David Fort Godshalk.Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations.:Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations

Atlanta has long been marketed by its civic elite as a city with moderate race relations, “The City Too Busy to Hate.” In the fall of 1967, however, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began planning a campaign of organized civil disobedience to challenge what he called his hometown's “false image” of racial progressivism. Reverend King sought to dramatize the fact that Atlanta was “behind almost every major southern city in its progress towards desegregation” (p. 276). An assassin's bullet cut King's planned crusade short, and Atlanta moved into the post–civil rights era with race and class inequalities that translated into the fifth-highest poverty rate among America's major cities. David Fort Godshalk's pioneering study of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot is a brilliant exposition of the creation of Atlanta's myth of racial progressivism. Godshalk patiently reconstructs the events leading up to the conflagration. However, the strength of this book is in its exposé of what happened in Atlanta after the riot. Godshalk demonstrates that historical memory shapes political behavior. In fact, this may be the best monograph ever written on the aftermath of a major race riot in a U. S. city. It deserves the broadest possible audience, and it will critically inform debates in the histories of segregation, urban public policy, and poverty studies.