Two victims of the Atlanta Race Massacre have been identified 117 years following the tragic events that occurred in the early 1900s. The murders began on Sept. 22, 1906, and lasted for four days after a mob of around 5,000 to 10,000 angry white men and boys hunted down Black people following false reports of Black men brutalizing white women.

At least 25 Black people were murdered in downtown Atlanta during the massacre as the white mob screamed, “Get them all! Kill the Negroes!” Nine of the victims were unidentified, but on Sept. 18, the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Metro Atlanta researchers were able to identify two of the unknown victims, according to WSBTV.

The Director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, Hank Klibanoff, says that the death certificates of two people who died around the time of the massacre have “riot” listed in parenthesis. The two unidentified victims were listed as 25-year-old Stinson Ferguson and 13-year-old Marshall Carter. The bodies of the murdered citizens were placed in front of the Henry W. Grady statue downtown during the massacre.

“Their death certificates show that they were killed in that time frame and off to the right near both names it says in parenthesis, riot,” said Klibanoff.

While the official number of victims is 25, it is likely that at least 100 lives were taken during the massacre as the white mob terrorized downtown Atlanta and prominent Black neighborhoods. Houses and businesses were burned down, and Black people were beaten and lynched.

Around 70 white men were arrested by the police and jailed on the first night of the massacre, and the city was soon under martial law. Gov. Joseph Meriwether Terrell ordered the state militia to disarm the Black residents because he was afraid of a counterattack. In the process, 257 Black men were disarmed and arrested, and two were killed by officials. One officer was also killed.

The known victims of the massacre include a local barber named William (aka Henry) Welch. Welch was beaten, shot and left to die near Grady Hospital.

Stocks Coal Company employee Milton Brown was chased down Peters Street before he was shot three times in his chest, head, and shoulder. The Atlanta Police Department witnessed his attack but did nothing to stop it. Brown reportedly said he “knew nothing of the trouble going on and that the attack on him was wholly unexpected” as he awaited an ambulance before he died.

Zeb Long was jailed after alleged “incendiary talk about the way white people were treating negros,” but the mob broke him out of the jail only to lynch him from a nearby tree. Black entrepreneur Alonzo Herndon, the wealthiest Black man in the city, just missed the mob because he had gone home for the day from one of his barbershops, but one of his barbers was beaten to death by the mob.

Will Moreland and James Fletcher were shot and lynched by police on Randolph Street. Carpenter Sam Robinson was shot and killed on his way to work for “not halting.”

Slyvia Johnson from the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of Metro Atlanta said that the next step is to locate descendants of the victims.

“We begin to piece together family trees, or did they have children,” said Johnson. “If they didn’t, who are their siblings, and did their siblings have children? And then we can begin to walk forward to find the descendants.”

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