1906

Atlanta's four white-owned newspapers — the Atlanta News, Georgian, Journal, and Constitution — ran sensationalized and fabricated stories of Black men assaulting white women during the heated 1906 gubernatorial race. On September 22, white mobs began attacking Black residents in downtown Atlanta. Over four days at least 25 Black people were killed (some estimates run higher), hundreds were injured, and thousands fled. Black neighborhoods like Brownsville mounted armed defense. Two white attackers were killed. The riot accelerated Black out-migration and radicalized W.E.B. Du Bois.

Atlanta's white-owned newspapers ran sensationalized and fabricated stories of Black men assaulting white women during the 1906 gubernatorial race. Over four days at least 25 Black people were killed, hundreds were injured, and thousands fled. Black neighborhoods mounted armed defense. The riot accelerated Black out-migration and radicalized W.E.B. Du Bois.

President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of all 167 Black soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 25th Infantry Regiment without trial, after a shooting incident in Brownsville, Texas in which one white man was killed and a police officer wounded. Evidence later showed the soldiers were not responsible — witnesses had planted evidence and shell casings. The mass discharge stripped the men of pensions and veterans' benefits. Congress reversed the discharges posthumously in 1972; only one survivor, Dorsie Willis, was still alive to receive $25,000 compensation.

As white mobs attacked Black Atlanta for four days, residents of Brownsville, a Black suburb, armed themselves and defended their community. When police arrived and demanded they surrender their arms, residents refused. Two officers were shot. The state militia was called. The coordinated defense of Brownsville demonstrated that organized Black armed resistance could repel mob violence, a lesson that would be applied in subsequent riots and explicitly theorized in the New Negro movement.

During the US military occupations of Cuba (1898-1902, 1906-1909), American forces imposed Jim Crow racial hierarchies on a society where Afro-Cuban soldiers had fought alongside white Cubans in the independence wars and held significant social standing. US officers segregated facilities, refused to salute Black Cuban officers, and promoted white Cubans over Black Cubans in reconstruction governance. The occupation exported American racial hierarchy to a country that had different — though still unequal — racial arrangements, and contributed to Afro-Cuban political radicalization.

White mobs attack Black Atlantans over several days.