Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race RelationsIn 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come. Nationally, the riot radicalized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. Du Bois's confrontationist stance and diminishing the accommodationist voice of Booker T. Washington. In Atlanta, fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with black elites, establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South without national intervention. Paired with black fears of renewed violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated black social divisions and repeatedly undermined black social justice movements, leaving the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation. Analyzing the interwoven struggles of men and women, blacks and whites, social outcasts and national powerbrokers, Godshalk illuminates the possibilities and limits of racial understanding and social change in twentieth-century America. |
Contents
Atlanta Junction of Everything Finest and Most Foul | 13 |
Chivalrys Multiple Meanings | 35 |
Voicing Black Manliness | 57 |
Testing Loyalties and Identities in the Crucible of Riot | 85 |
Competing National Constructions of Manhood and Mayhem | 115 |
Interracial Cooperations Profits and Costs | 135 |
God Give Us Men | 163 |
Atlantas Reconstruction and Americas Racial Transformations | 187 |
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1906 quotation 23 Sept African Americans argued Atlanta Race Riot Atlanta Riot Atlanta University attacks Baptist black and white black criminals black elites black ministers black rapists black women Bois's Booker Brownsville campaign Church city's civil rights Color Line crime Davis defend disfranchisement editor fears folder Following the Color GERC groups Hoke Smith interracial cooperation Jim Crow John Hope journalist labor law-and-order Leo Frank Lugenia Burns Hope lynching manly mob violence moral NAACP Negro Neighborhood Union Niagara Movement Northen NU's officials organization Oswald Garrison Villard participants police political postriot potential Proctor protect racial violence racist Ray Stannard Baker reel reform residents riot's role saloons second quotation segregation sexual social South Street threats tion vision W. E. B. Du Bois Washington white business white civic leaders white elites white mob white newspapers white supremacy white women Wizard working-class WSIC
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Page 11 - He had left his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. He felt...