The Atlanta Riot of 1906 followed a race-baiting gubernatorial campaign and newspaper reports alleging an “epidemic of rape” that exacerbated white fears of black social and economic empowerment. On the evening of September 22, a white mob of 10,000 rampaged through the black business district. The violence soon spread to Brownsville, a middle-class black suburb. With the police and state militia aiding the mob, more than one thousand black residents fled the city. The riot lasted five nights, killing at least twenty-seven, injuring hundreds, and destroying black-owned property. The carnage caused many African Americans to question Booker T. Washington’s philosophy and the idea of a New South, where blacks would seek economic gains but forgo civil rights. In this letter Francis J. Garrison (1848–1916), an editor and the youngest son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, thanks Washington, a close friend, for his account on post-riot Atlanta. Garrison later joined his siblings and nephew, Oswald Villard, in building the NAACP.