Transcript: The Atlanta Riot

MARK BAUERLEIN Atlanta was considered the most progressive city in the South. And what they could point to was concrete evidence. More Negro colleges than any other city in the United States. More African American publications than almost any other city in the United States.

JUNE DOBBS BUTTS And people took real pride in the accomplishments of black people. It made us feel vindicated, and validated. My dad was so proud. He had visitors come to our home, he would take them on a tour of all of the schools, drive through the neighborhoods. So and so built that house. And he would show them how blacks lived in Atlanta.

LEROY DAVIS Booker T. Washington more or less took a few success stories and tried to use that to show that, in fact African Americans, if you played by the rules that I’ve established, that in fact, you too could be successful. That was of course not the reality.

NARRATOR The reality was that Atlanta was the one of the most racially segregated city in the South.

MARK BAUERLEIN W. E. B. Dubois is one of the most intelligent, eloquent figures in the country. If he has an appointment with an attorney in the Candler Building...he can’t just go in and get in the elevator. He has to wait for the freight elevator or...or walk up the stairs. The white elevator operator is not going to take him upstairs.

MARK BAUERLEIN So, that’s a place where Dubois leaves the affluent black community, goes into the white community and has to respect forms of segregation, of Jim Crow hierarchy where his affluence, his intelligence, his education means nothing.

NARRATOR Racial tensions were intensified when Thomas Dixon’s play, the Clansman, arrives in Atlanta.

MARK BAUERLEIN Dixon’s play presented in stark contrast the two strongest images in the South at this time. One image is of the innocent, virginal, defenseless, eighteen year old, Anglo Saxon female. The other is the dark-skinned, leering, lustful, criminal, degenerate black man. And the latter is preying upon the former. And for him there was only solution the Klansmen.

NARRATOR The play glorified the Ku Klux Klan and denigrated blacks. Throughout the week of September 17th, the press began to publish incidents of alleged rape, almost all of which later proved to be false. By Saturday the 22, white tempers were at boiling point.

MARK BAUERLEIN The streets were swelling with people. Extras were flooding the streets corners, "Second Assault. Third Assault." At one point, a man got up on a box and started delivering a speech. "We got to do something to protect our white women." Packs of white men and boys began rushing from the train station, from the hotel lobbies, from the theaters to the spot. You had by now five thousand people there in that one spot. The cries of revenge, anger, of white retaliation against blacks increased.

MARK BAUERLEIN A black messenger boy rides by on a bicycle. Someone knocks him down. He gets up and tries to defend himself and ten people swarm in on him beat him senseless, leave him bleeding in the gutter. This openly excites greater blood lust. So the mob begins to spread out...packs of 200, 100 begin marching up and down the alleyways trying to find black stragglers, black men working in the shops, dragging them outside and beating them.

MARK BAUERLEIN Streetcars bringing blacks into the city, mobs surround the car. If a black didn’t fight back, he was usually knocked down, kicked around and usually left alone. If he fought back, he was dead.

MARK BAUERLEIN This was downtown Atlanta. This was a few blocks from the police station; the state capital is just a few blocks up on the hill. The governor is up there.

NARRATOR As the mob rampaged, 13 year-old Walter White and his postman father, who were often mistaken for Caucasian, were driving through downtown Atlanta. Their fair complexion allowed White and his father to safely pass through the rioters. Later White recalled how they prepared to defend their home as the mob approached.

WALTER WHITE (ACTOR) In a voice as quiet as if He was asking me to pass the sugar, my father said, "Son, don't shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then- don't you miss!" In that instant there opened up in me a great awareness. I knew then who I was. I was a negro, a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance. It made no difference how intelligent, or talented, my millions of brothers and I were nor how virtuously we lived. A curse like that of Judas was on us.

NARRATOR Walter White’s experience would lead him to become one of the foremost civil rights leaders in America.

NARRATOR The militia finally arrived to end the riot and restore order.

MARK BAUERLEIN After the riot Washington came to the city and He tried to find a silver lining in what had happened. But in truth, this time Washington’s conciliatory attitude just didn’t hold water for many people.

MARK BAUERLAIN This was Atlanta. This was supposedly the experiment that would prove what you projected in terms of racial uplift. We would cooperate with the white community. We wouldn’t agitate too much politically. We wouldn’t demand the vote too much. We would try to follow a good Protestant work ethic, buy a little property and gain a little capital. We did that in Atlanta and look what happened this time.

NARRATOR The riot reinforced Du Bois's growing resolve to exchange his scholar’s life for an agitator's.