Joseph Terrell, the governor of Georgia, spent that weekend ordering out the state militia, and by Monday morning the troops were in the streets of Atlanta. It had started on the Saturday evening, the 22nd, when extra editions carried lurid and unverified accounts of assaults on four white women; the crowds gathered off the strength of those papers, and the violence ran through the 24th. This was 1906.
The official count was at least twenty-five Black Atlantans killed and two white men; unofficial counts ranged from ten to a hundred, and it has never been settled. Families buried their dead quietly, and many left the city altogether. The New-York Tribune of that Monday put it in the lower-middle columns, under "Troops Hold Atlanta" — the photographs above were of hotel porches at Saratoga. What followed in Georgia was not a return to how things had been but a tightening: separation written further into law, and the Black vote narrowed within two years.
Those extras were set to be heard rather than read — a few short words in heavy type, because the newsboys sold by shouting the line on the corner, and the line was written for the shouting. Copies of those particular editions are scarce today; the papers were thrown away, and researchers have often had to work from what libraries happened to keep.
The churches along Auburn Avenue kept their doors open through those nights, and people slept in the pews. In the morning someone went along the rows and counted, and then went looking for the ones who weren't there. Some of those lists were read out at services later that year.