It was 1906. Atlanta's streets simmered with racial tension that boiled into bedlam on the evening of Sept. 22. When the dust settled three days later, 27 black people and two white people were dead. More than 70 others were injured.

Starting on Thursday, the city will host a series of events to commemorate what happened here 100 years ago.

And though the riots occurred nine years before the University founded its Atlanta campus, Emory faculty and students are joining the efforts to remember the violence.

Jody Usher ('89GSAS), who co-chairs the Transforming Community Project, which is working to examine race relations in the University's history, said the memorial efforts reinforce TCP's purpose of examining the past to create a better future.

"We see this remembrance as bringing Atlanta and Emory closer, and second of all, leading to future events and ways of building community," she said.

Usher, along with Thee Smith, an associate professor of religion, and TCP Chair Leslie Harris, an associate professor of history, have worked with the Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot to plan the memorial events, Usher said. Smith serves on the Coalition's steering committee, and Usher acts as the Emory liaison to the Coalition.

The Centennial Remembrance Weekend events will begin Thursday with an exhibit about the riot at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site visitor's center and a memorial service at the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

The 1906 riot erupted after local newspapers published a series of accounts of black men attacking white women. Most of the accounts were unsubstantiated, but the rumors, combined with a growing fear that Atlanta's blacks were becoming too powerful economically and politically, sparked the violent, three-day riot.

Lori Teague, associate professor in the health, physical education and dance department, and Patton White, instructor in the same department, have choreographed a work based on the 1906 riot to be performed later this month, Usher said.

"There are times when connecting history and art can influence change," she said.

It's a necessary connection, TCP leaders said, even though Emory was not officially part of Atlanta when the riots took place,

Vice President and Deputy to the President Gary Hauk, also a TCP leader, wrote in an e-mail to the Wheel that the riots continued to influence the social and economic environment in the city for the next several decades.

Efforts to integrate the University, for example, were stymied by city leaders who held more "traditional attitudes" toward race, Hauk wrote.

Many of those leaders served on Emory's Board of Trustees, he wrote.

"It's important to remember how those forces shaped Atlanta and Emory, and how we still live with the aftermath," Hauk wrote.

Important even for those who are not from Atlanta and have only a tenuous connection with this place, Usher said.

"This is American history," she said. "We need only scratch the surface to discover the racial tensions and atrocities that happened everywhere in America."

And that can be generalized to the racial misunderstandings, discrimination and oppression happening around the world, she added.

"We can all put ourselves in the picture," she said.

- Contact Rachel Zelkowitz at rzelkow@learnlink.emory.edu