The Shadows of Jim Crow: The Atlanta Ripper and the Women The City Forgot

tldr; Atlanta, 1911. Black women like Rosa Trice are turning up dead, again and again, and the city barely flinches. No headlines. No suspects. No justice. Just silence.

But this episode? We’re dragging that silence into the daylight.

Because when the history books forget… we remember.
Throw in some zombies, a suspicious house that vanished, and the kind of systemic racism that still hits way too close to home, and yeah, it gets real.

Not your grandma’s ghost story.

⚠️Trigger Warning⚠️

Hey y’all—before we get into today’s episode, I want to give a heads up. This one’s heavy. We’re talking about violence against Black women in early 1900s Atlanta—specifically murder, abuse, and the kind of erasure that still hurts today. It’s hard, but it matters. That said, if this is something you’re not in the headspace to hear right now, it’s okay to pause, come back later, or skip this one entirely. Your wellbeing is what matters most.

Hi there, friends! Welcome to Bygone Echoes, a history podcast. I’m your host, Courtney — and I’m so glad you chose to be here.

Around here, we dig into the stories that make us laugh, sometimes cry, and always remind us how the past shaped the good, the bad, and the deeply messed-up things we’re still dealing with today. And how, sometimes, some things never really change.

This episode? It’s got unsolved murders, systemic racism, some unexpected case law… and yes — zombies. Sort of. Stay with me.

Because today’s story isn’t haunted doll weird or Victorian séance quirky. It’s the kind of history that gets buried because it’s uncomfortable — because the people it happened to were never meant to be remembered.

But not here. Here, we remember them.

Picture it: Atlanta, 1911. Thick summer heat pressing against your skin. You’re walking home through Pittsburgh — a Black neighborhood shaped by freed people and working-class families. No streetlights. No sidewalks. Just dry dirt, the crunch of gravel, and the low, eerie rumble of a train pulling past in the dark.

You’ve heard the whispers. Another Black woman murdered. Throat slit. Body left in the open. No witnesses. No suspects. No justice. Only rumors in the Black newspapers and prayers whispered in homes.

And as you pass the sagging porches and laundry lines of your neighborhood, you occasionally hear another kind of violence, too — not from the shadows, but inside the houses. A slap. A scream. Silence. The kind of pain the city never reports, because the victims are Black women.

The real horror wasn’t just the murders. It was how easy it was to get away with them. How easy it was to commit violence against women and never be held accountable. It’s in how quickly the names disappeared.

This episode isn’t about solving the case — because if we can’t even agree on who the victims were, we’re not catching the killer. It’s about the city that looked away. The system that let it happen. And the women whose lives were treated like footnotes, if they were written down at all.

We’re going to meet one of them: Rosa Trice — a laundress, a wife, a homeowner. A woman whose name survived when so many didn’t.

And we’re going to talk about “the system.”

You know — that thing everyone blames when stuff goes wrong, like it’s a haunted vending machine spitting out injustice. But here’s the truth: the system isn’t vague. It’s not a ghost. It’s people. Real people. People who design it, maintain it, and benefit from it.

This episode is about what happens when those people decide your life doesn’t matter.

Now — fair warning.

This is not a satisfying story. There’s no dramatic arrest. No moment of reckoning. The killer was never caught. The violence didn’t stop. The system didn’t change. And that silence — that lack of resolution — is part of the point.

But we tell it anyway. Because remembering is its own kind of resistance.

Because history isn’t just about the past — it’s about how we got to now, and where we might be heading next.

So grab your parasol and your walking shoes, friends.

Tonight, we’re taking the long road home — through 1911 Atlanta, where the heat wasn’t the only thing making Black women sweat with fear.

While an unknown killer was striking fear into the black population of Atlanta, the rest of the world circa 1911 wasn’t exactly on pause. So, lets take a spin around the globe.

In China, the ancient Qing Dynasty officially collapsed, ending over 2,000 years of imperial rule. A small group of angry, fed-up citizens and soldiers in Wuchang—now part of what we call Wuhan—rose up, and the Republic of China was declared by year’s end. This single collapse triggered decades of upheaval, revolution, and global migration that would literally reshape the world map.

In Europe, the powder keg that would become World War I was already hissing. Tensions between empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, France—were rising like smoke under a closed lid. Everyone was spying, stockpiling, and signing treaties with crossed fingers behind their backs.

But on the surface? Everything looked calm. Polished. Civilized.

It was very much a ‘There is no war in Ba Sing Se’ kind of moment.

Except, of course, there totally was. You just had to know where to look.

Meanwhile, in Belfast, Northern Ireland — which, back then, was still part of a united Ireland under British rule — the Titanic was getting her final polish, all set to sail straight into history (and an iceberg) just one year later.

In 1911, the United States was charging into the future—planes were popping up in the sky, factories roared, wealth flowed, and cities grew taller every year. But not everyone got to come along for the ride. For most people, progress was just a backdrop to poverty, prejudice, and survival.

Working conditions in 1911? Honestly, calling them “conditions” is generous.

If you were a factory worker, you were probably working 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Your pay was low, there was no health insurance, and if you got hurt? That was a YOU problem. To make things even better, the machines you used could easily maim you, the factory air could poison you, and the fire exits? Locked—from the outside. Because we can’t have unauthorized potty breaks.

And that’s just life for the factory workers.

The everyday person faced capitalism without a conscience. Where the labor was cheap, and human lives were even cheaper.

And in March of 1911, all of that would combust—literally, in a fire—at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City.

The fire lasted less than 20 minutes, but it killed 146 people. The majority of the victims were young immigrant women — Italian, Jewish, barely out of girlhood. They spent long hours sewing shirtwaists — which, if you’re like me and weren’t totally sure what that means, these were popular women’s blouses in the early 1900s. Think white cotton or linen, puffy sleeves, maybe some fancy lace or pleats, meant to be tucked into a skirt.

But here’s the thing: that fire sparked outrage. People marched. Laws changed. The tragedy led to reform.

So hold onto that — hold onto the image of a world spinning forward, of some tragedies igniting movements and making the world safer for everyone, while others are simultaneously being buried.

Because while Titanic builders hammered rivets in Belfast and revolutionaries revolutioned in China, Black women like Rosa Trice walked home in the dark of Atlanta, praying to make it to their doors alive.

And the world barely noticed.

Atlanta, Georgia is located in the Southern US. It’s the state capital — but long before it was crowned with that title, and long before it became the urban giant we know today, this land was home to the Muscogee.

The Muscogee people are often called “Creek” by white settlers who, in true colonial fashion, couldn’t be bothered to learn their actual name.

For centuries, the Muscogee lived here — on lands they farmed, fished, hunted, and held sacred. This wasn’t just territory; it was ancestral ground, bound to their identity, culture, and survival. But as white settlers pushed deeper into Georgia, greed and expansion took over.

The U.S. government forced Native nations to sign treaties — official agreements that were supposed to set fair terms between governments. Unfortunately, these treaties were more about giving the U.S. a legal cover to take what it wanted, while pretending it was all done properly.

In reality, these agreements were often forced under threat, manipulated, or signed under crushing pressure. And even then, white officials broke them repeatedly, reshaping and rewriting the rules whenever it suited their expansion plans. Promises made to Native nations were routinely betrayed.

Then, in the 1830s, the U.S. government sealed this violent project with the Indian Removal Act.

Federal troops and state militias rounded up thousands of Native families at gunpoint, burned their homes and fields, and forced them to march west in what we now call the Trail of Tears. Along the way, entire communities — men, women, children — were punished not for any crime, but simply for existing on land white settlers wanted. Thousands died. It was deliberate, brutal displacement, clearing the way for white settlers hungry for land, power, and profit.

And let’s be real — calling it removal hides the truth. This was genocide: a system of theft, terror, and deliberate destruction of entire nations.

It wasn’t just about the actions of a few settlers; it was about an entire system that rewarded greed, conquest, and betrayal, no matter the human cost.

By the mid-1800s, the settlement built on the land where the Muscogee had been violently displaced was called Terminus — literally “the end of the line” — because it marked where the Western & Atlantic Railroad would link Georgia’s interior to other major rail networks across the South and beyond. A few years later, it was renamed Marthasville, after a politician’s daughter, before finally becoming Atlanta in 1847 — a name meant to signal grand ambitions, connecting the Atlantic coast to the Pacific by rail.

You heard me right: three names in under ten years. Talk about a rebranding frenzy.

Atlanta didn’t rise on rich farmland or easy ground — it sits on rolling hills, thick red clay soil, and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, you know — that long mountain range that stretches from Georgia all the way up to Canada. Atlanta is one of the highest major cities in the eastern U.S., sitting pretty at more than 1,050 feet, or 320 meters, above sea level. Not exactly the easiest place to lay track.

But here’s the thing: geography isn’t just about smooth ground — it’s about location. Atlanta’s tough hills sat at the perfect crossing point for multiple major rail lines. It was where the Western & Atlantic, Georgia, and Macon & Western railroads could all meet and connect the South’s interior to cities beyond. Sure, building there was a challenge, but the payoff was massive: whoever controlled this rail junction controlled a key piece of the South’s economic future.

In the mid-1800s, Atlanta was just a few miles across, a scrappy rail town. But it was growing! By 1911, the time of our story, it had stretched to about 12 square miles, or 31 square kilometers. It hadn’t yet become the sprawling giant we know today — but by the mid-1800s it was well on its way.

And what fueled that growth, that trade, and that speed? Slavery.

Because let’s be honest: when people in power want to get rich fast, they often don’t choose fairness — they choose exploitation. Not because it’s the only path, but because to them, it’s the easiest and most profitable. And I mean why should they care? If the system is built to reward greed, they don’t have to care — unless something or someone forces them to.

The U.S. banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 — no more raiding villages, chaining people at gunpoint, and shipping them across the Atlantic. But make no mistake: slavery was still very legal. The government basically said, “You can still own people — just don’t go full pirate about it anymore.”

But we all know that greed doesn’t stop just because the law changes.

That would be too much like right.

In 1860 — literally one year before the Civil War — the last known illegal slave ship, the Clotilda, smuggled African men, women, and children into the U.S. These were free people in Africa, violently abducted, trafficked, and forced into enslavement in America — all so white smugglers could cash in on human bodies.

By the time the Civil War broke out, enslaved people made up about 20% of Atlanta’s population — nearly 2,000 Black men, women, and children. They weren’t recent arrivals from Africa like those on the Clotilda; they were born into slavery in the US, the descendants of people violently taken across the Atlantic generations earlier. Their unpaid, forced labor powered Atlanta’s warehouses, railroads, factories, construction sites, and the homes of the wealthy.

Atlanta’s deep investment in slavery made it a crucial Confederate supply hub — which is exactly why, in 1864, the Union army controversially burned the city to the ground. But here’s where the city’s mythmaking kicks in: after the ashes cooled, Atlanta branded itself not as ruined, but reborn — the Phoenix City.

In the years that followed — during a period known as Reconstruction — the federal government, led by Northern politicians, tried to rebuild the South. But it wasn’t just about repairing roads and railways; it was about reshaping the social order. About protecting the rights of newly freed Black Americans and redefining what citizenship meant in a country built on slavery. It was radical. It was hopeful. And ultimately, it was abandoned.

Why? Because the North stopped caring. And yes, I chose that word on purpose: they. stopped. caring.

Exhaustion, racism, political deals, and profit won out. Reconstruction quickly proved to be difficult and costly, and Northern leaders wanted to “move on” — to secure business interests, national unity, and political calm. Fighting for Black rights in the South? That wasn’t part of the long game because it wasn’t profitable. Because, remember, the North was racist too, and the system — then and now — is designed to reward greed.

So when Reconstruction became inconvenient, Northern leaders walked away. They made peace with the South by abandoning the people they promised to protect. And in that silence, something cruel took root.

Jim Crow wasn’t a new system. It was a recycled one — a resurrection. Slavery, patched and updated. If slavery was Version 1.0, then Jim Crow was the upgrade nobody asked for — just as violent, just as unjust, but now dressed in the language of “law and order.”

Jim Crow laws emerged after Reconstruction failed, codifying segregation and pushing Black families to the margins. Black Atlantans, however, fought back by building their own thriving neighborhoods, businesses, and schools — Morehouse, Spelman, Atlanta University — all symbols of Black achievement and progress.

But white resentment didn’t just simmer — it seethed.

And in 1906, it exploded.

A white mob — fueled by racist headlines and political power plays — tore through downtown Atlanta. They weren’t “protesters.” They weren’t “angry citizens.” They were violent extremists, and they came prepared to kill.

They hunted Black men and boys in the streets.

They looted Black-owned businesses.

They set homes on fire.

They beat women in front of their children.

They dragged people out of streetcars and bashed their skulls in — just to prove they could.

But the newspapers? They called it a “race riot.”

Because when white people commit mass violence, the press softens it — always has.

If Black Atlantans had done this to white citizens, it would’ve been called an uprising, an insurrection, maybe even a war.

But because it was white mobs spilling blood, it got rebranded: a “riot.” As if it was spontaneous. Chaotic. Out of character.

It wasn’t.

It was organized.

It was encouraged.

And it was a message: You are not safe here. You are not equal.

So let’s call it what it was:

Not a riot.

A massacre.

And a warning.

By 1911, the trauma was still fresh. Black Atlantans lived in a city where the promise of success was shadowed by the constant threat of violence. A place where your degree or your business or your hard work couldn’t protect you from the lash of Jim Crow. Where the police weren’t your protectors. Where your survival depended on your wits, your community, and a whole lot of prayer.

And that brings us to Pittsburgh — the neighborhood where Rosa Trice lived.

Pittsburgh was a Black working-class neighborhood, shaped by freedmen and laborers after the Civil War. It stood pressed up against the Atlanta & West Point Railroad tracks — steel veins of commerce that cut through the city, powered by Black labor but built for white wealth. The trains roared past homes they’d never stop for, even though these were the very people who them running.

Here, men worked as porters, factory hands, and rail workers. Women — like Rosa — often worked as laundresses, maids, or domestic workers, sometimes taking in extra washing just to make ends meet. These were hard, backbreaking jobs, but they built the heartbeat of the community.

Rosa lived here — in this neighborhood, on these streets. She walked the same dusty roads, heard the same trains rattling by, felt the same summer heat pressing against her skin. And when the killings began, it was here, in the places she knew, that the dread took hold.

By the time her name appeared in the headlines, she wasn’t the first. She was one among many. And still, the city’s leaders — the people with the power to act — did nothing.

Let me tell you about a house.

Not a mansion. Not a museum. Just a narrow, L-shaped, wood-frame house at 76 Gardner Street in Atlanta — tucked up against the railroad tracks, where the walls probably shook with every passing train, and soot settled on the porch like dust. Where sleep had to compete with steel on steel.

It wasn’t fancy. But it was owned.

By a Black family.

In post-slavery Atlanta.

And that? That means something.

The first name tied to the property where this home stood was John Trice. Born sometime between 1830 and 1840, he was almost certainly enslaved. And yet, by the 1880s, he appears in the Freedman’s Tax Digest as a landowner. Not a renter. Not a dependent.  The property he owned was 1/8th of an acre & covered two lots — 76 and 77 Gardner St. SW — was a pretty decent size for a working-class family.

Let me say that again, incase you misheard me: a man who was once owned, now owned land. In Atlanta. In the Deep South. Decades after slavery ended. That’s not just survival. That’s legacy.

He had at least one son — John Trice Jr., likely born enslaved, too, but freed in childhood. I couldn’t find anything on his mother, and he may have been the only surviving child. But I found him — reading, writing, working steadily and appearing in nearly every city directory from the 1890s to 1912. Always listed at Gardner Street. Same address. Same house. Sometimes even working alongside his father on the very same railroad tracks that ran beside their home.

In October of 1900, John Jr. married a black woman named Rosa Cooper.

I believe I found her in Jefferson County in 1880. She was 19 years old, and listed as the daughter of Willis and Kate Cooper. The oldest of several siblings. She couldn’t read or write, but I imagine she had big-sister energy — the kind who cooks when Mama’s tired, wrangles the younger kids, helps with the farm chores, keeps things going. The kind of girl who grows up fast because she has to.

But in the 1870 census? Rosa’s missing. The children who came after her are there, but she’s not. And that says a lot. Maybe she was working. Maybe she was sent away to live with relatives. Maybe she just wasn’t counted.

By 1900, Rosa was in Atlanta. Married. Close to 40. John Jr. was in his 40s, too. This wasn’t a starry-eyed teenage love story. This was two grown people choosing each other in the middle of a hard life. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was stability. But whatever it was — they built something real.

They made their home at 76 Gardner.

It was modest — no sewer system, no paved streets, no street lights, no sidewalk — but it had piped water. That felt like a small miracle. There was a porch, probably a backyard line for drying laundry, maybe chickens in a coop. It sat slightly isolated from the denser blocks nearby. Their street was quiet, minus the trains. But that home was theirs.

Rosa worked as a laundress.

And let me pause right here — because that job? It wasn’t “just” washing clothes.

It meant hauling water by bucket, boiling it over fire in a black iron pot, scrubbing on a washboard until your hands cracked, wringing heavy fabrics by hand, then starching and pressing every shirt and skirt with a cast-iron that weighed more than a newborn. It meant doing all of that for other people while your own laundry piled up. Rosa did that. Likely for white families that paid for her services.

The 1910 census says she’d had one child — but the child had died.

No name. No record. Just a single haunting line:

“Children born: 1. Living: 0.”

We’ll never know if the child was John’s, or from before. Never know if they died in infancy, or after a few sweet years. Never know where that grief lived in Rosa’s body. But I know it was there. And I believe the house held it, too.

By 1910, John Sr. disappears from the record. Maybe he died. Maybe he slipped out of the paperwork. I like to think he passed in that house — hearing the trains, watching his porch, knowing what he built. Maybe for the first time since slavery, he got to do what had been stolen from generations of Black families — pass something down. Not just a house, but a legacy. A place. Proof that he’d been here, and that his family had a right to stay.

I studied that neighborhood. In 1910, only three families in the surrounding area owned their homes. Everyone else rented or boarded. The Trices owned theirs outright. Their neighbors were Black laborers, rail workers, laundresses — just like Rosa. There was a widow with daughters a few houses down. An unmarried carpenter. A physician a few streets over. It wasn’t wealthy. But it was strong. Pittsburgh was one of the few places in Atlanta where Black families could build a life with even a sliver of security.

The house on Gardner was just a few blocks from McDaniel Street — a vital artery of Atlanta’s early Black neighborhoods. It was one of the first areas in the city with electric streetcars. And if you squint, you can imagine the hope of it — electricity creeping closer, paved roads on the horizon, dreams of permanence.

And still, I wonder — did the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, that massacre, scar Rosa and John? Were they hiding inside their home while white mobs stormed the city? Did they lose friends? Neighbors? Did they survive something unspeakable… just to be erased in another way?

Maybe they held on tighter to what they had after that — their home, their routines, each other. Maybe surviving that kind of terror made the everyday feel sacred. Or maybe it just made it heavier.

And then — five years later — something shifts.

In 1911, Rosa is listed in the city directory. Alone. Running her laundry business.

John isn’t listed at all.

A “John Trice” had been listed every year since the 1890s at the 76 Gardner Street residence. And then suddenly, that name is missing. And we don’t know why. Was he injured? Out of town? Too sick to work?

Or was this the beginning of something else?

We may never know what happened to John that winter. But we do know what happened to Rosa.

I imagine that Saturday night, January 21st, 1911 was cold for Atlanta.

In the kind of way that crept under doors and clung to the back of your throat. Rosa may have stoked the fire. Maybe she finished the laundry, or was getting ready for church the next morning. Maybe she was folding sheets by the stove, her hands still red from the lye and hot water.

Or maybe she was getting ready to leave. The newspaper doesn’t say where she may have been going — just where she ended up.

Early the next morning — Sunday, January 22nd — her body was found. About 75 yards from her home on Gardner Street, near the tracks that shaped her life the past 9 years.

Her skull was crushed.

Her jaw had been stabbed.

Her throat was cut.

And she had been dragged — through the dirt, through the cold, through whatever little dignity she had left.

The papers all she was “about 35.”

But Rosa, according to the 1910 census, was 50 years old.

She had:

• been born into slavery — and gained her freedom.
• Seen the Civil War end, and with it, a brief promise: Black men could vote. Black families could marry legally. Citizenship was guaranteed. Education became possible.
• She survived Reconstruction — and watched everything the war had promised get clawed back.
• She got married. To a man whose family owned their own home — a rare kind of security for Black families in the South.
• She had and lost a child.
• She survived the Atlanta Race Massacre.
• She worked as a laundress — hard enough, profitably enough, to make it into the city directory on her own.
• And she died steps from her home. Alone.

She had been lying there for hours.

That same day — Sunday — the city held a coroner’s inquest.

Which… side note? The coroner was legally blind — which honestly, initially alarmed me. But it turns out I’d confused “coroner” — the person who legally investigates a death — with “medical examiner,” the one who actually examines the body.

Just one of those weird little history facts you don’t expect to stumble across while researching a murder.

Anyway — the coroners verdict?

“Death by violence.”

And that was it.

Her husband, John Trice, was arrested.

And honestly? That made sense. I mean, if true crime podcasts have taught us anything, it’s usually the spouse, right?

He was taken from their home. Questioned. Locked up.

And I wonder — what was that like?

Because this was still deep in the Jim Crow era.

Atlanta didn’t have a single Black police officer until 1948.

So who questioned him? Who held him in that cell?

How did they treat him — a Black man whose wife had just been violently murdered?

We’ll never know.

No weapon was recovered.

No suspect was charged.

No deeper investigation occurred.

The connection that this could be part of something bigger, like someone targetting black women specifically, didn’t occur until the summer of 1911, after several more women had already been killed in the same manner.

But for John back in January? There was no evidence to hold him.

He was released shortly after.

And then — he went back home.

Back to the house where Rosa was murdered.

Where her body had been dragged, just feet from the porch.

And he kept living there.

Did people think he did it?

Did he think people thought he did it?

Was he innocent? Guilty? Grieving? Broken?

Was it hard for him to sleep in that house, now alone?

I don’t know.

John’s name appears one final time in the city directory — in 1912.

Still at 76 Gardner.

Listed only as a “laborer” now. No job title. No company he works for. No clarity.

But still there.

And then?

He disappears.

No more listings.

No death record I could find. For him, or Rosa, or his father.

Just absence.

And I’ll be honest, when I saw that by 1914 another family was living at 76 Gardner, I had big feelings! Like excuse me, I am not related to nor do I even know the Trice family, but that is THEIR home! Who are you and who said you could live here?! My research after this point is less thorough, because I needed to get the episode out, but from what I can tell:

By 1914, a man named Frank Johnson, a Black barber, is in the directory as living at 76 Gardner. Also now, another Johnson — Joseph, a carpenter and his wife Hattie, a laundress — are listed next door at 77 Gardner.

Two addresses on the land that had all belonged to the Trices for decades.

But the Johnsons don’t stay long either.

By 1916, 76 and 77 Gardner St. vanish.

Gone from the directory.

Gone from the map.

And when aerial photography finally captured that part of Atlanta in 1938?

It’s empty.

The house is gone.

The lot is bare.

The ground where Rosa walked.

The home John Sr. built.

The space where a child was mourned and a marriage lived and a woman murdered — erased.

And what happened to 76 Gardner St?

It was taken by the railroad.

No plaque. No marker.

No memory.

No one watching.

Except me. And now you.

I set out to tell the story of the Atlanta Ripper victims.

I wanted to name every woman and girl.

Trace each death.

Show the pattern.

Find their final resting places so they could be mourned — gone, but not forgotten.

I know — it was too ambitious.

So I stepped back.

I started with Rosa Trice. Because my initial research — incorrectly — listed her as the first victim.

And her story? It’s never really been told. Not fully. Not with care.

It’s just a few lines in a newspaper article. And none of them get her age right. Or maybe they do? But how am I supposed to trust the newspaper or the census, when I know I can’t fully trust either?

And y’all know me — I’m not a historian. I’m not a genealogist. I’m doing this for funsies.

But I tried.

I traced fragments — census lines, newspaper clippings, tax records, city directories.

I read between the gaps.

I tried to imagine not just how she died, but how she lived.

Because she was a whole person — not just two lines in a newspaper.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the act of trying — of remembering — matters.

Maybe Rosa is where we begin.

Because what started as a list of victims unraveled into something messier.

Names changed spellings.

People appeared, disappeared, resurfaced without clarity.

Some were never named at all.

The deeper I looked, the more uncertain it became.

Was it 10 victims? 24? 28?

Did it start in 1906? Did it stretch into the 1930s?

We don’t know.

And we probably never will.

And that’s the tragedy. That’s the failure.

These were people. Fellow humans.

Black women. Working-class women.

Domestic workers. Laundresses. Maids.

Walking home after long days cleaning someone else’s life.

They were stalked.

Their skulls crushed.

Their throats cut.

Their shoes taken.

Their bodies discarded like trash.

Some even died from shotgun wounds. Some from strangulation.

It’s too many to even count.

And the world — the United States — even the city of Atlanta barely blinked.

Black churches tried to raise awareness.

The Black community, and a few white sympathizers, tried to protect these women.

But what can you do when Jim Crow is law?

There were barely any headlines.

No outrage — just spectacle.

No serious investigation.

No justice.

Some victims were blamed for their own deaths.

Some were brushed off as just “domestic violence.”

Some were never recorded at all. Their bodies never discovered.

I wanted to say every name.

To give each woman dignity, memory, humanity.

But the recordkeeping? It’s chaos, to put it nicely.

And I’m just one person, sifting through fragments —

trying to make sense of what was never meant to be preserved.

So this time?

I’m remembering Rosa.

I’ll put a list of possible victims on the website, along with the sources — in case anyone else wants to pick up where I left off. Or if you’re just curious about the chaos I’ve been swimming in.

Because these women mattered.

Because Rosa’s life — not just her death — showed me everything I didn’t even want to understand.

About how the system allowed these murders to happen — and to remain unsolved.

About how historic Black neighborhoods get erased.

About what it meant to be a Black woman in the Jim Crow South.

And about how the system and the people who uphold it decide which history matters — and which disappears.

And remember:

The system isn’t some nameless, faceless beast.

It’s people. Real people.

People who design it, maintain it, and benefit from it.

It’s a human creation — and that means it can be changed.

We just have to decide it matters enough to try.

We talked about 76 Gardner Street — Rosa’s home. The house she shared with her husband, John. The house she died just steps from. And how, after 1915, it vanished from the city directory. I found the streets were renumbered in the 1920s, I thought maybe that was the issue.

But, no.

I firmly believe it was taken by the railroad it sat beside. Quietly, and legally.

So like… I’ve been reading legal cases lately. Against my will, thank you very much, and that’s a whole saga I won’t drag you into. But in the middle of that rabbit hole, I stumbled on a 1903 case: Gardner v. Georgia Railroad & Banking Co. For a second I froze — Gardner? Could it be Rosa’s street? I got so excited!

It wasn’t. Just a coincidence. Honestly, the case name should have given that away, but anyway, the ruling stuck with me.

Because what that case did say was that railroads had the right to condemn land — which basically means they could legally take privately owned property — not just once, but over and over, every time they decided it was “necessary.” Side tracks? Terminals? Expansion? If they wanted your land, they could legally take it.

Especially if you were Black. Especially if you were poor. You had no real power to stop them.

And fun fact? Railroads in the U.S. never really lost that power. They can still condemn land if they claim it serves the public good. And sure, you can fight it — but if the courts side with the railroad? You’re probably out of luck.

Rosa and John’s house literally sat beside the tracks. I saw it on a 1911 Sanborn Insurance map. (Side note: early 1900s insurance maps? Obscure, nerdy magic that feeds my soul. Shout out to those little hand-drawn porches and outhouses. I freaking love you.)

But the later insurance maps? Harder to find and sadly not digitized. And Atlanta won’t give me a library card because apparently, living several states away makes me unworthy. ….and I’m too stubborn to ask. I’m sure I could find the process to get one, I’m just at capacity.

So I turned to aerial photography.

And by 1938 — the first year those photos exist that I could find online for free — the house was already gone. The whole lot looks bare.

That land wasn’t forgotten. It was cleared. It was taken. And the railroad kept growing. By the 1970s, it expanded again — pushing deeper into the Pittsburgh neighborhood. Quietly eating it, block by block. No fire. No headline. Just legal paperwork. Just condemnation rights doing exactly what they were designed to do.

So no — Rosa and John didn’t just lose their home. It was erased. By design.

And when I realized I’d been staring at this empty lot on Google Maps, thinking I’d found 76 Gardner… only to see it has lived under the railroad tracks since the 1930s?

That hit me. Hard.

Because John Trice who was born into slavery once owned that home. He bought land. Built a home. Built a life. And now? That piece of history is buried beneath steel and gravel. It’s been erased, like it never mattered.

And if I’m wrong? Oh my goodness, I hope I’m wrong. I WANT to be wrong.

I would love for someone — a professional historian, a genealogist, a local expert, or just someone with time and access to records I couldn’t get — to prove me wrong.

To tell me Rosa lived longer. That she has a grave we can visit. That John’s name reappears. That the house at 76 Gardner stood for decades and I just missed it.

Because if what I’ve found is true — if Rosa’s life was erased, her body brutalized, and her home quietly swallowed by the railroad — then this isn’t just history.

It’s a blueprint.

And that? That’s what breaks me.

That hurts.

The rail yard where John and his father worked, just steps from Rosa’s kitchen, still stands. It’s old. Weathered. Rusted. But still there. And there’s a giant word painted on one of the buildings:

TERMINUS.

And that’s when it hit me.

Like, I know that name, but from where…

The Walking Dead.

Yup. That season. Early in the show. Rick and the gang’s wild shenanigans lead them to a rail yard that promises sanctuary — but delivers terror. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it. But spray-painted on a building in the rail yard is the word “Terminus,” and the tracks? They’re a trap.

Those episodes?

They were filmed right next to where Rosa Trice’s home now lies — buried beneath those same tracks. Where she was violently killed.

And it makes me wonder: how many stories are buried like that?

Think about it. Everyone knows Jack the Ripper. Hell, the name “Atlanta Ripper” is based on him. There are museums. Walking tours. Documentaries. Novels. Podcasts. Entire industries built around a mystery man who killed five white women in London — in the 1880s.

We’ve talked about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. That tragedy sparked labor reforms, memorials, a national reckoning. And don’t get me wrong — they should be remembered.

This isn’t the Tragedy Olympics. It’s not about ranking grief.

It’s about who we remember… and who we let disappear.

Here’s another contrast:

In 1913 — just two years after Rosa Trice was murdered and forgotten, and while Black women were still being stalked and killed by the Atlanta Ripper — the city of Atlanta erupted over the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white child laborer.

Her death made national headlines, as it should have. What happened to that child was horrible. And then, it continued to get worse.

Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, was accused of the crime, convicted, and sentenced to die.

But — and here’s where justice almost flickered — the evidence used to convict him was flimsy. So his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Unfortunately, some white people didn’t like that.

Violent white extremists — including a former governor, a judge, and other prominent white men from the community — stormed the prison, abducted Leo, and lynched him.

Then they posed for photographs beneath his body. You can still see those photos online today.

These men committed an act of terror against someone who was already being punished for a crime many people then — and nearly all historians now — agree he didn’t commit.

Because Leo’s real crime?

Was being Jewish.

And antisemitism was — and still is, today as you hear my words — alive and well.

Mary’s case stirred national outrage.

But for the Black women actively murdered at the same time?

No public mourning.

No headlines.

No trials.

Just silence.

So you have to ask —

Why didn’t the same urgency exist for Black women in Atlanta?

Why do some stories get preserved… and others get paved over?

We remember a fictional rail yard from a zombie show.

But not that a formerly enslaved man once bought land there. Built a home. Passed it to his son.

And that his daughter-in-law was murdered just steps from the porch — before the house itself was buried under the tracks.

If that makes you angry?

Good.

It should.

Because this isn’t just history.

This still happens.

Neighborhoods like Rosa’s — Black neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods — are still being erased every day. Bulldozed for stadiums, highways, luxury condos, or “urban revitalization.” It’s called progress. It’s called development. But it’s the same pattern, repackaged. The same quiet removal. The same shrug.

We still live in a country where Black women go missing, get murdered, and barely make the news. No manhunts. No headlines. Just grief that never gets a name.

And it’s not just Black women. Indigenous women have been disappearing — and dying — for generations. Right now, in 2025, families are still pleading for help. For coverage. For someone to care.

Campaigns like MMIW — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women — exist because the system still doesn’t care enough to look. Because when the victims sit at the intersection of race, gender, and poverty? They’re treated like they don’t matter.

The systems that let the Atlanta Ripper go undetected?

They’re not gone.

They’ve just evolved.

We still underfund Black communities.

We still neglect public services.

We still let certain crimes go unsolved — because, deep down, this country still sends the same message:

Some lives matter more than others.

Some deaths get justice.

Others get silence.

So if you’re listening and you feel angry — hold onto that.

Because Rosa’s story isn’t just about the past.

It’s about now.

It’s about who gets remembered, and who gets erased.

History doesn’t just live in books.

It lives in houses.

In our neighborhoods.

In the names we were never meant to learn.

And learning them?

Saying them?

That’s how we fight back.

That’s how we remember. That’s how we honor. That’s how we make sure silence doesn’t win.

Because Rosa mattered.

And so did every woman who was listed, but never lifted.

When we remember them, we say: You were seen. You were here. You mattered.

So, where does that leave us?

With a house that no longer stands. With lives we were never meant to learn about — and a silence that was carefully constructed, not accidental.

But silence doesn’t have to be the final word.

Rosa Trice mattered.

And so did every woman whose name did and didn’t make the headlines.

Whose life wasn’t recorded.

Whose death was ignored.

When we say their names, when we remember their homes, when we trace the footsteps they took on those dirt roads — even if all we have is a city directory and a ghost of an address — we’re refusing to let them disappear.

And that matters.

Because the system that let this happen? It’s not ancient history.

It’s still around. Just polished. Repackaged. A little rebranded. And easier to ignore if it doesn’t touch you directly.

So if this story made you uncomfortable — good.

If it made you sad, or angry, or restless — hold onto that.

Use it.

Because remembrance is resistance.

And curiosity? Curiosity is power.

If today’s episode stirred something in you — if it made you feel the weight of these forgotten women — don’t let it stop here.

You can help.

Start by learning about the MMIW movement — that’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It’s a crisis that’s still happening today, and awareness is just the beginning.

Support local and national organizations that search for missing persons — like the Black and Missing Foundation or NamUs.gov, the national database for missing and unidentified people in the U.S.

Because these stories — Rosa’s, and so many others — aren’t just the past. They are patterns. And breaking them starts with caring enough to learn. To notice. To say: this matters.

Thank you for being here.

For listening, feeling, and remembering alongside me.

Next time, we’ll shift gears to something spooky, but its so many fun spooky topics I haven’t decided which is my favorite yet.

Until then?

Be kind. Be curious. And be ready to make history.

Interested in learning more?

Interested in learning more?

Sadly, there are no books that truly center the Atlanta Ripper victims — their lives, their humanity, or the systems that erased them. Books with similar themes include:

White Rage by Carol Anderson: Reveals how American policy and backlash have systematically blocked Black progress after every civil rights gain.

And The Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney: A sweeping investigation of the Leo Frank case and lynching, exposing the antisemitism and politics behind it.

At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire: Connects the civil rights movement to the long fight against sexual violence toward Black women, starting in the Jim Crow era.

And visit our website at www.bygoneechoes.website for resources, information and more.