neighbourhood, in order that there might be adequate educational facilities for their children. They had three churches and not a saloon. The residents were all of the industrious, property-owning sort, bearing the best reputation among white people who knew them.

Think, then, of the situation in Brownsville during the riot in Atlanta. All sorts of exaggerated rumours came from the city. The Negroes of Atlanta were being slaughtered wholesale. A condition of panic fear developed. Many of the people of the little town sought refuge in Gammon Theological Seminary, where, packed together, they sat up all one night praying. President Bowen did not have his clothes off for days, expecting the mob every moment. He telephoned for police protection on Sunday, but none was provided. Terror also existed among the families which remained in Brownsville; most of the men were armed, and they had decided, should the mob appear, to make a stand in defence of their homes.

At last, on Monday evening, just at dark, a squad of the county police, led by Officer Poole, marched into the settlement at Brownsville. Here, although there had been not the slightest sign of disturbance, they began arresting Negroes for being armed. Several armed white citizens, who were not officers, joined them.

Finally, looking up a little street they saw dimly in the next block a group of Negro men. Part of the officers were left with the prisoners and part went up the street. As they approached the group of Negroes, the officers began firing: the Negroes responded. Officer Heard was shot dead; another officer was wounded, and several Negroes were killed or injured.

The police went back to town with their prisoners. On the way two of the Negroes in their charge were shot. A white man’s wife, who saw the outrage, being with child, dropped dead of fright.

The Negroes (all of this is now a matter of court record) declared that they were expecting the mob; that the police—not mounted as usual, not armed as usual, and accompanied by citizens—looked to them in the darkness like a mob. In their fright the firing began.

The wildest reports, of course, were circulated. One sent broadcast was that five hundred students of Clark University, all armed, had decoyed the police in order to shoot them down. As a matter of fact, the university did not open its fall session until October 3d, over a week later—and on this night there were just two students on the grounds. The next morning the police and the troops appeared and arrested a very large proportion of the male inhabitants of the town. Police officers accompanied by white citizens, entered one Negro home, where lay a man named Lewis, badly wounded the night before. He was in bed; they opened his shirt, placed their revolvers at his breast, and in cold blood shot him through the body several times in the presence of his relatives. They left him for dead, but he has since recovered.

President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.

In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent, industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found—not shot, but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen—lying in a woodshed back of Fambro’s store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade, and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.

Results of the Riot

And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other way to defend those arrested, doctors’ bills were to be paid, the undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the Brownsville Negroes, said:

“We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police had been guilty of.”

After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get—I heard a good many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices—and left the country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because of the riot.

Report of a White Committee on the Riot

It is significant that not one of the Negroes killed and wounded in the riot was of the criminal class. Every one was industrious, respectable and law-abiding. A white committee, composed of W. G. Cooper, Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and George Muse, a prominent merchant, backed by the sober citizenship of the town, made an honest investigation and issued a brave and truthful report. Here are a few of its conclusions: