Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of black people in the United States were victims of lynching and racial violence. The lynching of African Americans during this era was a form of racial terrorism intended to intimidate black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation, and it was most prevalent in the South. After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to violent abuse of racial minorities and decades of political, social and economic exploitation. Lynching became the most public and notorious form of terror and subordination, as white mobs were usually permitted to engage in racial terror and brutal violence with impunity while black people were pulled out of jails or turned over to mobs by law enforcement officials unwilling to protect them. Terror lynchings often included burning and mutilation, sometimes in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. Many victims' names were not recorded and will never be known, but more than 580 documented lynchings took place in Georgia alone. Black men lynched in Troup County during this era included Willis Hodnett in 1884, Samuel Owensby in 1913, Austin Callaway in 1940, and Henry Gilbert, a Troup County resident killed in Harris County in 1947. Lynchings of African Americans occurred with alarming frequency in Troup County and surrounding areas, where for decades racial violence was a fact of life and African Americans were denied basic security of person and property. In fall 1940, Warren Temple Methodist Church became a center of protest after Austin Callaway, also known as Austin Brown, was lynched in LaGrange on September 7, 1940, when armed men took him from the local jail, shot him repeatedly, and left him to die on a rural road. With no meaningful response from white officials, the African American community, led by Rev. L.W. Strickland, pastor at Warren Temple, held mass meetings and organized the first branch of the NAACP in LaGrange. In late October, Strickland wrote Thurgood Marshall that the city had settled the matter by ignoring it. The lynching remained uninvestigated, and no one was ever held responsible. In January 2017, the Chief of Police, Mayor, and city leaders formally apologized for the LaGrange Police Department's role in the lynching of Austin Callaway.