I hold your stories. I am Georgia’s red clay and black land. The silence that speaks beneath the roar of trains and traffic. I am a record. You call me soil, but I am memory.
I remember how Black life rose after slavery’s end. How men and women carved businesses into my streets, lifted schools on my back, built homes, churches, barbershops, laundries, groceries. I held Alonzo Herndon’s dream, his barbershop on Peachtree, gleaming with polish, his hands making a fortune from skill and dignity. I held Clark University and Gammon Theological Seminary in Brownsville, where scholars and preachers walked across me in their Sunday coats.
I remember too when white fear grew heavy that September. How newspaper headlines screamed false stories, lurid tales of Black men attacking white women. How those lies piled up like kindling. How politicians sharpened them into promises. They set fire to lies and handed them to the crowd.
On Saturday night, Sept. 22, 1906, the storm broke. From Five Points, where the corner of Peachtree, Marietta, Edgewood, Decatur, and Pryor meet, pulling us into its center of the city. The crowd poured outward, thousands strong, drunk on lies and rage. Knives and pistols, clubs and fists…