|
|
|
Book Review
| David Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 376. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2962-5); $22.50 paper (ISBN 0-8078-5626-6).
|
| Godshalk describes a summer of inflammatory headlines and unsubstantiated accusations of black men attacking white women, which incited armed white mobs, who attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty black fatalities and over one hundred injured. Atlanta's working-class black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids, acting in a solidarity, forged over many years in barbershops, restaurant, and saloons. African Americans asked the federal government to suppress the riot but in the absence of a request from local or state authorities, the administration demurred. Meanwhile, the white militia disarmed and arrested hundreds of African Americans. Godshalk places the four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, concluding that the outcome shaped future race relations in the city and elsewhere in the South. |
1
|
|
The riot racialized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. DuBois to assume a confrontational stance, which included violence as self-protection. It diminished the accomodationist influence of Booker T. Washington since whites had attacked his followers of respectable, harmless, educated African Americans. Fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with those African American elites, who, determined still to show their respectability, eagerly came forward. They, together, established a biracial tradition that encouraged northern whites to believe racial reconciliation was possible in the South based on goodwill even in the most difficult times. Black elites embraced biracialism breaking their temporary bonds in the riot and dependency upon gun-wielding courageous working-class blacks in solidarity. Godshalk believes that the elite biracial accommodation reached in post riot Atlanta repeatedly undermined black social justice movements and kept the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation . |
2
|
|
Perhaps of most interest to legal historians Godshalk explains how in the Atlanta riot, as in the other less well known cases, the legal system reflected the biases of white citizens who created it. Reformers after the riot reckoned with the fact of black disenfranchisement which left control of the legal system to elected judges and police, who reflected the racial perspectives of their constituents. |
3
|
|
The courts insisted they would institute and maintain order in an even handed way. Godshalk concludes this meant "openly discriminating against black defendants," as usual (147). The judges did not want further violence blamed on the unreliability of the courts. Therefore, judges and prosecutors united in seeking guilty verdicts and maximum sentences for African Americans charged with any form of aggression toward whites, whether physical or verbal, defensive or offensive. Godshalk observes that "As a rule, whites were hauled before the courts for only the most serious offenses" (147). |
4
|
|
The court system, after almost convicting one black defendant of a rape he did not commit, convicted another, Will Johnson, in his stead, and blamed him for the riot. When the state supreme court upheld Johnson's conviction on a 3–2 vote, the dissenters noted that two white witnesses placed him far from the scene of the crime working at a construction site, corroborated by a timecard. The mobs and the white community demanded a scapegoat, and the sheriff conveniently reported that at the execution Johnson privately confessed. |
5
|
|
By the time the race riot exploded in Atlanta, mobbing, assault, lynching and other such racial violence had become commonplace. In 1906, to add a note of legal approbation to the violence, the Supreme Court decided that black laborers who contracted to work for a lumber manufacturer and were forced by armed white men to leave their jobs without being paid had no federally protected right to enforce their contracts. In deciding the case the Court in Hodges v. United States made clear that the workers reliance on the plain language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was misplaced. The court affirmed what the Justice Department routinely wrote to African Americans. They should not seek prosecution for those who assaulted and murdered blacks from the Justice Department. These were not federal crimes and, in the interest of federalism, they should enlist local police, who by the way, often helped to perpetrate the complained about abuse. |
6
|
|
Godshalk persuasively explains how the riot cast a long shadow. Biracial cooperation squelched any rising black militancy in the immediate aftermath. Also, elite fears of social disorder reinforced segregation and undermined attempts at integration after WW II. Atlanta's biracial traditions covered over the white racist hatreds graphically displayed during the riot, "but only at the cost of veiling promising black visions of America's future" (290). Atlanta became the city too busy to hate and a model of racial cooperation, while problems went unaddressed. |
7
|
| Mary Frances Berry
|
| University of Pennsylvania |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|