Prosperity and Lawlessness
But the awakening of moral sentiment in the city, unfortunately, came too late. Crime, made more lurid by agitation, had so kindled the fires of hatred that they could not be extinguished by ordinary methods. The best people of Atlanta were like the citizens of prosperous Northern cities, too busy with money-making to pay attention to public affairs. For Atlanta is growing rapidly. Its bank clearings jumped from ninety millions in 1900 to two hundred and twenty-two millions in 1906, its streets are well paved and well lighted, its street-car service is good, its sky-scrapers are comparable with the best in the North. In other words, it was progressive—few cities I know of more so—but it had forgotten its public duties.
Within a few months before the riot there had been a number of crimes of worthless Negroes against white women. Leading Negroes, while not one of them with whom I talked wished to protect any Negro who was really guilty, asserted that the number of these crimes had been greatly exaggerated and that in special instances the details had been over-emphasised because the criminal was black; that they had been used to further inflame race hatred. I had a personal investigation made of every crime against a white woman committed in the few months before and after the riot. Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention in the newspapers, although one, the offence of a white man named Turnadge, was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges against Negroes in the six months preceding the riot two were cases of rape, horrible in their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape, three may have been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part of the white woman, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a Negro had assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide.
The facts of two of these cases I will narrate—and without excuse for the horror of the details. If we are to understand the true conditions in the South, these things must be told.
Story of One Negro’s Crime
One of the cases was that of Mrs. Knowles Etheleen Kimmel, twenty-five years old, wife of a farmer living near Atlanta. A mile beyond the end of the street-car line stands a small green bungalow-like house in a lonely spot near the edge of the pine woods. The Kimmels who lived there were not Southerners by birth but of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. They had been in the South four or five years, renting their lonesome farm, raising cotton and corn and hopefully getting a little ahead. On the day before the riot a strange rough-looking Negro called at the back door of the Kimmel home. He wore a soldier’s cast-off khaki uniform. He asked a foolish question and went away. Mrs. Kimmel was worried and told her husband. He, too, was worried—the fear of this crime is everywhere present in the South—and when he went away in the afternoon he asked his nearest neighbour to look out for the strange Negro. When he came back a few hours later, he found fifty white men in his yard. He knew what had happened without being told: his wife was under medical attendance in the house. She had been able to give a clear description of the Negro: bloodhounds were brought, but the pursuing white men had so obliterated the criminal’s tracks that he could not be traced. Through information given by a Negro a suspect was arrested and nearly lynched before he could be brought to Mrs. Kimmel for identification; when she saw him she said: “He is not the man.” The real criminal was never apprehended.
One day, weeks afterward, I found the husband working alone in his field; his wife, to whom the surroundings had become unbearable, had gone away to visit friends. He told me the story hesitatingly. His prospects, he said, were ruined: his neighbours had been sympathetic but he could not continue to live there with the feeling that they all knew. He was preparing to give up his home and lose himself where people did not know his story. I asked him if he favoured lynching, and his answer surprised me.
“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “You see, I’m a Christian man, or I try to be. My wife is a Christian woman. We’ve talked about it. What good would it do? We should make criminals of ourselves, shouldn’t we? No, let the law take its course. When I came here, I tried to help the Negroes as much as I could. But many of them won’t work even when the wages are high: they won’t come when they agree to and when they get a few dollars ahead they go down to the saloons in Atlanta. Everyone is troubled about getting labour and everyone is afraid of prowling idle Negroes. Now, the thing has come to me, and it’s just about ruined my life.”
When I came away the poor lonesome fellow followed me half-way up the hill, asking: “Now, what would you do?”
One more case. One of the prominent florists in Atlanta is W. C. Lawrence. He is an Englishman, whose home is in the outskirts of the city. On the morning of August 20th his daughter Mabel, fourteen years old, and his sister Ethel, twenty-five years old, a trained nurse who had recently come from England, went out into the nearby woods to pick ferns. Being in broad daylight and within sight of houses, they had no fear. Returning along an old Confederate breastworks, they were met by a brutal-looking Negro with a club in one hand and a stone in the other. He first knocked the little girl down, then her aunt. When the child “came to” she found herself partially bound with a rope. “Honey,” said the Negro, “I want you to come with me.” With remarkable presence of mind the child said: “I can’t, my leg is broken,” and she let it swing limp from the knee. Deceived, the Negro went back to bind the aunt. Mabel, instantly untying the rope, jumped up and ran for help. When he saw the child escaping the Negro ran off.