7/26/2023 0 Comments Callaway gpsy white![]() ![]() Initially, he said, he met resistance because people didn’t know where it would lead. He wanted to develop a similar program for LaGrange. After he became mayor, Thornton researched racial reconciliation efforts in other communities. ![]() In 2013, Jim Thornton, a white Republican, was elected the 42nd mayor of LaGrange, defeating a black Democrat and continuing an unbroken record of white mayors in a town roughly divided between black and white.Īs a city council member, Thornton had heard people talk about racial divisions in the community for years, but felt he’d heard few answers. LaGrange city leaders tout the city’s promising future with some $1 billion in recent corporate investment that will create 2,100 new jobs.īut the rosy outlook conceals a long legacy of racial inequality. The area is near West Point Lake and Callaway Gardens, top recreation destinations in the state, and the city itself is growing at a time when many small Georgia towns are shrinking. LaGrange today is a flourishing town of 31,000, where the cotton mills of a century ago have been supplanted by auto parts manufacturers supporting the nearby Kia Motors plant. “We’re starting to tear down walls that have existed for years.” “It’s broken some barriers between the races,” said Ernest Ward, president of the Troup County chapter of the NAACP. There even have been whispers of who may have been involved. Some still remember the fear Callaway's brutal killing struck in the black community, and how stories spread about what triggered his murder. The apology - believed to be the first of its kind - drew worldwide attention to this town 60 miles southwest of Atlanta and shook loose local memories, such as the Bowens'. Explore It also took place two months after the city’s white chief of police, Lou Dekmar, publicly apologized for his agency’s failure to protect Callaway while in custody and for its failure to investigate his murder. The dedication culminated two years of work among black and white citizens seeking racial reconciliation in a place where violence and intimidation against African Americans were never fully acknowledged. “We speak their names today and from this day forward we will tell the stories to our families.” “We’re going to speak these names today, amen,” intoned Deborah Tatum, a family member of Callaway who grew up in LaGrange not knowing the story of his murder. Relatives of both Callaway and Gilbert joined clergy and community members at Warren Temple United Methodist Church for the solemn ceremony. Saturday, black and white residents of the county gathered to dedicate a historic marker memorializing Callaway’s lynching and three others documented in the area: Willis Hodnett in 1884 Samuel Owensby in 1913 and Henry Gilbert, a Troup County resident who was lynched in neighboring Harris County, in 1947. In LaGrange, a public examination of Callaway’s lynching has sparked a reckoning of the violence committed against black Troup residents during the Jim Crow era, and helped launch a civic movement to make amends. The revelation, and the details of the Bowen family’s attempt to save the dying man, paint a fuller picture of the hushed-up crime. This month, Bowen showed an AJC reporter and local residents where Callaway was murdered, revealing the location for the first time. No one was ever prosecuted and as the decades passed, silence helped the bloody episode recede from memory. ![]()
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