Talk:Lynching of Austin Callaway

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Doncram in topic location info

location info

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It's not crucial for the article, but I notice the news coverage does not link to a specific place, while the jail he was taken from was in fact a specific place that could be mentioned. It must have been the jail of the Troup County Courthouse, Annex, and Jail, built in 1939, that he was taken from, I think. The courthouse still exists, but the jail is gone however. So video news coverage doesn't have a meaningful place for journalist to stand in front of, while reporting, so they use a town square in LaGrange instead. Or the church where the memorial service was held. --doncram 15:03, 28 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

I agree that it was likely the county jail, although the article refers to the Troup Together report and saying he was taken from the city jail. It is not available online to read, and no other source appears to identify his having been taken from a city jail. It seems unlikely that the city would have had two jails at the time, and the county courthouse and jail would have been dominant.Parkwells (talk) 19:20, 31 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
Right, I saw that mention of a "city jail", which I think must have been wording that was perhaps a tad careless on the part of the reporter, unless it can simply be interpreted to mean a "jail in the city", which would apply to the county jail. The practice for jails in Georgia at the time, as far as I can tell from working on articles about numerous historic jails in Georgia, was that there was usually one county jail serving all the towns in a county. A current exception to that pattern is Union County and Towns County, which share one jail (as covered in this article about a historic jail in Union County. It is easy to believe that a given jail would sometimes be called by the name of the city in which it is located, rather than by its official county-based name. --doncram 21:01, 31 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wording

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I understand the intent of referring to the white abductors as a mob, to emphasize that they were operating outside the law, but the word "mob" means a large group or crowd of disorderly people. Most of us have seen the photos of hundreds or thousands of people attending a lynching - that's a mob. I changed it to "group" and "gang" but emphasized that they were operating extrajudicially.Parkwells (talk) 19:20, 31 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • Per WP:STICKTOSOURCE, I think we should call it a mob b/c reliable sources seem to do so. E.g. CNN says, "The mob ordered the lone jailer at gunpoint to open Callaway's cell and fled into the night with him." [1] And the Northeastern University source says, "Austin Callaway was just sixteen years old when he was shot and killed by a lynch-mob in LaGrange, Georgia in 1940." [2] Everymorning (talk) 19:25, 31 January 2017 (UTC)Reply