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…
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 December 23, 1936, the body of a 40-year-old Black man who had been lynched named Mack Henry Brown was found floating at the confluence of Roswell’s Vickery Creek and the Chattahoochee River. Mr. Brown, who lived and worked at an apartment house in Atlanta, had been missing for over…
On September 20, 1916, Henry White, a 24-year-old African American was lynched by a large white mob in the city of Durham in Walker County. Georgia. Mr. White had come to Durham from Chattanooga, Tennessee and worked as a miner in the Pittsburg-Durham coal mines. Earlier that morning. it was…
Near this location on August 17, 1915, Leo M. Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, was lynched for the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory employee. A highly controversial trial fueled by societal tensions and anti-Semitism resulted in a guilty verdict in 1913. After…
On September 10, 1912, a 24-year-old Black man named Rob Edwards was lynched and hung in downtown Cumming, Georgia. During this era, deep racial hostility burdened Black people with presumptions of guilt, often resulting in accusations that were unfounded and unreliable. Mr. Edwards was one of several Black men arrested…