Police arrested the black victim with his white attackers and freed the gang.
Evidence
On the night of October 28, 1946, a young black man named Clifford Hines was walking home along Formwalt Street, where his family had lived for four years. A gang of six Columbians—including one from Garibaldi Street—caught sight of him, whistling and listening to a portable radio. “Ain’t this a nigger?” asked seventeen-year-old Ralph Childers. An eighth-grade dropout from Forsyth County, Childers long resented black Atlantans buying homes he could not even afford to rent. In the Columbians, he found a way to vent his anger. By his own account, he had already been involved in the beatings of a dozen or so black men and the bombing of several houses by the time he caught sight of Hines. Chasing him into an alley, Childers and his fellow Columbians proceeded to blackjack the man into screaming hysteria, as Hines’s white neighbors stood by, doing nothing. Fortunately for him, police stumbled onto the scene just after the Columbians forced him into the backseat of a waiting car. Unfortunately for Hines, however, the patrolmen arrested him along with Childers, allowing the others to go free. Soon bailed out of jail, Ralph Childers received a hero’s welcome and a medal of honor at the Columbians’ next meeting. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 116
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes who the Columbians are—a violent Atlanta segregationist gang—and introduces Ralph Childers’s motivation rooted in housing resentment.
- XREF: connects to: Johnson’s removal of Black troops facilitated white violence against freedpeople. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 804
Broader Connections
- Johnson’s removal of Black troops facilitated white violence against freedpeople.
#exemplifies(0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 804