History's not always about people and events that we can be proud of.
But it' important to know all of our history so that perhaps we can avoid repeating the
mistakes of the past.
One example is what happened in Atlanta on a Saturday night in September 1906.
The city was growing, filling with people desperate to find work.
Many of them farm workers who couldn't make a living.
And for the first time, poor whites were competing against Blacks for jobs.
There just wasn't enough work for everybody.
Competition for jobs in the city, and then you have a tremendous influx of both white--poor
whites and poor black people coming into the city, often competing for the same jobs on
the railroads and construction.
There's tension over that.
And it was a time when whites in the South and across the nation believed in superiority
of the white race.
That black people no matter what degree of education and social standing were still inferior
to any white person.
Whites were so afraid of African Americans that they passed laws called Jim Crow laws
that separated whites from blacks in all parts of life.
They were passed first in the areas of transportation, on the street cars and on the trains.
In Atlanta, there were separate elevators for black and white.
Separate parts of the cemetery for black and white.
Separate parts of the street cars for black and white.
Separate Bibles in the courtroom that you would swear on.
In other words, every part of life was segregated by race.
Restaurants, toilets, everything.
In 1906, Hoke Smith ran for governor.
In his campaign speeches, he blamed African Americans for the problems Georgia faced.
And one of the problems he claimed were crimes against white women.
It was a time when these sensational news articles, which were based on flimsy information
at best and nonexisting information to say the least, inflamed the passions of white
Georgians to take some kind of action.
A series of newspaper articles accused black men of insulting and attacking white women,
even though there was little proof that these assaults really happened.
Because of these articles, the mob of angry men gathered in the streets, became hysterical,
and very violent.
Then the mob started pouring out its different parts of the city looking for black victims.
And they just randomly began to attack black people.
They attacked blacks on the trolleys that moved about the city at that time.
It was very brutal.
All matters of horror were recruited.
People were smothered, choked, and beaten to death, clubbed to death.
The mob smashed the plate glass window in Herndon's barber shop, dragged two of the
barbers out, and killed them.
He represented to them what they were angry at.
They were angry at some of the economic accomplishments of blacks.
Blacks began to eventually realized that we were being attacked and rioters were going
nowhere.
So they began to arm themselves.
Of course the government took upon itself to arrest any blacks caught with arms and
they were jailed.
Blacks did arm themselves and eventually fought back.
When black Atlantans fought back, the mob lost its courage.
The governor called in the militia, and three days after the riot began, it was over.
But not before at least 26 people had been killed and hundreds had been injured.
I interviewed a woman one time--white woman--who grew up in downtown Atlanta, and she was 10
years old at the time.
And she told me--I'll never forget it--how she woke up that night and just knew that
something was in the air because you could feel a tension in the air.
And she saw her mother and her sister praying by the windowside and she went over and joined
them.
And she looked outside and there was a lamppost.
And from the lamppost a black man had been hanged and his body was being riddled with
bullets, downtown Atlanta.
And you know, it was a totally grizzly scene.
And she said I'll never forget as long as I live.
And I remember her telling me that very, very vividly.
When it was all over, white Atlanta wanted to return to normal to forget that they would
commit such atrocities.
But black Atlanta couldn't forget.
And what about us?
Today, 90 years later, why should we remember?
We've had riots in the 1990s.
And these riots, like the Atlanta riot, have not come up out of nowhere.
There are deep seeded causes for these riots as well as the immediate spark that set the
riot off.
And we need to try to look at these deep rooted divisions in our society, tensions among our
people, issues in our society, to help us be better educated so that we won't have such
things happening in the future.