1970 Augusta riot facts for kids

The Augusta Riot was a collective rebellion of Black citizens in Augusta, Georgia, and the largest urban uprising in the Deep South during the Civil Rights era. Fueled by long-simmering grievances about racial injustice, it was sparked by White officials’ stonewalling in the face of Black citizens’ demand for answers about the beating death of Black teenager Charles Oatman. At its height on the evening of May 11, 1970, two to three thousand people participated, ransacking and setting fire to White- and Chinese-American-owned businesses, damaging $1 million of property over a 130-block area. White police officers violently suppressed the riot, with the endorsement of Georgia governor Lester Maddox, shoot-to-kill orders from their captain, and reinforcements by the National Guard and State Patrol. Despite the suppression, the riot fundamentally shook the status quo, galvanizing a new wave of activism that opened economic and political doors for Augusta’s Black citizens.

Context

Police brutality and severe poverty were deeply woven into the fabric of White supremacy in Augusta, and they showed no signs of weakening as a new decade dawned. Augusta’s Black organizations had different visions for bringing change: NAACP and SCLC chapters sought to expand on gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party chapter and a cadre of Paine College students embraced the militancy and self-assertion of Black Power, and the Committee of Ten embodied a middle way, with a militant style but a focus on confronting White officials. Simmering tensions came to a head on the evening of May 9, when news began to circulate that Charles Oatman had been beaten to death in the county jail. The 16-year-old was a popular student at A.R. Johnson Junior High School. He was also mentally challenged. In a grim accident in late March, Oatman had fatally wounded his young niece in the kitchen of his family’s small house, but White authorities charged him with killing her and incarcerated him. Over the course of several weeks in the jail, he was brutally tortured and beaten, ultimately dying of his injuries.

Repressive Reaction--and Renewed Activism

In the months that followed, all-White juries convicted the two teenagers charged in Oatman's death, over 100 people active in the riot, and the militants who declared “warfare.” The police captain was promoted to chief, the mayor lavished praise on the police department, and the media and political leaders depicted the riot as nothing more than inherently violent people, an angry mob, getting violent and destroying their own neighborhood, for no reason. A major FBI investigation into excessive police force brought two officers to trial, but they were acquitted by overwhelmingly-White juries. Charles Oatman’s mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, but it was dismissed on a technicality. No White official has been held accountable for any wrongdoing.

Despite these injustices, the riot galvanized a new wave of activism. The fears it generated gave activists new leverage in their demands for change. Black voters began to make substantive gains in local politics, a major lawsuit for school desegregation gained renewed momentum, and Black leadership of a newly-created Human Relations Commission won numerous anti-discrimination cases and opened new doors for Black employment. Activists memorialized the six victims in solidarity with the four students killed at Kent State University a week earlier and the two students killed at Jackson State University three days later. Key participants continued to work for racial justice, in Augusta and in other places. And they sought to preserve a very different account of the event. “The rebellion Monday, May 11,” a handbill circulating in the community that summer proclaimed, “was an effort of the Blacks in Augusta, in Georgia, and in Amerikka to seek liberation, freedom, and justice…The PEOPLE REVOLTED.”

But amidst these changes, White supremacy showed its resiliency. Rapid White flight to neighboring Columbia County undercut the gains of school desegregation, the Human Relations Commission was weakened and ultimately defunded, and divestment mixed with a fragile capital base decimated the once-bustling principal Black neighborhood. Concentrated poverty continued as the economy shifted from industrial manufacturing to low-wage service jobs; in contemporary Augusta, 30% of Black households subsist below the federal poverty threshold. The criminality projected onto African Americans in 1970 continues, undergirding the racialized system of mass incarceration that legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow.” And the White supremacist narrative of the riot became firmly established as the community’s dominant memory of what happened—erasing the memory of Black grievances, of Black organizing and political intent, and of Black gains in the wake of the rebellion of May 11-12.

A local group, the 1970 Augusta Riot Observance Committee, has been working to recover and honor the real story of this event, and the above summary is part of that work. For more information see www.1970augustariot.com