On July 1, 1911, a 20-year-old woman named Emma Lou Sharpe sat in her house on Hanover Street in Atlanta and waited for her mother to come home. It was a Saturday evening, and Emma Lou was worried. Her mother had left an hour before to fetch some groceries and still had not returned. Usually, this wouldn't be a cause for concern, but these were unusual times. Just two weeks before, a neighbor of the Sharpes named Addie Watts was hit on the head with a brick. Then, as the local papers described in a mysterious understatement, "a coupling pin was brought into play." Watts' attacker then dragged her into a clump of bushes and slit her throat. Watts' murder had been just the latest in a string of attacks that left the local African-American population on edge. All the victims had been of black or mixed race. All had been young, around 20 years old. All had been women. Emma Lou Sharpe fit that description almost exactly, but she was more concerned about her mother, whose name was Lena. Frantic with worry, Emma Lou set out in search of her mother. At the market, she learned that Lena had never showed up. Emma Lou started back for home. In the area that now separates Inman Park from Reynoldstown, she was approached by a stranger, who she described later, according to The Atlanta Constitution, as "tall, black, broad-shouldered and wearing a broad-brimmed black hat."
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