Lynching in America / The Lynching of Porter Turner

Lynching in America, also, The Lynching of Porter Turner. Community Remembrance Project. Lynching in America. Racial terror lynching claimed the lives of thousands of African Americans between 1877 and 1950. Following the Civil War, white Southerners sought to uphold an ideology of white supremacy and used fatal violence against Black women, men, and children to reinforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynching emerged as the most public and notorious form of racial terrorism, and state and federal officials largely tolerated these lawless killings by not holding white mob participants and terrorist groups accountable for their crimes. African Americans who pursued social, political, and economic opportunities were often targeted as threats to racial hierarchy. White elected officials, law enforcement officers and community leaders were all implicated in racial terror violence as they often protected or actively supported white mob violence. Public spectacle lynchings were often attended by hundreds to thousands of white spectators without fear of legal repercussions. Lynching was ultimately meant to send a broader message of white domination and to instill fear within the entire African American community. Although the names and stories of many victims may never be known, over 580 racial terror lynchings have been documented in Georgia alone, with at least 4 in DeKalb County., The Lynching of Porter Turner. 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 60 hours a week as a mechanic and porter at an auto dealership and full-service garage. He supplemented his income to support his wife and two sons by driving a white-owned taxi at night. On the morning of August 21, Mr. Turner's body was found brutally stabbed to death in the chest and back on the front lawn of a white physician's home on Springdale Road. The cab he had been driving was abandoned on the curb across the street. DeKalb Police conducted only a cursory investigation. In June 1946, it became clear that Mr. Turner had been a victim of lynching violence after undercover informants working with Georgia's Assistant Attorney General announced that members of the Klavalier Klub - a strong arm of the Ku Klux Klan tasked with terroristic raids - had boasted during a covert meeting of killing him. During this era, the Atlanta Klan, police departments, and white taxi owners conspired to protect white economic control. Financial independence made Black people vulnerable to violent retaliation. Despite the new evidence of who committed the murder, no one was ever arrested or held accountable for Mr. Turner's lynching.