The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent. being coloured. [Sidenote: Gunpowder and Fire.] Most of the white people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.
The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them, perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination. The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.
It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But it kept carefully to parts of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and “teach him his place.”
Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course, reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken; there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of hand.
There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to the teeth.
Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether reassure me. [Sidenote: A Friend of the Negro.] The Judge is one of the leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time negro.” He is well known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him high among their champions.