Racial terror lynching claimed the lives of thousands of African Americans between 1877 and 1950 as white Southerners sought to uphold white supremacy through fatal violence against Black women, men, and children, with state and federal officials largely tolerating these lawless killings and white elected officials, law enforcement officers, and community leaders often protecting or supporting mob violence. Public spectacle lynchings, sometimes attended by hundreds to thousands of white spectators, were meant to reinforce racial subordination, segregation, and fear throughout the African American community; more than 580 such lynchings have been documented in Georgia, including at least 4 in DeKalb County. On the night of August 20, 1945, Porter Flournoy Turner, a 50-year-old Black Atlanta taxi driver born in Greensboro, Georgia, was lynched near this site. By age 14 he was a wage-earning farm laborer for his family, and after moving to Atlanta's Fourth Ward in 1920 he worked 60 hours a week as a mechanic and porter at an auto dealership and full-service garage while also driving a white-owned taxi at night to support his wife and two sons. On the morning of August 21, his body was found brutally stabbed in the chest and back on the front lawn of a white physician's home on Springdale Road, with the cab abandoned across the street. DeKalb Police conducted only a cursory investigation. In June 1946, undercover informants working with Georgia's Assistant Attorney General revealed 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, and financial independence made Black people vulnerable to violent retaliation. Despite this evidence, no one was ever arrested or held accountable for Porter's Turner's lynching.