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circumvent the ban on Negro players in professional baseball by passing off his second baseman Charlie Grant as an Indian, but it didn’t work.
    The ugliest side of this mood visited the Williams neighborhood in 1906, in the form of the Atlanta race riot. With that year’s gubernatorial primary coming up, and with the candidates pledging to complete the disfranchisement of Negro voters, newspapers accompanied the political stories with accounts of rapes and insults against white women. The relatively liberal Atlanta Constitution often had several of these on a single front page, culminating in one story headed “Negro Menaced Miss Orrie Bryan.” There was a formal portrait of Miss Bryan beneath a four-column photograph of her father calling on a large crowd to help him lynch one Luther Frazier, who allegedly had accosted, but not touched, Miss Bryan. White mobs killed nearly fifty Negroes over the next three days. The Constitution ’s banner headlines included “Governor Calls All Troops Out,” “Chased Negroes All the Night,” “Too Much Talk Was His Doom,” “Riot’s End All Depends on Negroes,” “He Used a Dead Body to Ward Off Bullets,” and a sidebar from Delaware called “Whip with Nine Thongs Avenges White Women Assaulted by Negro.”
    The 1906 riot, along with a similar one two years later in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, provoked Atlanta University’s Du Bois to join with white Northern philanthropists to create the NAACP in 1909. Young Reverend Williams, whose accomplishments at the Ebenezer church were making him a community leader, became the first president of the Atlanta chapter. For him, the riot’s aftermath brought an unexpected blessing in the flight of prominent white families from Victorian homes near the downtown riot area. He bought one of them at a bargain price. Its location on Auburn Avenue, only a few blocks from Atlanta’s first cluster of Negro businesses, was a great advantage to him in church recruitment. Even better, there were sites available along that same street, between the house and the businesses, that would make an ideal permanent home for a new church. These considerations of price and location outweighed the fact that the two-story Queen Anne-style house—with its five bedrooms, wraparound porch, twelve-foot ceilings, and modern coal furnace in the basement—was far too big for the Williams family of three. By taking in boarders, they earned money toward the payments.
    In 1909, they moved into the new house at 501 Auburn Avenue with their young daughter, Alberta. From childhood, she was homely in appearance, with blunt features and a rather squat frame, yet always known for her sweet shyness and humility. Neighbors considered her the kind of person who would not be noticed in a small crowded room, and relatives would even say she was “kind of fearful.” She lacked the assertiveness of her parents, perhaps intimidated by her father’s achievements and by her mother’s stature as the “First Lady of Ebenezer.” But she became an astute observer of church politics, as taught to her by both parents, and she developed an enormous strength—passive, absorptive, sure of herself—on her own ground, which was always church and family. Her refinements and talents were directed there. In both places, she would be a creature of refuge—organizer, comforter, facilitator. All her life she would be the official organist at Ebenezer and also at one of the auxiliaries of the National Baptist Convention.
    Ebenezer members considered Reverend Williams an able preacher, but his reputation and influence outside the church derived primarily from his skills in real estate and civic action. He was the type who convened meetings, identified community goals, and got elected to chair committees he himself proposed. He became president of the Atlanta Baptist