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terrified and feeling themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get—I heard a good many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices—and left the country, some going to California, some to Northern cities.” 6
    Baker’s
Following the Color Line
quotes a letter from a young black man who joined the post-riot exodus out of Atlanta:
     … It is possible that you have formed at least a good idea of how we feel as the result of the horrible eruption in Georgia. I have not spoken to a Caucasian on the subject since then. But, listen: How would you feel, if with our history, there came a time when, after speeches and papers and teachings you acquired property and were educated, and were a fairly good man, it were impossible for you to walk the street (for whose maintenance you were taxed) with your sister without being in mortal fear of death if you resented any insult offered to her? How would you feel if you saw a governor, a mayor, a sheriff, whom you could not oppose at the polls, encourage by deed or word orboth, a mob of “best” and worst citizens to slaughter your people in the streets and in their own homes and in their places of business? Do you think that you could resist the same wrath that caused God to slay the Philistines and the Russians to throw bombs? I can resist it, but with each new outrage I am less able to resist it. And yet if I gave way to my feelings I should become just like other men … of the mob! 7
    The full psychological impact of the Atlanta riot may be incalculable, but one specific result is clear. Many whites—even those who disapproved of mob violence, lynching, and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan—were deeply shaken by the many instances during the melee in which blacks displayed the will and the means to fight back. Segregationists pointed to the resistance as proof that they were right—that blacks had to be kept down, had to be kept in their place. Measures to deny black citizens the vote throughout the South were perfected. Public accommodations were labeled whites only and blacks only; merchants began requiring black patrons to enter through the back door. This whole blueprint for the New South was codified into law as a way of delineating two ostensibly “separate but equal” societies. Black Atlanta was effectively walled off from the rest of the city, left to make its own way in the world. The long, dark night of Jim Crow segregation had fallen.
    * * *
    Jim Crow was bad in the cities of the South, but in small towns and rural areas it was all but intolerable. The system of sharecroppingthat tied many families to the land and mired them in poverty was almost as oppressive as slavery. There was no question of voting rights or fair treatment by the courts. The Klan was in its heyday, and blacks impertinent enough to demand to be treated as full citizens ran a very real risk of being lynched—the whole point of Klan-style terrorism was to make examples of “troublemakers” so that everyone else would stay in line. Black schools were kept inferior by design, which meant parents could not even dream that the next generation would have a better life. Faced with such a hopeless situation, many African Americans just packed up and left.
    They went north, seeking prosperity and freedom, in a series of waves known collectively as the Great Migration. You could plot their destinations by following the routes of the nearest rail lines—families from North and South Carolina settled in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Newark, Boston; those from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia tended to end up in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit; and many migrants from Texas and Louisiana headed west to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle. New York City, as usual, was a magnet for newcomers from all over. Between 1910 and 1940, an estimated 1.6 million black Americans from the South moved north and west; between 1940