by Karen Branan
Before, during, and after the riots, white newspapers, theaters, and political podiums resounded with vicious calls for lynching, deportation, castration, and sterilization of blacks. Even the normally temperate Harris County Journal went off the tracks as editor Hardy published on his front page an inflammatory letter to the Atlanta Georgian titled “Scripture Justifies Lynching,” which proposed that back rapists be castrated.
The Columbus Sun-Enquirer took to the idea and championed it on its editorial page. The Columbus City Council followed up by taking under consideration a bill to do just that. Hamilton’s leaders, perhaps stunned by how quickly they were being roused to violence, declared a moratorium on rabid racism in the pages of the Journal.
Later, men of stature would blame the riot on the heated rhetoric of Smith’s campaign, Dixon’s play (which was still enjoying wide audiences throughout Georgia), and the Atlanta Georgian and its editor, John Temple Graves.
They might also have blamed the riot for fueling the growth of the Niagara Movement, begun less than a year earlier by W. E. B. Du Bois and other black intellectuals. Three years later it would become the NAACP, the first widespread national formation of blacks and their white allies to take on lynching. Until this point most black leaders had been hesitant to make a big show of strength, fearing it would only rouse whites to more violence and hurt their cause.
Watching politicians like Hoke Smith and other formerly trusted whites fomenting antiblack violence, Du Bois, the country’s first black Harvard graduate, now a professor at Atlanta University, concluded that blacks could no longer trust the South’s good white leaders to protect them. His first glimmer of that reality had come after Sam Hose’s lynching seven years earlier, when Atlanta newspapers had also acted as cheerleaders for a lynching and he’d been stunned to see Hose’s knuckle bones displayed in an Atlanta butcher’s window.
During and after the Atlanta riots he and his colleagues expressed these sentiments more loudly and frequently. Kelly Miller, a colleague of Du Bois, Terrell, and Cooper and a Howard University professor, rejected Booker T. Washington’s insistence that good white southerners could handle these problems, and called for federal troops to step in. He argued that if they didn’t, blacks should arm themselves and fight back. Du Bois himself had sat on his front steps with a shotgun across his knees to protect his wife and daughters during the Atlanta riots. He and other black leaders began to counsel self-defense. Whether it was because of this counsel or sheer desperation, increasing numbers of rural blacks were taking up guns for self-protection.
Du Bois had recently completed a massive U.S. Bureau of Labor study of “the distribution of labor, the relation of landlord and tenant, the political organization and the family life and the distribution of the population” in Lowndes County, Alabama, a hundred miles from Harris. He’d worked on this for a year, seen several of his black agents driven out with shotguns, interviewed thousands of farmers of both races, studied every land record and every justice court case since 1850, and done what no one had dared to do before: he’d taken the machine apart. His study would show how it worked, right down to the last nut and bolt.
Two white agents had conducted intensive confidential interviews that would show the sex relations among black and white, as well as the political dynamics that drove labor relations, land ownership, and the economy and wrapped black people’s lives in barbed wire.
This unprecedented report would never see daylight. Just before Baker came to town, Du Bois learned that his report had “disappeared” within the Labor Bureau. He’d gone to Washington to fight for its release and been told it “touched on political matters.” It was a piece of dynamite, of course, which when lobbed into Congress would certainly drive deep fissures into the North-South alliance, so carefully constructed since the war.
Eight years earlier, a similar, though less scientific report Du Bois wrote on commission for McClure’s magazine had met the same fate. Soon New York philanthropist George Foster Peabody, the Columbus native with vast influence over the General Education Board, one of Atlanta University’s largest funders, would warn Du Bois to stop inflaming blacks against whites. He would inveigh upon Booker T. Washington to speak against Du Bois and finally, in 1909, arranged for Du Bois to lose his job. In 1911 the determined and creative Du Bois rewrote the censored report as The Quest of the Silver Fleece, a novel.
In the wake of the Atlanta riot, in a madcap rush to avoid race war or, as former Georgia governor William J. Northen began predicting, “the utter collapse of western civilization,” temperance groups such as the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League blamed liquor. Mayor pro tem Ed Pomeroy and others shut down Atlanta’s saloons. Quickly, however, white saloons were reopened so as not to turn away convention business. Bars allowing whites and blacks were closed for good and black bars were closed for long periods. The Georgia prohibition bill, covering both races, pushed relentlessly and unsuccessfully for decades, was signed into law in the immediate wake of the riots to take effect on August 1, 1907. In this season of heightened Negrophobia, its passage was heralded as whites making a personal sacrifice in order to save the dissolute Negro, whose welfare they must oversee.
Black voting was viewed by many as contributing to “Negro uppityness” as much as interracial carousing and alcohol selling. Consequently, upon his election, Governor Smith spearheaded a voting law requiring literacy and property ownership, which cut almost all blacks from the rolls. By 1910 only eleven black men would be qualified to vote in Harris County. In addition, the new white agenda for blacks—put into operation with the defeat of populism—deemed any education beyond industrial training useless and even dangerous. Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington, the darling of the white business community, made countless speeches essentially urging blacks to gratefully accept their naturally inferior position in America.
With all of this in play, astute black leaders of the time had to wonder if the Atlanta “riots” were not prearranged by white leaders determined to stamp out any remaining vestiges of “Negro domination.” One of these leaders, an editor named Max Barber, was driven from the city much like Alex Manly, not by a crazed mob brandishing torches but by a soft-spoken banker, James W. English, who called him into his office and told him that he could leave with his family or kiss his wife and children good-bye forever. Two years later, English would be exposed in state senate hearing rooms as a major beneficiary of the state’s barbaric convict labor system.
In 1907, around the time that Dozier Huckaby was murdered near Mountain Hill in a fight with a black man and a white man over a little “ginger-colored baby,” former governor William J. Northen began organizing grassroots clubs. His goal was to bring together the best of the whites and the blacks to protect white women from black rapists, blacks from other blacks, and blacks both male and female from brutish white men who might lynch or rape them.
In the same year, far away in St. Francisville, Louisiana, after a white man murdered another in a fight over a black woman, a mass meeting was held in the courthouse to formulate plans to suppress “the keeping of Negro concubines by white men.”
Northen’s credentials were impeccable and he enjoyed widespread support within both races. He’d presided over the Georgia Baptist Convention since 1895, served several terms as head of the Southern Baptist Convention, and was a trustee at Mercer, a Baptist college, for forty years. He was governor of Georgia from 1890 to 1894 and served many years before that in the state legislature.
In the midst of the riots, he’d called together the most prominent black and white ministers in Atlanta at the colored YMCA. In February, he attended the Georgia Equal Rights Convention, the inner circle of black leaders in the state, a group allied with Du Bois and his Niagara Movement. These men were not, however, willing to accept Northen’s—and all white southern leaders’—insistence that blacks accept white supremacy as the sine qua non of any pact.
For most of that year Northen traveled the state, urging
the formation of organizations called variously “civic leagues,” “law and order leagues,” and “legions of honor.” Newspapers closely followed his progress and he was exultant over his success. At seventy-one, with a flowing white beard, he seemed anointed by the Almighty to the task. In a Jeremiah warning of the imminent fall of white civilization, he spoke strongly against lynching and proudly of his efforts as governor to stop it, but like many of the old patriarchs who’d never come to terms with their own racism, he confused people with his double messages. One day he’d be blasting the mob; the next day he’d be talking so venomously about black lawbreakers that he seemed to be rallying the mob to action. But 1907 marked the first time that he’d led forthright public discussions of the white South’s biggest taboo: miscegenation, particularly between white men and black women.
In his pilgrimage, Northen enlisted select groups of “sun-kissed white men,” by which he meant high-minded Christians and “law-abiding Negro ministers and Negro laymen” who are “fully and heartily ready and anxious to help solve the awful conditions which confront us.” He called on whites to follow his example; they should not hesitate, he said, to salute a law-abiding African American and “tell him I am his friend and will be his staunch friend as long as he behaves himself as a member of the community.” This recognition, Northen suggested, “helps the Negro to make himself a man.” Working together—with whites fully in charge—the white and black “first classes” would codify the population of each county so that they would know “definitely and fully, the character of all the people among whom we live.” Only “law-abiding” blacks had access, he contended, to the information necessary to make a complete and accurate list of the “vicious and villainous Negroes,” who “lounge around dives and dens and clubs during the day and commit burglaries and assaults at night.”
“Law-abiding” black men, Northen told his audiences, had the special task of helping to unearth “a large body of low down, filthy, morally corrupt, and physically rotten white men who have Negro concubines.” Once exposed, every “last one of such white men” was to be sent to the state penitentiary for twenty-five years. Punishing these men was absolutely vital, Northen emphasized, because “we can never settle the problem of the races as long as we allow corrupt white men to ruin the homes of Negroes and make for them a lot of instant strumpets and wenches of pure, clean women.”
Such talk surely shocked the people of Harris County, even those who hated the practice of interracial sex. The notion that black men, even “law-abiding black men,” should have any say in this sensitive matter would have curdled the blood of most white men in Harris County. Already Georgia’s black leaders were demanding the integration of police forces, and in nearby Macon these demands were being answered. In 1889 Hamilton’s own respectable black men had organized a posse to hunt down a white child molester. “Mobs of negroes armed with shotguns, pistols, etc., have nightly visited the premises” of the suspect’s father-in-law for the past two weeks, reported the Atlanta Constitution. That Sunday night, “100 armed negroes went to his residence and demanded entrance and searched the house.” No attempt was made to stop them and the culprit was quickly turned in by another white man. No record was found of the outcome; he was most likely put on a train, the solution for many complicated situations in those days.
Still, this black toe dipped into white men’s waters caused concern. A year earlier, in Charleston, South Carolina, two black men had lynched a white man who “outraged” a black woman, and Rev. Henry Turner’s Equal Rights Convention passed a resolution of support and voted to raise funds for the men. More recently, the news of armed blacks protecting their neighborhoods during the Atlanta riot dredged up memories of an earlier scare, when one of the Hamilton elite had announced that Negroes had stolen the local militia’s arms cache. Though he’d quickly reversed himself, those old fears of black insurrection born during slavery and passed down to newer generations sullied the air more than usual these days. Behind all this was the knowledge of the cruelties whites had heaped upon black heads—not least of which was what white men had done to black women—and the long-standing, deeply suppressed fear that their turn would come. Slowly they were waking to the fact that perhaps this turning of the table might already have started, catching them unaware.
By the fall of 1907, Northen had visited more than ninety counties and organized civic leagues in many of them, according to his weekly reports in the Atlanta Georgian. Northen was not, however, invited to bring his campaign to Harris County. He’d been swept into the governor’s office in 1890 on a tidal wave of populism and, despite his disavowal of the movement years ago, he’d not been forgiven. Some years earlier, when the Atlanta Constitution announced he’d be addressing the Harris County Farmer’s Alliance—an organization largely Populist but taken over by crafty conservative Democrats—its president, Judge Cooper Williams, wrote politely but firmly to say the governor had never been invited to Harris County. Williams men knew how to hold a grudge and this had all the earmarks of one. Or maybe they were just smart enough to surmise that since Northen was loudly advocating incarcerating white men for having sex with black women, half of them would end up in the penitentiary if his ideas took hold. Another strike against Northen was that some years earlier when he was governor and advocating stronger antilynching laws, he’d had the temerity to announce to the world that there were “100,000 white murderers in Georgia,” referring to lynch mob members who’d gone unpunished.
Whether to invite Northen would not have been a matter of any debate in Hamilton. White women especially shared his concerns, but not his determination to expose white offenders, and besides, Hamilton had always done things its own way. In their minds, they had good relations with their black folks and their black ministers; they regularly sent white ministers like Rev. Willie Upshaw and their own Rev. Alex Copeland into black churches to reassure the restive ones. As for this business between white men and black women, sooner or later they’d deal with that in their own way as well. But they certainly weren’t giving black men a say in the matter. The sheriff at this time was Mitch Huling; he and his deputy, Buddie Hadley, had family up to their necks in these matters.
Harris wasn’t the only county to turn its back on him; still, Northen found no shortage of supporters. One day he was in Jasper County, the next in Putnam, often in two or three counties in the same day. He met with bankers and ministers and merchants. He published their names and gloried in their willingness to sign on to his ever-increasing army of Christian conquistadors. Many were his old populist allies and many conservatives were driven to support him by the recent embarrassment and fright they were given by the Atlanta riots, and the resulting embarrassing national revelations of white southern men’s biracial sex lives. Chief among these was a magazine series called “Following the Color Line.”
Before the embers died on Atlanta streets, a “muckraker” named Ray Stannard Baker stepped off the train in Atlanta. Already famous, Baker had worked at McClure’s with the legendary Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Baker had recently started the American Magazine, intending to push it to the forefront of American journalism with a series on the Atlanta riot and its causes. Muckraking, or “yellow journalism,” was feared by the plutocrats while the masses saw in it hope of great societal change.
Du Bois was one of the first men Baker interviewed. Du Bois found Baker naïve but shared the findings of his study in hopes this white man with a large bullhorn would be willing to bring them to light. His bottom line, as he told Baker, was that inequality—not sex, alcohol, black crime, or miscegenation—was at the heart of “the Negro problem.”
Baker, who followed Northen’s campaign and accorded him much space in the series, was largely cut from Northen’s cloth, and believed that what was needed to solve the race problem was simply an equal application of criminal laws and an abundance of kindness and decency on everyone’s part. He did nothing to dispute the white supremacist beliefs undergirding the system
he criticized. Disregarding Du Bois’s position, he nonetheless revealed more truth about the relations between white men and black women than arguably any white journalist before him. His goal was not to detail the humiliation this posed to blacks nor the role it played in weakening black communities socially and economically, but to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the white South’s claim of “white supremacy” as their excuse for discrimination and injustice. He described a growing antagonism towards miscegeny and talked about how the old practice of white men—including prominent judges, governors, and wealthy planters—keeping their black families on the side was still alive and well.
He described a visit with a prominent white man who expressed great bitterness against Negroes and argued that they must be kept down. The next day another man showed him the “neat cottage where the other man’s Negro family lived.” “I saw this man’s colored children in the yard,” he said.
In 1906 Baker’s incendiary articles began to appear. Bits and pieces would be reprinted in pamphlet form by committees to advance Negro interests in the North and passed from hand to hand to the delight of many, for here at last was proof the Negro wasn’t the only problem. The white man, mostly the “cracker,” but in part the planter, was getting his due; Baker, desiring this class’s patronage, hastened to brush off what little damage he’d done.
He advised readers: “The hatred and fear of such relations have grown most rapidly, of course, among the better class of white people. The class of white men who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago and than it was in slavery times. Negroes are awakening to this, too. I found several Negro communities, where women’s clubs and other organizations were trying, feebly enough, but significantly, trying to stem the evil from their side. It’s a terrible slough to get out of. These women (concubines) are honored rather than ostracized, have advantages, thus status among Negroes.”