Lynchings of African Americans occurred with alarming frequency throughout the United States, including Troup County and surrounding areas. For decades, racial violence was a fact of life. African Americans were denied basic security of person and property. Fear of police, courts, and night-riding terrorists was powerful. In fall 1940, historic…
On the night of August 20, 1945, Porter Flournoy Turner, a 50-year- old Black Atlanta taxi driver, was lynched near this site. Born in Greensboro, Georgia, Mr. Turner was a wage-earning farm laborer for his family by age 14 before moving to Atlanta’s Fourth Ward in 1920. Mr. Turner worked…
2.4 miles east, at Moore’s Ford Bridge on the Apalachee River, four African-Americans – George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Dorsey Malcom (reportedly 7 months pregnant) – were brutally beaten and shot by an unmasked mob on the afternoon of July 25, 1946. The lynching followed an…
White mobs lynched at least four Black men in Gainesville between 1877 and 1950 in complete disregard for the legal system and their constitutional rights. On February 17, 1891, a white mob abducted Tony Champion from his jail cell and hanged him from a tree near NE 6th Street. Just…