Between 1865 and 1950, thousands of Black people were lynched across the United States as white Southerners resisted equal rights for African Americans and sought to uphold white supremacy through intimidation and fatal violence. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of racial terrorism and often included death by gunshot, burning, or mutilation as well as hanging. Black people were lynched for resisting economic exploitation, violating perceived social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or being accused of crimes even when there was no evidence. White mobs often seized victims from police custody or killed them in broad daylight before spectators, while law enforcement frequently failed to resist and sometimes participated, and state and federal officials largely tolerated these killings by failing to investigate or hold perpetrators accountable. At least 595 racial terror lynchings were documented in Georgia between 1865 and 1950, including at least 36 in Fulton County. On the morning of September 24, 1906, the body of 30-year-old Zeb Long was found hanging from a tree in East Point after a mob of at least 50 white men stormed the local jail around 5:00 am, kidnapped him, dragged him about half a mile west of the jail, and lynched him. His arrest came during the wider white mob violence that began two days earlier in the Atlanta area, when at least 5,000 white men and boys terrorized and violently attacked Black men, women, and children in the four-day 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Police in East Point had arrested Long on the evening of September 23 for “incendiary talk about the way white people were treating negroes” and placed him in a small wooden jail described as a flimsy shack, but took no further precautions. Though Long begged for his life, he was killed, and on September 25 a coroner's jury said he had been killed by unknown parties. No further investigation was made, and no one involved in the mob violence that terrorized East Point's Black community and lynched Long between September 22 and 25 was held accountable.