The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (review)

In a slim volume of less than 200 pages, Gregory Mixon has constructed an excellent account of the sequence of events that led to the Atlanta riot of 1906. This terse study provides more than a stimulating description of the familiar events surrounding that famous riot for he has produced a long-awaited explanation of the origins of the bloody event. The author marvellously succeeds in developing overarching themes and challenging interpretations. In the process, he succeeds in placing that tragic event in the larger context of American riots of the late nineteenth and early twenty centuries and relates it to the particular politics of the New South.

Divided into three parts; the study is well balanced with three chapters for each section. In the first part, Mixon examines the emergence of conflicting visions, as the concept of progress defined by city's white elite is challenged by demands from the white working class on the one hand and the rising expectation of the Afro-American community on the other hand. The second part scrutinizes the white elite response's to these challenges, underlined by the development of the ideology of white supremacy, the policy of Afro-American disfranchisement, and the false charges of growing criminalty among the Afro-American community. In the process, Mixon not only shows how white racism was at the root of the Atlanta riot, but he also demonstrates how racial prejudice pervaded all other issues and was used in a way to rationalize violence against Afro-Americans. This was particularly obvious during the gubernatorial campaign of 1906 when Thomas Watson and other progressist leaders did not hesitate to embrace the ideology of white supremacy to win electoral votes and to make disfranchisement the foundation by which they could wrest power from the Democratic party. The local newspapers played a major role in exciting the public mind by printing false rumors in alleging Afro-American criminality. As a result, the Afro-American community was subject to increasing violence and retaliatory measures aimed at coercing it into submission. The third part investigates the riot itself. After dealing with the various atrocities committed by the white mob, determining the geographical area where the riot took place and studying the attitude of various white classes, Mixon examines the means used by the City and State authorities to restore order in Atlanta. The last chapter entitled "the illusion of hope" looks at the efforts of the white commercial elite to redefine the city's social parameters after the riot. Taken individually, the chapters are most often incisive and impressively detailed, particularly in their discussion of Atlanta politics.

This book goes beyond a simple study of the 1906 Atlanta riot. In the course of his treatment of the subject, Mixon explains that the riot resulted not only from an integrated juncture of race, class and violence but was also the product of Atlanta urban politics and the particular character of the merchant class. Embodied in the vivid tension of the time, the riot appears, under the pen of the author, as a complex event, closely linked to the process of city-building by the white elites. As a result, this critical event serves to illustrate how the boundaries between class and race were defined in the larger perspective of Southern urbanization. Indeed, the post war years saw the formation of a Afro-American elite in Atlanta as Afro-Americans moved from rural areas to the city. In the process, many Afro-Americans rose out from poverty and gained property-owner status. But this emergence of an Afro-American leadership was never acknowledged by the white population and its elites. The author concisely describes how the ideology of white supremacy, underlined by violence and segregation policies, played a prominent role in reaffirming the white elites' control over the city's Afro-American population, obscuring, in the process, the class and cultural divisions that existed among whites.

Mixon provides...