Reconstructing Atlanta

Throughout the four years of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people liberated themselves, risking their lives to escape their circumstances. Many sought out Union troops and fought alongside them with the goal of securing the freedom of all enslaved people.

With the Union’s victory in 1865, the United States moved into Reconstruction, a period intended to establish lasting peace and help the newly freed people settle into new lives. Union troops stayed in the South to deter violence and legislature and treaties established pathways to property and education for Black Americans. 

But as Black people gained new freedoms and the hope for stability, the former Confederate states were also re-establishing power—power that they used to strip Black Americans of their rights through legislature and mob violence.

Promises Abandoned

12 years after the war ended, Congress passed the Compromise of 1877. Former Confederate states regained control of the political landscape, rolled back hard-won protections and reinstated a strict racial hierarchy. Reconstruction had ended with the promise of freedom and equality for Black Americans unmet.

After the Civil War, many newly freed Black people migrated to Atlanta. Federal troops were stationed there, which offered some level of protection unavailable in the rural areas of the South. From 1860 to 1870 the Black population of Atlanta doubled.

General Sherman’s destruction of the city led to a flurry of construction following the end of the war. This work called for a large labor force and newly freed Black men and their families flocked to the city to take advantage of the opportunity for life beyond the farm. So many people arrived that the city experienced a major housing crisis and tent cities for Black migrants sprung up in the city’s least desirable areas.

As time went by, however, these tent cities were transformed into vibrant neighborhoods where Black businesses, schools, and churches thrived. Prosperity brought important services and some political influence to the wider Black community. But even these modest achievements inflamed white resentment: racism and discrimination continued to limit progress for Black citizens of Atlanta.

With a growing Black middle class, multiple Black men in elected office, and a significant Black male voting population, Atlanta stood as a symbol of the “New South.” The term captured the region’s ambition for economic and social progress after the devastation of the Civil War. To many white Georgians, this vision of the future was a threat to their way of life — and they fought to reverse it. 

The tension came to a head in the 1906 Georgia governor’s race. Candidates Hoke Smith and Clark Howell both used their competing newspapers as platforms to stoke white fear, printing falsified reports of Black men assaulting white women. 

On the evening of September 22, 1906, white mobs gathered downtown. For four days, these vigilante gangs roamed the city killing any Black person they could find, pulling people off streetcars and out of their places of employment. The violence had spread around the city and into Black residential neighborhoods. 

Two days into the massacre, the governor of Georgia deployed the state militia to restore order. The militia disproportionately disarmed Black citizens defending themselves over their attackers. 

By September 26, 1906, federal troops and the National Guard had been deployed to Atlanta and the violence slowly de-escalated. 

Over those four days, more than 10,000 white people destroyed hundreds of Black businesses, schools, churches, and homes. At least 25 Black people were killed, though some estimates suggest the death toll was much higher. 

The violence of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre crushed Black political and economic progress once promised by Reconstruction. It left Black Atlanta citizens with deep psychological scars and a devastating choice between fleeing the city and trying to rebuild once more.

After the massacre, Black Atlantans had to choose whether to stay or to flee the city. Every person had their own reasons for making the choice they did. The city’s most prominent voices had to choose, too. Among them were Jesse Max Barber and Reverend Henry Proctor. 

Barber, editor of The Voice of the Negro, chose to flee. After writing about the massacre in national newspapers under the pseudonym “A Colored Citizen,” he came under threat of arrest from the city’s police commissioner, Captain James English, Sr. For him, leaving the city and his home behind meant having the freedom to speak about what he had witnessed and how it had come to be. He fled to Chicago, taking his newspaper with him, though he closed the paper down the following year. The loss of the newspaper was a significant blow for Black Atlantans; it had been a crucial outlet for free speech and a space to follow the issues that meant most to them. 

Proctor, by contrast, stayed and sought compromise. He prescribed to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy, arguing that accommodation and restraint were the best response to racial violence. Proctor’s work centered on cooperative organizing and civic participation through groups like the Colored Cooperative Civic League. This approach emphasized respectability, dialogue, and cooperation across racial lines. Proctor and those aligned with him sought to prevent the massacre from defining Atlanta’s public image, striving to show white residents and the broader public that the city remained stable, orderly, and open for business.

In the decades after the massacre, Atlanta’s racial lines hardened into stricter segregation. For Black residents, there was persistent pressure to resist resistance—to not push back or speak up but instead to avert violence by presenting as agreeable. Following the example of Proctor and others, they toed the line and established a fragile equilibrium in the name of stability and growth. Atlanta came to be known as “the City Too Busy to Hate,” a reputation built not on the absence of racial conflict, but on the careful management of it.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Black Atlanta leaders continued to prioritize economic growth over confrontations about social progress. This approach of working within the segregated political climate to gain power and influence became known as “the Atlanta Way.”

In the years after the massacre, many Black-owned businesses relocated from the integrated business district of downtown Atlanta to majority-Black neighborhoods like Summerhill, West End, Vine City, and Auburn Avenue. “Sweet Auburn,” as Auburn Avenue became known, was central to the culture and economy of Atlanta’s Black citizens. Called the “richest Negro street in the world” by local political leader John Wesley Dobbs, it was the hub of business and social institutions, from banks and insurance companies to churches and community centers. 

“The Atlanta Way” describes a strategy that works well for middle class and wealthy citizens—those who profit alongside white residents by keeping peace in the face of injustice. The daily reality of Black Atlantans living in poverty, however, was different. This created tension in the Black community of Atlanta.

The institutions that thrived along Auburn Avenue, sustained as they were by the Atlanta Way, became central to the lives of many Black Atlantans, middle and working class alike. They provided space for this tension to mount into calls for change that grew louder and louder. Churches, in particular, became fertile ground for political action—and a key organizational base for what would become the Civil Rights Movement.

By the early 1960s, both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were headquartered in Sweet Auburn. With its mix of political organizations, Black-owned restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues, Atlanta offered a unique launch pad for the Civil Rights Movement. From the hate of the 1906 massacre had grown a haven where the nation’s most ambitious seekers of liberation could rest, dream, and plan their next moves.