four assaults by Negroes on white women. I had a personal investigation made of each of those cases. Two of them may have been attempts at assaults, but two palpably were nothing more than fright on the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out. And yet this was one of the “assaults” chronicled in letters five inches high in a newspaper extra.

And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when everyone 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 News published five such extras, and 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 was taken as truthful; for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigation. Calls began to come in from every direction for police protection. A loafing Negro in a backyard, 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.

In Atlanta the proportion of men who go armed continually is very large; the pawnshops of Decatur and Peters 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 good citizens, white and black, were far away in their homes; the bad men had been drinking in the dives permitted to exist by the respectable people of Atlanta; and here they were gathered, by night, in the heart of the city.

The Mob Gathers

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 horseplay, 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.

Crime had 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 unspeakably horrible manner. The mob entered barber shops where respectable Negro men were at work shaving white customers, pulled them away from their chairs and beat 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, but they robbed stores kept by white men.

JAMES H. WALLACE	R. R. WRIGHT
“The asphalt workers are nearly all coloured. In New York ... the chosen representative who sits with the Central Federated Union of the city is James H. Wallace, a coloured man.”	Organiser of the Negro State Fair in Georgia. Of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe.
H. O. TANNER	REV. H. H. PROCTOR
One of whose pictures hangs in the Luxembourg; winner N. W. Harris prize for the best American painting at Chicago.	Pastor of the First Congregational Church (coloured), to which belong many of the best coloured families of Atlanta.
Photograph by Sexton & Maxwell
DR. W. F. PENN	GEORGE W. CABLE
This prosperous Negro physician’s home in Atlanta was visited by the mob.	Chairman of the coloured probation officers of the Juvenile Court, Indianapolis.

Of course the Mayor came out, and the police force and the fire department, and finally the Governor ordered out the militia—to apply that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.

It is highly significant of Southern conditions—which the North does not understand—that the first instinct of thousands of Negroes in Atlanta, when the riot broke out, was not to run away from the white people but to run to them. The white man who takes the most radical position in opposition to the Negro race will often be found loaning money to individual Negroes, feeding them and their families from his kitchen, or defending “his Negroes” in court or elsewhere. All of the more prominent white citizens of Atlanta, during the riot, protected and fed many coloured families who ran to them in their terror. Even Hoke Smith, Governor-elect of Georgia, who is more distrusted by the Negroes as a race probably than any other white man in Georgia, protected many Negroes in his house during the disturbance. In many cases white friends armed Negroes and told them to protect themselves. One widow I know of who had a single black servant, placed a shot-gun in his hands and told him to fire on any mob that tried to get him. She trusted him absolutely. Southern people possess a real liking, wholly unknown in the North, for individual Negroes whom they know.

So much for Saturday night. Sunday was quiescent but nervous—the atmosphere full of the electricity of apprehension. Monday night, after a day of alarm and of prowling crowds of men, which might at any moment develop into mobs, the riot broke forth again—in a suburb of Atlanta called Brownsville.

Story of the Mob’s Work in a Southern Negro Town

When I went out to Brownsville, knowing of its bloody part in the riot, I expected to find a typical Negro slum. I looked for squalour, ignorance, vice. And I was surprised to find a large settlement of Negroes practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being as attractive without and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes of middle-class white people. Near at hand, surrounded by beautiful grounds, were two Negro colleges—Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary. The post-office was kept by a Negro. There were several stores owned by Negroes. The school-house, though supplied with teachers by the county, was built wholly with money personally contributed by the Negroes of the