1906 Atlanta Race Massacre
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The 120th commemorationRemembrance Exposition WeekSeptember 20-26, 2026→

The Coalition to Remember

The 1906
Atlanta
Race Massacre

For four days in September 1906, white mobs attacked Black Atlantans across the city. At least twenty-five people were killed.

Whitehall and Marietta Streets, Atlanta, 1905. Streetcars, carriages and crowds.

Marietta Street,
one year before.

Library of Congress · 1905

This was the busiest corner in Atlanta. The city's streetcar lines all met a block from here, and Black Atlantans rode them every day. Much of the city around them had been built by Black labor, and little of its wealth had reached them. On the evening of September 22 the mob attacked those passengers first, and before the night ended it had left the bodies of three victims at the base of the Henry Grady statue on this street.

Library of Congress · 1905

About

In 1895 Atlanta invited the world to the Cotton States Exposition. On its stage a Black educator offered a bargain: work, build, be patient, and safety will follow.

Black Atlanta built. By the turn of the century downtown was a bustling, economically progressive Black district, and when W. E. B. Du Bois went to Paris to show the world what Black America was becoming, he took photographs of its strivers with him.

In September 1906 a white mob answered that prosperity with fire. Over four days neighbors were murdered in Atlanta's streets and Black-owned businesses were burned.

Black Atlanta, betrayed but unbroken, built again.

The Coalition exists to make sure that story is told in full, as a truth to face together rather than a wound to reopen. This is the 120th-year commemoration, and the beginning of a permanent institution: The Annual 1906 Remembrance Exposition Week.

What's on

The Annual 1906
Remembrance
Exposition Week

9 events announced

A week of truth-telling, learning, remembrance and community action, guided by this year's theme: Truth, Reconciliation, and Action.

4
venues across the city
3
day Mini-Conference
5
days of the History Exhibit
9
events in all

Why this form, why now

An Exposition requires witnesses.

It claims public space. It announces that a community's story, evidence and vision matter, and that they will be told every year, permanently, in the city where it happened.

The most powerful Black leaders have always known that speaking truth requires a stage, witnesses and permanent structures. It requires declaration, not plea.

  1. 1895

    Booker T. Washington used the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta to declare economic power.

  2. 1900

    W. E. B. Du Bois came from Atlanta to the Paris Exposition Universelle to demand global recognition.

  3. 1903

    Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk while teaching at Atlanta University, with a chapter on Washington and another on Atlanta.

  4. 1905

    Du Bois, then teaching in Atlanta, helped found the Niagara Movement to organize resistance. It fed into the founding of the NAACP four years later.

  5. 2026

    Atlanta uses the Annual 1906 Remembrance Exposition Week to declare: this violence will be named, this leadership will be honored, this lineage will continue. Every year. Permanently.

One registration contribution covers all three Mini-Conference days. Single- and two-event registration is also available, and several events are free and open to all. The History Exhibit runs at the APEX Museum with HBCU student docents.

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What happened

Through the summer of 1906, Atlanta's four white daily papers ran repeated false stories alleging assaults by Black men on white women.

The stories were lurid, exaggerated, or invented outright, and each extra edition outsold the last. The night before the massacre, the Atlanta Evening News asked its readers: “Shall these black devils be permitted to assault and almost kill our women, and go unpunished?” Two of those papers live on today as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. No apology has ever been made.

Atlanta newspaper headlines from September 1906, alleging assaults and calling the city to act.
01 · The invented crime waveThe headlines themselves. On the afternoon of September 22 the papers put out four separate extra editions alleging new assaults. None of them was substantiated, and each edition drew a bigger, angrier crowd into the streets downtown.

By nine that evening, a mob of thousands of white men and boys was attacking Black Atlantans at Five Points.

They pulled people from streetcars, dragged Black workers out of hotels and barbershops, and killed at least twenty-five people over four days. Ten to fifteen thousand were in the streets before heavy rain broke the first night at three in the morning.

Peachtree Street, Atlanta, 1906.
02 · What the mob attackedWhat the mob attacked was Black success. On Peachtree Street, Alonzo Herndon, who was born enslaved, ran the finest barbershop in the South and was building the fortune that became Atlanta Life Insurance. His shop was among the first places destroyed.
A 1906 newspaper's drawing of the saloons along Decatur Street.
03 · The excuseAll summer the papers described Decatur Street's Black-patronized saloons as dens of vice. This drawing of them ran in one of those same newspapers. The violence began here at about nine in the evening, with an attack on a Black bicycle messenger.
The interior of Alonzo Herndon's Crystal Palace barbershop in 1903: marble, mirrors, chandeliers and rows of chairs.
04 · What was thereInside Alonzo Herndon's Crystal Palace on Peachtree Street, 1903. Marble, mirrors and twenty-five chairs, the finest barbershop in the South, owned by a man born enslaved. Around it stood six Black colleges, Black-owned groceries, pharmacies and newspapers, and the neighborhoods of Brownsville and Darktown. This was the Atlanta the mob set out to break. Atlanta History Center

Those killed were never honestly counted.

10
certificates issued
City coroner
12
in the official history
Franklin Garrett, Atlanta and Environs, 1954
25
known killed
Equal Justice Initiative; Fulton County Remembrance Coalition
40
upper scholarly estimate
New Georgia Encyclopedia
100
in unofficial reports
Fulton County Remembrance Coalition

25 victims

At least twenty-five people were killed in Atlanta between the 22nd and the 25th of September, 1906.

Sixteen of those killed have been identified by name. Nine have not, and researchers are still working to recover them.

Each name opens what the record holds about that person, and what it leaves out. Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson were identified in 2023, one hundred and seventeen years after they were killed.

Studio portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois, photographed by James E. Purdy in 1907.
W. E. B. Du Bois was thirty-eight and teaching at Atlanta University. He was in Alabama when the massacre began; he came back by train and sat on the steps of the dormitory where his wife and daughter lived, holding a shotgun. Within three weeks he had written “A Litany of Atlanta.” Photographed by James E. Purdy, 1907

“Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee.”

“A Litany of Atlanta,” The Independent, 11 October 1906. SubtitledDone at Atlanta, on the Day of Death, 1906.

One of the twenty-five

George Union Wilder

He escaped slavery during the Civil War and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He took the middle name Union because of that service. He was found dead in a shed behind Frank Fambro’s store.

Age
70
Where they died
A shed behind Frank Fambro’s store, Brownsville
Date
25 September 1906
Buried
South-View Cemetery (the only marked grave of a victim)

What we don't know

  • Exactly how he died

His is the only marked grave of a victim at South-View Cemetery. The stone carries the middle name he adopted because of his service, and a hand-written epitaph:

A soldier of the Civil War, was killed in the riot

The 2006 centennial began here, with a funeral motorcade and a memorial service at this grave.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. National Center for Civil and Human Rights, “The Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906: A brief history” (PDF)
  3. U.S. Army pension records of George Union Wilder, 1890–1907, National Archives and Records Administration

One of the twenty-five

Marshall Carter

He suffered a fractured skull and died at Grady Hospital of asphyxia due to inhaled vomit.

Age
13
Occupation
Schoolboy
Where they lived
Love Street, on the edge of Summerhill
Where they died
Grady Hospital
Date
22 September 1906
Buried
South-View Cemetery

Counted in 2023

His original Fulton County Board of Health “return of a death” certificate was located. It carried the word “riot.”

NCCHR Truth and Transformation Initiative, with the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and the Afro-American Genealogical Historical Society

What we don't know

  • Who his family were
  • Where exactly he was attacked

Sources

  1. National Center for Civil and Human Rights, “Unearthing the Past: Identifying Victims of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre”

One of the twenty-five

Stinson Ferguson

He sustained a gunshot wound to the abdomen and was declared dead on arrival at Grady Hospital.

Age
25
Where they lived
Thurmond Street, northwest Atlanta
Where they died
Grady Hospital
Date
22 September 1906
Buried
South-View Cemetery

Counted in 2023

His original Fulton County Board of Health “return of a death” certificate was located. It carried the word “riot.”

NCCHR Truth and Transformation Initiative, with the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and the Afro-American Genealogical Historical Society

What we don't know

  • His occupation
  • Who his family were
  • Where exactly he was shot

Sources

  1. National Center for Civil and Human Rights, “Unearthing the Past: Identifying Victims of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre”

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

One of the twenty-five

Not named

No name for this person has been recovered from the record.

Date
September 1906

What we don't know

  • Name
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Where they lived
  • Where they died
  • Where they are buried
  • Whether anyone was left to look for them

Sixteen of the twenty-five have been identified by name. This person has not. The 2023 identifications of Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson came from Fulton County death certificates that had been on file the whole time, and that search continues.

Sources

  1. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, “Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 Narrative”
  2. Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition have documented 25 Black people killed.

History · the resistance

Brownsville armed itself.

On the massacre's third night, county police and armed white civilians marched into Brownsville, the Black neighborhood around Clark College and Gammon Theological Seminary, expecting to disarm it. The residents fired back. An officer was killed, and the state militia occupied the neighborhood, seized weapons, and arrested more than 250 Black men, including the colleges' professors.

Luther Judson Price, Atlanta's first Black postmaster, in a period portrait with spectacles and a bow tie.
Luther Judson Price was born in 1856, was among Clark College's first graduates, and became Atlanta's first Black postmaster, serving Brownsville from the post office he ran on Gammon Avenue. When the neighborhood defended itself, the county arrested him on charges of supplying his neighbors with weapons. The charges were dropped. He kept his post office, registered Black voters, and lived in Brownsville until his death in 1936. Atlanta Public Schools archive
Title page: Regulations for the Government of the National Guard of Georgia, 1908.
The state answered Black self-defense with occupation and law. The militia that raided Brownsville got its standing rules in this 1908 manual. That same year Georgia amended its constitution with a literacy test and a grandfather clause, and most Black citizens could not vote for the next fifty years. Library of Congress
Walter Francis White, photographed by Clara Sipprell.
Walter White was thirteen in 1906. When the mob came up Houston Street, he sat in the dark of his family's parlor holding a gun, and his father told him: “Son, don't shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn, and then—don't you miss.” The mob turned back. In 1909 the movement Du Bois led became the NAACP, and White ran it from 1929 to 1955, going undercover to investigate dozens of lynchings. Photographed by Clara Sipprell

What survives

Only six images related to the massacre are known to survive.

Georgia State militia on Peachtree Street just south of Five Points, in the aftermath of the massacre.
Photograph 1 of 2Militia on Peachtree Street, just south of Five Points, in the aftermath. Atlanta History Center
Members of the Georgia State Militia halted on Marietta Street near Peachtree Street.
Photograph 2 of 2Militia halted on Marietta Street near Peachtree, the street where the mob left three of its victims. Atlanta History Center
Harper's Weekly image of militia and a streetcar at Walton and Peachtree Streets.
Illustration 1 of 4Harper's Weekly: troops lining the streets at Walton and Peachtree after the riot call was tolled. Atlanta History Center
A page from Collier's Weekly showing a Brownsville storefront.
Illustration 2 of 4Collier's Weekly on Brownsville, the neighborhood that armed itself. Atlanta History Center
Cover of Le Petit Journal, 7 October 1906: 'Massacre of Negroes at Atlanta.'
Illustration 3 of 4Le Petit Journal, Paris, October 7. The massacre as Europe saw it, fifteen days later. Atlanta History Center
Cover of Le Petit Parisien, 14 October 1906: 'Massacre of Negroes through the streets of Atlanta.'
Illustration 4 of 4Le Petit Parisien, Paris, October 14. Two different French covers a week apart. Atlanta was world news. Atlanta History Center

The sources

A city built on Black labor

Atlanta grew from 89,000 people in 1900 to 150,000 by 1910. The Black population grew fastest of all.

Forty years after Union troops left the city in ruins, Atlanta had rebuilt itself as the railroad hub of the South, and Black Atlantans had built much of it. They also built their own city inside it: six colleges, churches, newspapers, insurance companies, groceries, pharmacies and barbershops.

Then two men ran for governor, and both promised to stop Black Georgians voting at all.

Hoke Smith had published the Atlanta Journal. He campaigned to add literacy tests and property requirements to the state constitution, written so that they would disqualify Black voters and spare poor white ones, and he won the primary in August 1906, a month before the massacre. Clark Howell owned the Atlanta Constitution and ran against him, arguing that the poll tax and the white primary already kept Black Georgians from the ballot. Each man had a newspaper at his disposal, and through that summer both used it to frighten white readers about their Black neighbors and to sell papers doing it.

Bird's-eye view of Atlanta, 1871.
Atlanta in 1871, six years after the war. Within a generation it was the commercial capital of the New South. Library of Congress

A century of silence

Franklin Garrett, Atlanta's official historian, gave the massacre five pages in his 2,072-page history of the city, and repeated the finding that twelve people had died.

Historians left it largely alone until the civil rights era, and it reached a wide audience only at the turn of this century, when four books appeared in five years. On the centennial in 2006 a coalition of academics and activists organized a year of programs, beginning with a funeral motorcade and a memorial at George Union Wilder's grave. In 2007 the massacre entered Georgia's public school curriculum.

In 2019, community members collected soil from the sites where people were killed. In 2022, three historical markers were dedicated. In 2023, researchers found the death certificates of Marshall Carter, aged thirteen, and Stinson Ferguson, aged twenty-five, and added two more names to the count. In 2025 a mural went up in Brownsville, and was revised after the community said it had not been consulted.

The name changed too. For most of a century this was called the Atlanta Race Riot, a phrase that puts Black Atlantans in the street starting the violence. They were the ones attacked, in their workplaces, on streetcars and at home, by white mobs the city let run for four days.

The twenty-five victimsSourcesThe 120th commemoration
The Fulton County Remembrance Coalition's historical marker for the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.
The Fulton County Remembrance Coalition gathered soil from the sites where people were killed in 2019, dedicated three markers in 2022, and worked with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to identify Marshall Carter and Stinson Ferguson in 2023. Courtesy of the Coalition

The documentary

Never Again

“Never Again Will Terror Prevail, Always Again Will The Resilient Arise!”

Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre was directed by Rev. Trent Frank for FrankinSense Productions LLC. It sets 1906 among the other American cities where white mobs attacked Black neighborhoods. It is also, in the filmmakers' words, a story of Black resilient leadership, resistance, racial reconciliation, coalition building, and societal change.

The film premieres on Thursday, September 24 at All Saints Episcopal Church and opens the three-day Mini-Conference. The Coalition is the presenting partner. The film and the Coalition are separate organizations.

Register for the premiereThe film's own site

The opening frame of the trailer for Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.
Trailer, 1:47. Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Courtesy of FrankinSense Productions LLC
A still from the documentary Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre.
From Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Courtesy of FrankinSense Productions LLC

The Coalition

We don't own the story.

We make sure it's told. The Coalition carries forward work that began on the centennial in 2006, when a group of academics and activists organized a year of programs about an event Atlanta had spent most of a century not discussing.

Vision

To foster racial reconciliation and cultural restoration in order to heal and bring about a transformational Atlanta, where equal opportunity and justice prevail, and where the ravages of racial hatred and disparities are relics of the past. Our vision is that diverse ethnic, racial, spiritual, and socio-economic groups continuously help each other to understand our shared history of the 1906 Atlanta Massacre, of white supremacist terrorism, its institutional causes, and its current status — continuously building on that understanding to enhance compassion, empathy, trust, and equal justice.

Mission

The Coalition facilitates member organizations and the community in working through the Arts, Memorializations, other Remembrance Events, Scholarly Presentations, and strategies of resistance to present the historical truths about the devastating and long-term traumatic effects of racial atrocities against African Americans, as typified by the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Our mission is to promote a process of truth and reconciliation regarding the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, its antecedent history, and the current status of domestic terrorism in Georgia.

What we hold to

  • 01

    We are a facilitator, not a program operator — we convene and enable member organizations rather than run programs ourselves.

  • 02

    Our framework is the Six Rs: Rise, Resilience, Remember, Reconcile, Restore, Resist.

  • 03

    We hold the “Built. Taken. Built.” heritage cycle — 1906 as an instance in a longer arc, not an aberration.

  • 04

    The Exposition is a permanent annual institution, not a one-time event.

  • 05

    Our posture is proactive and restorative: truth first, then reconciliation, then action.

Board leadership

  • Rev. Trent Frank

    Board President

    Overall Planning & Film Screening · Founding Co-Convener

  • Dr. Clarissa Myrick-Harris White

    Board Vice President

    Partnerships · History Exhibit & Exposition Digital Collection

  • Ms. Adria Kitchens

    Board Treasurer

    Co-Director, Exposition Mini-Conference · Equitable Dinner

  • Ms. Sharron Paige-Whitaker

    Board Secretary

    Future Awards Programs

  • Dr. R. Candy Tate

    Chair, Standing Committee for the 1906 Remembrance Exposition

    Partnerships & Website · Founding Co-Convener, Former Board President

  • Rev. Dr. Brendan A. Jenkins

    Vice-Chair, Standing Committee for the 1906 Remembrance Exposition

    Co-Director, Exposition Mini-Conference · Community Commerce Building

Engage with the workArchives and past yearsSourcesThe deeper history

Partners

These organizations host the venues, the exhibit, the dinner and the scholarship.

Coverage

In the news

Engage

Remember. Reconcile. Restore. Resist.

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