"Baker's description of the Atlanta riot...reads like the story of a Russian massacre...the fury of the mob reached the highest pitch." -Chattanooga Daily Times, March 24, 1907
"One of the nation's best-known muckraking journalists, Ray Stannard Baker, interviewed residents...and concluded that the cops had started it." -The Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 17, 2006
"Baker is honestly trying to get at the truth...on the Atlanta riot." -Courier-Journal, Louisville, April 24, 1907
"In the aftermath of the Atlanta riot, Booker and Oswald Villard had asked the muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker to investigate the causes of the causes of the riot." -Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (2011)
What sparked the deadly Atlanta riot of 1906 and who was most to blame for the carnage?
Sent to investigate the scene and interview survivors, famous journalist Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) offers some surprising answers in his highly acclaimed 1907 book, " The Atlanta Riot."
The Atlanta riot of 1906 was a series of racially motivated violent attacks by armed mobs that began on the evening of September 22, 1906, and lasted through September 24, resulting in the deaths estimated at 100 citizens. The events were reported by newspapers around the world, and the violence did not end until after Governor Terrell called in the Georgia National Guard.
In introducing his book, Baker writes:
"Upon the ocean of antagonism between the white and negro races in this country, there arises occasionally a wave, stormy in its appearance, but soon subsiding into quietude. Such a wave was the Atlanta riot. Its ominous size, greater by far than the ordinary race disturbances which express themselves in lynchings, alarmed the entire country and awakened in the South a new sense of the dangers which threatened it."
About the author:
Ray Stannard Baker (April 17, 1870 – July 12, 1946) was an American journalist, historian, biographer, and author. In 1898 Baker joined the staff of McClure's, a pioneer muckraking magazine, and quickly rose to prominence.
In 1907, dissatisfied with the muckraker label, Baker, Steffens, and Tarbell left McClure's and founded The American Magazine. In 1908 after the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot got him involved, Baker published the book about it, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide.
