Veiled Visions
The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10045203 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory Michael Dorr (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 554-555 |
| Publication date | 2006-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations, David Fort Godshalk, 2005 |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/4486317 |
| OpenAlex | W2028753736 |
| Language | EN |
Few monographs can divine national repercussions from local events, largely because local events rarely have transcendent significance. As David Fort Godshalk compellingly argues, examining Atlanta's 1906 race riot reveals how one searing local trauma—a racial pogrom incited by false white accounts of black-on-white rapes—reconfigured both local and national understandings of America's “race problem.” Focusing mostly on white and black elites, with sensitivity to gender issues and with close attention to class conflict (if not to the underclass itself), Godshalk recounts the riot, how white and black elites struggled against each other and within their racial cohorts over the memory of the riot, and how these contested memories led locally to the emergence of the “Atlanta Plan” for race relations and nationally to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (naacp) legal assault on segregation. Godshalk's book paints a familiar portrait of Atlanta as the New South boosters' utopia, the promise of which barely masked simmering racial and class tensions. That volatile brew of racial antipathy and class resentment erupted into a racial massacre on September 22, 1906. In his effort to avoid echoing the lurid sensationalism that incited the riot, Godshalk drains the event of its horror and drama. Thus, it is difficult for readers to appreciate the sense of crisis that the bloodbath elicited from both the white and black communities, locally and nationally. Moreover, his insistent pairing of historical figures (for example, Booker T. Washington with W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Hopkins with William J. Northen) tends to create too neat ideological dichotomies. Yet his attention to other voices—of elite black women and of poor whites and blacks— restores dimension to the analysis
Atlanta · Criminology · Metropolitan area · Political science · Race (biology · Racial hierarchy · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
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| Highly cited | No |
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