Disintegration Read Online Free PDF Page B

accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:
    1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
    2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
    3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.
    These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. 2
    The debate, for the moment, was academic: Jim Crow marched relentlessly through the South, regardless of what black intellectuals might have to say about it. In Atlanta, the black entrepreneurs who had prospered during the boom years of the city’s fin-de-siècle renaissance were forced to retreat from the bustling central business district and consolidate in segregated enclaves, especially along Auburn Avenue—Sweet Auburn—which
Fortune
magazine in 1956 called “the richest Negro street in the world,” a mile and a half of black affluence. Like Harlem’s Strivers’ Row or Washington’s LeDroit Park, Sweet Auburn became an important focal point of a new and growing phenomenon: the black middle class.
    To the west of the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, a unique complex of African American educational institutions was being assembled—Morehouse College for men and Spelman College for women, Clark College, Morris Brown College, Atlanta University. If Sweet Auburn was black America’s most powerful economic engine, the University Center District was its most dynamic intellectual center. At the eastern end of Sweet Auburn lay a sprawling, dirt-poor, all-black slum known as Darktown—one of scores of black ghettoes across the nation known by that generic name. The economic and social disparities among black Atlantans were clear for all to see, but at the time everyone assumed that eventually these gaps would become irrelevant. Ultimately, the rising tide of uplift would benefit all.
    The few black Atlantans who were rich and the many who were poor had something in common, after all, that trumped any differences in wealth or education: They were all black, and white Atlantans were increasingly determined to keepthem on the black side of town—and to do so “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X would say decades later in a very different context. There was nothing subtle about this campaign to put “colored” folks in their place and keep them there. In the summer of 1906, for example, a leading Georgia politician, Hoke Smith, issued what had become a typical warning: “We will control the Negro peacefully if we can—but with guns if we must.”
    On September 20, 1906, a white woman named Knowles Kimmel—a farmer’s wife who would come to represent the flower of Southern womanhood—made a shocking claim. While she was alone at the Kimmel farmhouse, in a western Atlanta suburb known as Oakland City, a “strange, rough-looking Negro” had appeared out of nowhere and sexually assaulted her, she said. The assault, if it indeed took place, was built into a cause célèbre by the race-baiting Atlanta newspapers. The idea of sexually rapacious black men defiling innocent, defenseless white women was uniquely powerful—and, to white supremacists like Henry Grady and Hoke Smith, uniquely useful in radicalizing and mobilizing white public opinion.
    Sensationalized reports about the Kimmel incident helped ignite a conflagration that turned out to be one of the most pivotal, least-remembered milestones in the history of race relations in the United States. In 1908, a muckraking New York journalist named Ray Stannard Baker—a contemporary and colleague of legends such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens—published a groundbreaking book,
Following the