Rebecca Burns
January 9, 2007 - William Inman
For Rebecca Burns (B.A. '89), her introduction to the story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot came through a public service announcement on the radio.
"I'm very embarrassed to admit that, like many, I didn’t know much about it at all," she says. "I thought it would make a good story for the magazine so I started to check it out."
Burns, the editor-in-chief of Atlanta Magazine and a journalist in Atlanta for the past 15 years (apart from a brief stint with Indianapolis Monthly), began her eye-opening research in earnest in communication professor Leonard Teel’s History of News Media class. Teel taught Burns more than two decades ago when she was beginning her career in journalism. Now enrolled in his graduate-level class, she thought the subject of the riot, which took the lives of 27 Atlantans, would make the perfect project for the semester.
"First, I decided I would do a story on it as a project in class, and use that to be an article in the magazine and kind of kill two birds with one stone," she says.
But after learning more about the horrifying but remarkable moment in Atlanta history, the seasoned reporter found the story too big for just a magazine article or an academic paper.
"I became so fascinated because there was so much material there," she says.
So Burns wrote a book proposal.
"And insanely enough they said, 'Sure, you can do it; you have eight months,'" she says.
In that incredibly short amount of time, Burns researched and wrote Rage in the Gate City, a 240-page narrative on that eruption of racial tension in Atlanta during the summer of 1906. Burns' book tells the story of the violent culmination of months of white fears over the increasing economic and social power of African-Americans in Atlanta, which was fueled by sensationalized rhetoric from politicians and the city's four newspapers.
Though the book is a work of nonfiction, she tells it in a straight narrative. "What I decided to do was ... to narrow the scope of the story from late July 1906 to the end of 1906 and keep it contained to those months. And to focus it as much on getting across the idea of 'Here's what Atlanta was like back then,' which is very interesting to me and very interesting to Atlanta. And to really tell the story of what happened."
For more, visit http://www.raceriotbook.com/