Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906

Abstract

According to the dust jacket, Mark Bauerlein's Negrophobia seeks “to uncover forgotten history and make a richly complex past, filled with promise and pain, come to life once again.” Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906 was the “seat of black intellectual life and moderate white progressivism.” He concludes the work arguing that Atlanta was the place where “organized racist aggression” and “vigilantism [that] emerged in 1915 as community wisdom” with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan was a direct result of the Atlanta riot nine years earlier. Bauerlein's focus is not on the near-decade interval between 1906 and 1915, but on the year December 8, 1905, to January 31, 1907. Within those months Bauerlein chronicles the coming of the Atlanta riot of 1906, a three-day conflagration, September 22-25, 1906, in which white people attacked black Atlantans. More descriptive than analytical and written in a style of “you are there,” Bauerlein's study has several strengths. He is skillful in constructing urban life for Atlanta's black elite, describing in detail the urban milieu of the Voice of the Negro editor-owner, J. Max Barber. A mini-biography of Recorder Nash Broyles is also useful. Additionally, class conflict between African American leaders and the lower classes is defined within the context of Atlanta's justice system. There is new information from such institutions as the Atlanta Psychological Society. Bauerlein is also successful in presenting the views of members of the black elite such as Barber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.