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Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy
. In the first chapter, he told the story of what happened on September 22, 1906, when Atlanta reached its flashpoint:
    And finally on this hot Saturday half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white men and Negroes, both drinking—certain newspapers in Atlanta began to print extras with big headings announcing new assaults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta
News
published five such extras, and newsboys cried them through the city:
    “Third assault.”
    “Fourth assault.”
    The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigation. 3
    By the time his book was published, Baker had thoroughly investigated the alleged incidents. “Two of them may have been attempts at assaults,” he wrote, “but two palpably were nothing more than fright on the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out. And yet this was one of the ‘assaults’ chronicled in letters five inches high in a newspaper extra.” 4
    But white Atlantans were in a mood to believe the worst. White mobs began to gather, and they were well-armed, liberally inebriated, and hell-bent on revenge. Black Atlanta came under all-out attack.
    White rioters pillaged black businesses, sometimes aiming for specific targets but settling for what was available. A mob smashed its way into a barbershop looking for the proprietor, Alonzo Herndon, a former slave who had become a wealthy businessman with extensive real estate holdings, a stake in an insurance company, and three profitable barbershops. When the mob arrived, Herndon had left for the day and the shop was closed. Momentarily disappointed, the rioters simply crossed the street to another barbershop—an establishment that had nothing at all to do with Herndon—where they smashed the place up, and, for good measure, killed all the barbers.
    The whites continued their rampage through Atlanta’s black neighborhoods for three days and nights. Crowded, bustling Decatur Street, with its black restaurants and saloons, was perhaps the epicenter, but black Atlantans were not truly safe anywhere in the city. A century later, the death toll remains unclear. Estimates of the number of blacks killed range from twenty-five to more than one hundred; most scholars agree that only two whites died, one of them from a heart attack.
    DuBois wrote an anguished poem about the riot called “A Litany of Atlanta.” One stanza goes:
    A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. 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. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!
    Bend us Thine ear, O Lord! 5
    DuBois’s stature rose in the wake of the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906. Support among black Americans for Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist strategy declined. And the movement toward absolute separation of the races throughout the South became complete.
    In Atlanta, the riot gave new impetus to the effort to shove black residents and businesses into segregated neighborhoods south and east of downtown—Sweet Auburn, Brownsville, University Central District, and the Old Fourth Ward on the east side, encompassing what once was Darktown. As Baker noted, “After the riot was over many Negro families,