1906 Atlanta race riot seen with new eyes

ATLANTA On a humid Saturday night in 1906, an Atlanta newsboy named Mendel Romm went downtown to pick up papers for delivery. He talked about what he saw for the rest of his life.

"When he got to Five Points, they were having a race riot," says his son, 77-year-old Mendel Romm Jr. of Buckhead. "They were pulling people off the streetcars and lynching them right there. My father was so scared he ran all the way home."

The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot is the closest thing to a race war that has ever happened in this city.

For four days that September, white mobs attacked black people in a fit of hysteria over exaggerated and erroneous reports of sex crimes against white women. Then blacks started fighting back. When the dust settled, at least two dozen people were dead, and Atlanta's reputation as a paragon of New South moderation had taken a beating in the eyes of the world.

Now a group of Atlantans wants to commemorate the riot — and try to learn from it — on the occasion of its centennial.

The Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot first met a year and a half ago in the fellowship hall of old Ebenezer Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church. This weekend, as the nation celebrates the King holiday, the coalition is beginning a series of public events leading up to an exhibition at the King National Historic Site in May and a symposium at Georgia State University's Rialto Center for the Performing Arts in September.

Organizers say they aren't trying to shame Atlanta; they just want to deal with a significant but largely forgotten chapter of its past.

"Race relations are such an important part of this city," says Andy Ambrose, deputy director of the Atlanta History Center and co-curator of the exhibition. "It's important to explore all of that, positive and negative. Atlanta is more than what the slogans say."

From its initial meetings, the coalition has grown to include 150 participants from an array of local universities, cultural institutions, faith groups and governments.

Some of the participants had never heard of the riot before they were invited to get involved. That didn't surprise one of the group's leaders, Saudia Muwwakkil, spokeswoman for the King site. "They never taught us about this in school," the Atlanta native says.

That should change next year, when Georgia's revised public school curriculum will require that the riot be taught in eighth-grade social studies.