On a Saturday afternoon in September 1906, newsboys in Atlanta's Five Point neighbourhood tried to attract customers with the following headlines:

These alleged assaults, none of which were ever substantiated, and other sensationalized headlines, stories, and cartoons appeared in Atlanta newspapers in the wake of a particularly adversarial Georgia gubernatorial race, during which both candidates, Clark Howell and Hoke Smith, two of Atlanta's most prosperous citizens and champions of white supremacy, did everything in their power to paint their opponent as being too friendly with the city's black citizens. The Atlanta Constitution, which Howell published, accused Smith of appointing blacks to federal positions during his time as secretary of the interior under Grover Cleveland. One of Smith's supporters, the South Georgia demagogue Tom Watson, asked his audience: “What does civilization owe to the negro?” And he answered what to him was a rhetorical question: “Nothing! Nothing! NOTHING!”

It mattered little that the Atlanta Independent, a black weekly, pointed out how both campaigns disenfranchised “every decent and helpful negro citizen and enfranchize[d] every venal and vicious white thug.” Atlanta, the city that prided itself on being an exception among the racially divided cities of the South, quickly succumbed to the lurid and dramatic news hype spread by the major newspapers: “With his yellow lips forming insulting phrases,” the Evening News exclaimed, “Luther Frazier, a young negro, attacked Miss Orrie Bryan, the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of Thomas L. Bryan, in her home.” And the journalists spurred on local men by asking: “What will you do to stop these outrages against the women? Shall these black devils be permitted to assault and almost kill our women, and go unpunished?”

As a result of this and other inflammatory rumours, white men and boys gathered all over Atlanta and attacked black-owned businesses, pulled some black men out of trams and trolleybuses, hunted others down in the streets. Long-held fears, especially of black sexual violence against white women, continued to lead to attacks by white mobs on black citizens during the following days, even after the state militia had entered the city to stop the violence.