Filmmaker Trent Frank posed the question to the audience following the screening of his documentary, “Never Again: The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre:” Could this happen again?
His film recounts the cultural and political climate in September 1906 that led to four days of violent attacks against Atlanta’s thriving Black communities, killing at least 25 people.
The documentary was screened Thursday evening at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta as part of the first annual 1906 Remembrance Exposition Week. Events throughout the week included a history exhibit at the APEX Museum, an Equitable Dinner discussion at Drew Charter School and other programming on the massacre.
“Can we say confidently today that this cannot be in our future?” Saudia Muwwakkil said of the 1906 massacre. She appears in the documentary and co-chaired a centennial remembrance of the massacre in 2006.
The audience raised concerns about race today. Recent controversies include Target, which in August apologized and pulled a children’s Halloween costume that evoked blackface. This month, Converse removed an ad after critics said its imagery evoked lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. And in Mississippi, law enforcement remains under scrutiny over the investigation into the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells.
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, formerly called the Atlanta Race Riots, remains largely unknown, Frank and Muwwakkil said.
Muwwakkil recalled that in planning the centennial remembrance, some questioned the need to revisit old history.
Remembering is a decision, she told the audience, and honoring the lives of the victims and preserving the story has been the work of a multicultural coalition of people.
The documentary recounts how in September 1906 newspapers published editions promoting the idea that Black men were assaulting White women. The claims fueled the formation of crowds in downtown Atlanta.
“The papers printed assault accusations faster than anyone could check them,” the film narrator said.
Headlines in the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution at the time of the massacre presented Black men as menacing and to be feared as Hoke Smith and Clark Howell competed for the Democratic nomination to be governor.
A newspaper image shown in the documentary carries the headline, “If you believe in White supremacy vote for Hoke Smith.”
Clarissa Myrick-Harris White, an Africana Studies professor at Morehouse College, said in the film that there was economic power in the community from Black-owned businesses “and that’s what was being sought to be torn down.”
Myrick-Harris White said that after a White police officer was killed in self-defense, 256 Black residents were rounded up.
“…A mob of thousands of White men and boys was attacking Black Atlantans at Five Points, the downtown crossroads,” an account on the film website reads. “The violence ran four days and reached the Black neighborhoods of Brownsville and Darktown…”
One victim was thrown from the Forsyth Street bridge, the narrator said.
Another victim, George Union Wilder, was formerly enslaved and became disabled after serving in the Civil War as a member of the 137th United States Colored Troops, according to the film.
Wilder was 71 when he was killed during the massacre. He had been shot and stabbed several times. The coroner wrote only “gunshot” on his report, the documentary states.
His wife Isabella wrote on his gravestone: “A soldier of the Civil War was killed in the riot of Atlanta.”
Following the screening, an audience member reflected on the fact that Wilder received no recognition from his city or country after serving on the military battlefield.
“The one thing that I got from [the film], that will stay with me forever, was the widow, Isabella, who had to make sure he was memorialized,” she said. “The fact that he served his country and that still was not enough.”
She added: “…And the ultimate sacrifice of his life [was over] racism.”
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