Negrophobia: a Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906.

• Author: Tant, Ed

By Mark Bauerlein Encounter Books. 337 pages. $25.95.

Atlanta billed itself as "the city too busy to hate" during the civil rights struggles in the segregated South during the late 1950s and early '60s, but Professor Mark Bauerlein shows that the roots of racism ran deep in Atlanta when the twentieth century was young.

In Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906, Bauerlein--a professor of English at Atlanta's Emory University--weaves a compelling story of how Jim Crow laws, political posturing during a Georgia governor's race, and sensation-seeking white-owned newspapers led to the tragic but little-remembered riot that terrorized Atlanta for four days in September 1906.

History long-forgotten or suppressed comes alive with action and immediacy in the narrative of Negrophobia.

Against a backdrop of post-bellum Atlanta rising from the ashes of the Civil War, the black moderate Booker T. Washington and the more militant W. E. B. Du Bois wage a bitter rivalry for the hearts and minds of their fellow African Americans. Asa Candler...