Lynching of Austin Callaway

In early September 1940, a white woman in LaGrange, Georgia — the county seat of Troup County — reported to local police that she had been attacked by a young Black man. Austin Callaway, sometimes recorded as Austin Brown, was arrested as a suspect; sources disagree on his age, variously reporting him as 16, 18, or 24. A 2017 report by the local group Troup Together, based on his death certificate and family history, concluded he was likely 24 at the time.

Callaway was held in the city jail in the basement of LaGrange's city hall. Early on the morning of September 8, 1940, around 2 a.m., six white men, who may have been masked and were armed with at least one gun, broke into the jail. They forced 20-year-old jailer S.J. Willis, the sole law enforcement officer present, at gunpoint to open Callaway's cell. The men took Callaway from the jail, drove him outside town, and shot him multiple times, leaving him for dead. He was found later that day by a passing motorist, alive but with gunshot wounds to his head, hands, and arms. He was taken to a hospital, where he died of his injuries that day.

Newspapers reported at the time that the police chief and county sheriff said they were investigating the shooting, but no investigative report has ever been found, and neither county nor state police pursued the case; the FBI did not investigate such cases at that time. The local LaGrange Daily News ran a single, brief article describing an unexplained shooting and did not use the word "lynching," while national and regional papers — including the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Carolina Times, Philadelphia Tribune, and Pittsburgh Courier — reported it as a lynching. Rev. Louie Strickland of Warren Temple Methodist Church wrote to NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall about the case, and the NAACP cited Callaway's death in a September 1940 letter to Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley in support of federal anti-lynching legislation, identifying it as the sixth verified lynching in the United States that year. The Georgia Commission on Interracial Cooperation conducted a contemporaneous inquiry questioning the lack of protection for Callaway and delayed press coverage.

No individuals were ever charged or identified as the perpetrators, and the case remained without official resolution for decades.

In the 21st century, a church discussion group's research led to the founding of Troup Together, which published a 2017 report, "Erasing Austin Callaway," examining inconsistencies in the original press coverage. On January 27, 2017, LaGrange Police Chief Louis M. Dekmar publicly apologized at a reconciliation service at Warren Temple United Methodist Church for the police department's role in failing to protect Callaway, calling the department's action and inaction in the case a source of profound regret. The city's mayor also apologized for officials' 1940 failure to prevent the lynching, and the LaGrange Daily News editor acknowledged in a January 2017 editorial that the paper had minimized its original coverage. In March 2017, the City of LaGrange and the Equal Justice Initiative installed a lynching memorial to Callaway at the church.