"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Atlanta was regarded as the gateway to the new, enlightened and racially progressive South. Whites and blacks were still separate and regarded as unequal by all but an elite of African-American intellectuals, yet an atmosphere of respect and cooperation mitigated the pain of segregation and made it seem like a transitory social arrangement. White business owners employed black workers at wages that gave them access to the new black middle class.

Black leaders led congregations, edited periodicals and taught classes, building a rich civic culture in the midst of Jim Crow. A new world was being born.".

"But Atlanta's dream of escaping the haunting memory of civil war and human bondage was shattered in 1906 when, in the middle of a bitter gubernatorial contest, Georgia politicians played the race card and white supremacist newspapers trumpeted a "negro crime" scare. Seizing on rumors of black predation against white women, they launched a campaign based on fears of miscegenation and white subservience.

Atlanta slipped into a climate of race hatred and sexual hysteria, a negrophobia culminating in a bloody riot that left over a dozen dead, and stymied race relations and the possibility of a New South for the next fifty years." "Drawing on new archival materials and detailing the events at ground level, Mark Bauerlein traces the origins, development and brutal climax of Atlanta's descent into hatred and violence in the fateful summer of 1906."--BOOK JACKET.