The Atlanta, Georgia, Riot.
April 27, 1907
Summary
An Atlanta newspaper prints bolded headlines about “blacks assaulting white women” and in an uproar, the whites attack every black person they see. The police force is very small and struggled to stop the mobs.
Transcription
The Atlanta, Georgia, Riot.
The Murder Of The Innocent.
Criminal Elements Neither Injured Nor Suppressed.
And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when every one was out of doors, when the streets were crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white men and Negroes both drinking, certain newspapers in Atlanta began to print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta Ness published five such extras, and the newsboys cried them through the city:
“Third assault.”
“Fourth assault.”
The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic. The news in the extras of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful: for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigations. Calls began to come in from every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a back yard, who in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and separated.
Many Men Armed
In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large: the pawnshops of Decatur an Petera streets, with windows like arsenals, furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak: the food citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes: the bad men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by night, in the heart of the city.
And finally a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken horse-play, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black, Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing as an orderly mob.
The Work of the Mob
Crime has been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man, woman or boy it saw who had a black face. A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man’s shoes was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakingly horrible manner.
The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negor men were at work shaving white customers, and killed them. Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming: they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not only Negro barber shops and restaurants, they robbed stores kept by white men.
White Men Opened Fire.
Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead: another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.
The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man’s wife, who saw the outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.
The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declare that they were expecting the mob: that the police-not mounted as usual, not armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens-looked to them in the darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.
The wildest reports, or course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was that 500 students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university did not open its fall session until October 3, over a week later-and on this night there were just two students on the grounds.
Police Shot Him
The next morning the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly wounded the night before. He was in bed: they opened his shirt, placed their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead, by the has since recovered.
President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary , one of the able Negroes in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes wer all disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
…
The Murder Of The Innocent.
Criminal Elements Neither Injured Nor Suppressed.
And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when every one was out of doors, when the streets were crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white men and Negroes both drinking, certain newspapers in Atlanta began to print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta Ness published five such extras, and the newsboys cried them through the city:
“Third assault.”
“Fourth assault.”
The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic. The news in the extras of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful: for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigations. Calls began to come in from every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a back yard, who in ordinary times would not have been noticed, became an object of real terror. The police force, too small at best, was thus distracted and separated.
Many Men Armed
In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large: the pawnshops of Decatur an Petera streets, with windows like arsenals, furnish the low class of Negroes and whites with cheap revolvers and knives. Every possible element was here, then, for a murderous outbreak: the food citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes: the bad men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by night, in the heart of the city.
And finally a trivial incident fired the tinder. Fear and vengeance generated it: it was marked at first by a sort of rough, half-drunken horse-play, but when once blood was shed, the brute, which is none too well controlled in the best city, came out and gorged itself. Once permit the shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black, Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing as an orderly mob.
The Work of the Mob
Crime has been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man, woman or boy it saw who had a black face. A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man’s shoes was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. Another young Negro was chased and stabbed to death with jack-knives in the most unspeakingly horrible manner.
The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negor men were at work shaving white customers, and killed them. Cars were stopped and inoffensive Negroes were thrown through the windows or dragged out and beaten. They did not stop with killing and maiming: they broke into hardware stores and armed themselves, they demolished not only Negro barber shops and restaurants, they robbed stores kept by white men.
White Men Opened Fire.
Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead: another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.
The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man’s wife, who saw the outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.
The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declare that they were expecting the mob: that the police-not mounted as usual, not armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens-looked to them in the darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.
The wildest reports, or course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was that 500 students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university did not open its fall session until October 3, over a week later-and on this night there were just two students on the grounds.
Police Shot Him
The next morning the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly wounded the night before. He was in bed: they opened his shirt, placed their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead, by the has since recovered.
President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary , one of the able Negroes in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes wer all disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
…
About this article
Source
Location on Page
Upper Right Quadrant
Topic
Contributed By
Benton Camper
Citation
“The Atlanta, Georgia, Riot.,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed January 20, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/487.