Negrophobia: a Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906.

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 builds a fortune on Coca-Cola while just blocks from his posh downtown Atlanta office building a black inner-city area is awash in crime, lust, alcoholism, opium-peddling, and cocaine pushing--or so the four competing white Atlanta papers told their readers day after day.

The official death toll from Atlanta's riot was twelve--ten blacks and two whites--"but there's no way of knowing for sure," says the writer, who estimates that about fifty blacks may have been killed by white mobs during the city's days of violence nearly a century ago.

Ten years after the "Rodney King riots" broke out in Los Angeles, Bauerlein's book is an absorbing account of a hidden but historic urban uprising that has long been swept under the rug in "the city too busy to hate."