the inevitable logic of an anti-Negro campaign carried on for nearly two years by dishonest, unscrupulous, ambitious politicians and conscientiousless newspaper editors . . . the open champion of mob law. (Barber, 1906a: 474)

Author of these words, J. Max Barber (1906b), editor of The Voice of the Negro, also writes how he had to move the publication to Chicago—shortening the name to The Voice—after he was run out of town for penning a letter refuting Georgian editor John Temple Graves’ account of the massacre that lays blame on a negro crime wave. Conflicting stories on what caused the massacre, its toll and the roadmap to peace are ultimately mediated by proximities to power. The Journal and Constitution were the major news publications and, while fully capable of well-rounded reporting that included multiple perspectives from those who experienced the terrorism of 1906, the lives and deaths of black folks were not major news. As Jacques Derrida (1996) would say, “There is nothing accidental or surprising about this” (p. 9). Derrida recognized the role of the powerful as keepers of the archive, its protectors from view and interpreters of its words. The limitations of the archive—stained by its power to erase, rich with the romance of black death—leave an impossible story to tell; one destined to fail before written, authoritatively fading the view.

The video

On the afternoon of 28 September 2006, the Coalition to Remember the Atlanta Race Riot organized a panel discussion at Georgia Tech. I found a video recording of the event via the Georgia Tech Library website. While attempting to bring attention to a little-known moment in history, the video itself is situated to suffer a similar fate of remembrance as it is not prominently displayed and was not easy to find. It is impossible to tell how many people were in attendance. The event takes place in what appears to be a large classroom. There is light chatter from the crowd throughout—the occasional cell phone ringing. The panel was moderated by Dr Georgia Persons of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. There were also audience questions and a closing statement from Dr Sue Rosser, Dean of Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Each panelist provided perspective with respect to their disciplines. Dr Ronald Bayor, chair of the Georgia Tech School of History, Technology, and Society, references a history of race relations in Atlanta post-reconstruction. He lays out a cultural foundation for the “riot” including the familiar stories of white political, economic, and social control. Addressing the massacre’s aftermath, Bayor suggests things got much worse regarding race relations. Atlanta was able to successfully maintain an image of a city “too busy to hate” by recognizing that white supremacy was possible to maintain without large-scale, gratuitous violence—though smaller incidents of white violence would still be accepted. Rebecca Burns, author of Rage in the Gate City: the Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, gives a more detailed account of the media instigation of racial tensions through mostly unsubstantiated claims of black on white violence. Dr June Dobbs-Butts, renowned sex therapist, speaks of her father John Wesley Dobbs and his first-hand accounts of the violent attacks as well as his legacy in the community. She attributes his experience with “the horror” and the racial climate of Atlanta to his development as a father and civic leader. The downtown street bearing his name is just one tribute to his influence. Amanda Meng, Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College Student Advisory Board, stresses the importance of knowing and respecting the history of Atlanta and recognizing the need for students, many of whom are calling Atlanta home on a temporary basis, to use their time to promote unity, understanding, and positive engagement. Finally, Dr Larry Keating, Georgia Tech College of Architecture, speaks to the geographical and political forces that maintained white supremacy in Atlanta. Segregation combined with economic sabotage and disenfranchisement barred black residents from exercising political agency.

I wish to return to the testimony of Dr Dobbs-Butts. Her contribution provided what the official record would not include: how the massacre existed in the lives and memories of black Atlanteans. She begins with her birth before going back to her parents’ relocation to Atlanta shortly before the massacre. Next, she recalls her father’s job as a federal railway clerk and visiting him at work as her earliest vivid memories where she remembers not being allowed to use the whites-only bathroom. This sets up her memories of the social life of black folks as regulated by Jim Crow, hearing her father talk about the Klan and segregation. She attributes the energy of his civic engagement during her childhood to his anger and trauma from the massacre, which she refers to as the “pogrom,” perhaps an even more appreciative term than massacre. In addition to her father’s experience, she tells stories of other black families impacted. She learned from Christine King-Farris how her own father, The Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. ran in horror when his teenage eyes met with the scene of the massacre as he exited a streetcar. Perhaps unaware of its significance, a young Martin, Jr. would tease his father over his adamancy toward never riding a streetcar again.

Dobbs-Butts (Figure 1) weaves together a history of black life in Atlanta as seen through her memories and the collective memory of the community she was raised in. My interest in Dr Dobbs-Butts stems from her use of memory as a process. James E. Young articulates this “memory-work” as “a kind of ‘working-through,’ which includes a sense of our changing relationship to particular memories. ‘Memory of the past might thus be regarded as a constantly negotiated, animated dialogue between ourselves and the past’” (Geddes, 2007: 69). Dobbs-Botts works through her commentary, extemporaneously sharing memories as they arise, building one off the other through their relationships that feels more like a talking with than a talking to. She is attending to what Jonathan Holloway (2013) refers to as ‘the tension between memory and history’ (p. 34) and the act of remembrance particularly when engaging the archive as ‘repositories of a constructed truth’ (p. 38). To think alongside memory-work and history reveals in this moment the practice of wake work, ‘a continued reckoning of the longue durée of Atlantic chattel slavery, with black fungibility, anti-blackness, and the gratuitous violence that structures black being, of accounting for the narrative, historical, structural, and other positions black people are forced to occupy’ (Sharpe, 2014: 59).

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Figure 1.

Dr June Dobbs-Butts—coalition to remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot Panel. Screen grab.

Dr Dobbs-Butts’ intervention exemplifies the importance of relationships and memory in attending to black life and death through the archive. It demonstrates a process of archival engagement that is personal and communal. Though, at times, such a point of entry may seem insignificant, this move prioritizes realities of the wake and how our lives are examples of the historical and social processes that are positioned in the wake (Hartman, 2008a; Sharpe, 2016). Dr Dobbs-Butts’ commentary maps the relations between the past and present and the ways the past marks the present via the lingering disturbance of the water’s surface by the ship. She recognizes both the existence of an anti-black world and that her positionality does not exist in a vacuum. Wake work as consciousness-raising focuses specifically on the afterlives of slavery and therefore positionality is more intentional to the work than mere recollection. What is at stake is the ground on which we stand as we recall and attend to. This ground is not only for the black folks whose lives were and/or are shaped by the events of 1906. Dr Dobbs-Butts also acknowledges the lack of white stories, challenging the audience to go and get them: “They’re out there. You’re related to them. It’s your heritage.” This is an invitation for the white audience to adopt a blackened process of engaging our collective history. Sharpe, by way of Sylvia Wynter, stresses recognition of the anti-black world as not solely populated with black people. I wonder if Dr Dobbs-Butts got to hear any of those white stories before she died in 2019 at the age of 90. I imagine how those white stories might also disrupt the official account of the events of 1906.

The Coalition’s 100-year commemoration event itself risks fading from view as well. Its location at the Georgia Tech library further suggests a privilege associated with access to the event. The webpage I downloaded the video from on the library website is no longer active. The quality of the information may be greater than the quantity of its reach. What remains is not only a documented moment of an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural effort to inform, but a visual representation of the collapse of time and space—a folding over of 100 years that in turn folds over each prior century of black life in abjection: the afterlife of slavery, cycling through 1906, cycling through 2006, through today.

The sites

I was deeply curious about what the site of the 1906 massacre yielded for public viewing, education, and reflection. I wanted to feel the energy of the spaces. I wanted to know what, if anything, bore witness to this significant moment in time. I walked the streets of Five Points in search of any indication of what took place there in 1906. I explored eight known sites from a PowerPoint that included lesson plans on the event from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (n.d.), recreating the photos from the PowerPoint. Of the eight sites identified, I would like to focus on sites 1, 5, and 6. I will eliminate any suspense about the other five sites by revealing there was nothing at any of them—that I could find—that gave any kind of acknowledgment to the massacre.

Site 1: Woodruff Park: Named in the 1970s after the former president of Coca-Cola who purchased and donated the land. I often walk through the park on my way to class or a meal. The park is typically busy with activity: students, community events, film shoots. It is a popular gathering spot for people who could be assumed as homeless. There are several markers in the park, including the “Atlanta from the Ashes (The Phoenix)” sculpture commemorating the rebirth of the city after its burning by Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. There is also a plaque dedicated to the bravery of Atlanta Police Officers (Figure 2) but nothing commemorating the bloodshed on its grounds.

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Figure 2.

Atlanta from the ashes and police marker.

Site 5: Forsyth Street Bridge area: This site was riddled with objects of remembrance. There is a square named for Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, who was struck by a car in this spot in 1949, dying a few days later (Figure 3). An oddly placed marker is all that remains of the J.N. Smith building (Figures 4). It seems when the building’s namesake, Jasper Newton Smith, leased the property, it came with the stipulation that the slabs would remain even if the building was razed (Keen, 2016). A MARTA transit station now stands watch over the slabs. As someone who braves the infamous Atlanta traffic to commute to campus, I had not been familiar with this area, seeing it from a distance until now.

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Figure 3.

Margaret Mitchell Square.

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Figure 4.

The J.N. Smith Building marble slabs.

When I came across an official Georgia Historic Marker nearby, I was optimistic, but it turned out to commemorate a different event of mass death. The Winecoff Hotel Fire of 1946 is, to date, the worst hotel fire in US history, killing 119 people, many of whom were children. I had not realized I was standing next to the building or its historic significance until reading the marker (Figure 5). Nonetheless, I am always intrigued by such markers and will usually make the effort to read them when I come across them. It is part of my process of critical curiosity and of attempting to connect to my environment. The tragedy of the fire instantly took me back to my childhood home and the fires that occurred there which thankfully did not result in loss of life.

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Figure 5.

Winecoff Hotel Fire Historical Marker.

Site 6: Marietta and Forsyth Streets: This site commemorates the life and legacy of former Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady. Before my project, I only knew the name from numerous black Atlanteans who were born at the nearby hospital of the same name, proudly identifying as “Grady Babies.” Since 1891, a grand statue (Figure 6) has stood at the intersection as a commemoration of Grady and his New South vision of economic development specifically for the benefit of whites. It was here the archive records the depositing of three dead black bodies during the pogrom of 1906, perhaps as a critique of the New South philosophy of shunning gratuitous violence. Here, I found three plaques at its base. They turned out to be a dedication of the area as Henry Grady Square in 1929 and two separate restoration projects on the statue and its grounds in 1981 and 1996–75 and 90 years after the massacre, respectively. I am reminded of complicated relationship with such statues of prominent yet highly problematic white men as a glaring example of the difficult histories whose difficulties present differently depending on the ground we choose to stand on as we examine them. A Western approach keeps the past as linear, separate from our here and now. When I see Grady towering over me, I see his presence in the here and now as absolute.

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Figure 6.

Henry Grady Memorial Statue.

As I inhabited these spaces, I experienced moments of surprise and a deep sense of loss. Signs of remembrance at these sites informed me of a past I never knew while simultaneously solidifying a present I know too well. Christina Sharpe (2016) posits “aspiration” as “keeping and putting breath in the Black body in hostile weather . . . living the time when our labor is no longer necessary but our flesh, our bodies, are still the stuff out of which ‘democracy’ is produced” (p. 112). While breath is taken away, breath is restored through my presence, my attending to the dead, and the inhabiting of a consciousness that recognizes the weight of what makes such inhabitance even necessary. I cannot separate my blackness from the curiosity over what is not there.

Although Karen Beckman (2003) is specifically referring to women in her book Vanishing Women, her words ring true when applied to blackness rendered invisible amid its hypervisibility. Here lies the notion of a history of vanishing:

Disappearance, masquerading as a certain kind of magical vanishing, can threaten to erase completely those bodies deemed superfluous or redundant . . . Although disappearance and vanishing may seem to signify the same thing, I want here to distinguish between these two words on the important grounds that while disappearance suggests a completed action vanishing is always in process. This inherent incompleteness becomes strategically useful at times when either an individual subject or the state itself tries to collapse magical vanishing into violent eradication, using the former as a screen for the latter. (p. 19)

I find it fascinating that this lack of black remembrance is often sutured by the remembrance of white life and death—a signal toward black social death. A historical arc of life and death in Five Points is prominently displayed. White Atlanteans and visitors are commemorated. The police are commemorated. Even a demolished building and the city itself rising from the ashes of the Civil War are commemorated. It is neither death itself nor these locations of death that are unworthy of memorial. Under the rubrics of hypervisibility and invisibility, there is nothing extraordinary about black death. Nothing. What are we to make of this nothingness?

Nana Adusei-Poku (2017) critiques the Western notion of “nothing is art”—the so-called universality of the “void”—where, for example, artist Robert Barry offers a blank, white space where we can be “free to think about what we are going to do” (p. 1). Adusei-Poku posits the myth of the universal is “connected to exclusion, which produces the ‘particular’ relational experience of nonexistence.” That which can be said for such art can be said for the Five Points sites of remembrance, “the absence of the black experience remains foundational and marginalized for the whiteness that fills these spaces” (Adusei-Poku, 2017: 4). It is a black experience with whiteness that creates the black abyss, the void that appears when one sees history repeating itself. With all its generative properties, a black experience with whiteness is to confront violence and death as a way of life—a way that must seemingly be forgotten to keep the so-called universal secure in its vision of itself as the quintessential human. But then again, if you are the sole human, there is no need for quintessential. Any challenge to this narrative fades from view under the imperial project.

My journey of wake work through the archive from print to video to witnessing leads me back to Hartman. What does it look like, as Hartman (2008b) asks, “to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (p. 12)? Adusei-Poku (2017) suggests, “there is no healing presence when the wounded past is erased from our cultural memory and archive” (p. 7). How are we to interpret the experience of antiblackness if the archive refuses to value black life or death differently? As I experience blackness ontologically, my concern is not with the recovery of the massacre to do the labor of informing whiteness of its willful erasures. Wake work provides an opportunity to position the reality of antiblackness at forefront of our thinking and remembering as a means of attending more appropriately to experiencing antiblackness and ultimately surviving it. Memory studies is an appropriate point of inquiry into the ruptures that are possible in the wake.

My interest is in a black study that produces an orthography of refusal, bringing new language to archival possibilities, a creative process that cares for black life and death enough to see them in myriad ways the institutional archive can’t dictate because it doesn’t know the vocabulary. No marker, no plaque, no commemorative renaming will suffice. ³ They present as solutions like constitutional amendments and black presidents. I am not interested in solutions. I am interested in survival. Survival is critical to our ability to, as Kevin Quashie would have us, imagine a black world, where we need not rely on the question black being and aliveness, where “antiblackness is part of blackness but not all of how or what blackness is. Antiblackness is total in the world, but it is not total in the black world” (Quashie, 2021: 5). In the black world, we engage the unknowns of blackness as a matter of its totality and not because of its vanishing by the anti-black world—in the wake.