Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
History
Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
President Bowen, of Gammon Theological Seminary, one of the able Negroes
in Atlanta, who had nothing whatever to do with the riot, was beaten over
the head by one of the police with his rifle-butt. The Negroes were all
disarmed, and about sixty of them were finally taken to Atlanta and locked
up charged with the murder of Officer Heard.
In the Brownsville riot four Negroes were killed. One was a decent,
industrious, though loud-talking, citizen named Fambro, who kept a small
grocery store and owned two houses besides, which he rented. He had a
comfortable home, a wife and one child. Another was an inoffensive Negro
named Wilder, seventy years old, a pensioner as a soldier of the Civil
War, who was well spoken of by all who knew him. He was found--not shot,
but murdered by a knife-cut in the abdomen--lying in a woodshed back of
Fambro's store. McGruder, a brick mason, who earned $4 a day at his trade,
and who had laid aside enough to earn his own home, was killed while under
arrest by the police; and Robinson, an industrious Negro carpenter, was
shot to death on his way to work Tuesday morning after the riot.
_Results of the Riot_
And after the riot in Brownsville, what? Here was a self-respecting
community of hard-working Negroes, disturbing no one, getting an honest
living. How did the riot affect them? Well, it demoralised them, set them
back for years. Not only were four men killed and several wounded, but
sixty of their citizens were in jail. Nearly every family had to go to the
lawyers, who would not take their cases without money in hand. Hence the
little homes had to be sold or mortgaged, or money borrowed in some other
way to defend those arrested, doctors' bills were to be paid, the
undertaker must be settled with. A riot is not over when the shooting
stops! And when the cases finally came up in court and all the evidence
was brought out every Negro went free; but two of the county policemen who
had taken part in the shooting, were punished. George Muse, one of the
foremost merchants of Atlanta, who was foreman of the jury which tried the
Brownsville Negroes, said:
"We think the Negroes were gathered just as white people were in other
parts of the town, for the purpose of defending their homes. We were
shocked by the conduct which the evidence showed some of the county police
had been guilty of."
After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling
themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get--I heard a good
many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices--and left the
country, some going to California, some to Northern cities. The best and
most enterprising are those who go: the worst remain. Not only did the
Negroes leave Brownsville, but they left the city itself in considerable
numbers. Labour was thus still scarcer and wages higher in Atlanta because
of the riot.
_Report of a White Committee on the Riot_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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