by Jennifer Johnson
The Collegian
Issue date: 3/1/07
Most students probably don't know that just over 100 years ago, a mob of white men beat and killed African Americans and laid extensive damaged to black-owned businesses in a bloody four-day period known as the Atlanta race riot. Most students probably have never even heard of the riot.
Wade Marbaugh and Paul Hudson hope to change that. They are the authors of American Apartheid, a play adapted from The Law of The White Circle, a novella by former Oglethorpe University president Thornwell Jacobs published just two years after the September 1906 riot.
In the book, the daughter of an octaroon (a person who is one eighth black) attempts to pass for her white half-sister, choosing a white suitor over her black fiance at a time when a class of educated and enterprising blacks began to threaten the long-standing social order of the South.
At the time of it's setting (only four decades since the end of the civil war), the democratic candidate for Governor had promised constituents to prevent African Americans the chance to vote. Newspapers supporting Hoke Smith ran headlines of black on white violence, with many reports being exaggerated and perhaps even fabricated.
"Whipped into a frenzy by the media," the co-authors of the play explained in their program, "mobs of white men rioted on September 22 and for three days thereafter."
They attacked blacks and damaged black businesses. That Fall, Smith kept his promise after winning election, and only a few blacks voted until the Civil Rights Movement six decades later.
As a Lyceum event for Black History month, the staged reading of the play on February 22, featured a cast comprised of both professional actors and GPC students and included music by faculty member Derwin Daniels.
The play finds its frame from the perspective of a present-day student picking up Jacobs's book at Oglethorpe University's library.
The story, set in September 1906 on the eve and during the Atlanta Race Riot, unfolds and is concluded before the audience returns to the student and her friends, who are the vehicles for the current issues our society faces (with mentions of Katrina victims, immigrants and homosexuals) that draw strong parallels to Jacobs' tale.
The 'white circle' the book and play mention is representative of the social and economic opportunity afforded to whites, but not to blacks. It is into this circle that Lola, the mixed-race artist engaged to a black college professor, hopes to cross.
The staged reading did not forgo the violence of the race riot, and included a scene in which, during the riot, 2 white men beat a black man and leave him for dead.
John Inscoe, History professor at UGA, Editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia and of Hudson's 1999 Thornwell Jacobs article for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, came to the JCLRC auditorium on Clarkston campus for the reading. Inscoe was pleased to see its transformation to the stage, saying "it captured and imagined the racial tension very well."
"For a white man to have written that book," Inscoe said, "published two years after the race riot, is exceptional in and of itself."
The Law of the White Circle, in fact, suggested intermarriage as the long-term solution to the racial strife. Jacobs' book, after decades off the press, was reprinted last year at the centennial of the Atlanta race riot. In its adaptation for the stage, one of its social comments is very clear in its last line. After the tale is told, and the present-day students leave the library in conversation, our frame of reference says, "Everybody just needs to think outside… the circle."
"I think the last line was a painful, appropriate way of making the point that we haven't yet solved the problem," Inscoe said. "I hope it will go far."
Another staged reading will be on March 15 at the Decatur campus in B1190 at 2 p.m., with another planned for later this spring.
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