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Nearly 8 Decades Later, an Apology for a Lynching in Georgia

Ernest Ward, right, the N.A.A.C.P. president in Troup County, Ga., said he had “a newfound respect” for Louis M. Dekmar, the police chief in LaGrange.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

LaGRANGE, Ga. — Some people here had never heard about the lynching of Austin Callaway — about how, almost 77 years ago, he was dragged out of a jail cell by a band of masked white men, then shot and left for dead.

Some people never forgot.

But on Thursday evening, the fatal cruelties inflicted upon Mr. Callaway — long obscured by time, fear, professional malfeasance and a reluctance to investigate the sins of the past — were acknowledged in this city of 31,000 people when LaGrange’s police chief, Louis M. Dekmar, who is white, issued a rare apology for a Southern lynching.

“I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin’s lynching, both through our action and our inaction,” Chief Dekmar told a crowd at a traditionally African-American church. “And for that, I’m profoundly sorry. It should never have happened.”

He also said that all citizens had the right to expect that their police department “be honest, decent, unbiased and ethical.”

“In Austin’s case, and in many like his, those were not the police department values he experienced,” he said.

The apology for the Sept. 8, 1940, killing is part of a renewed push across the American South to acknowledge the brutal mob violence that was used to enforce the system of racial segregation after Reconstruction: In a 2015 study, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit based in Montgomery, Ala., documented 4,075 of what it called the “racial terror lynchings” of blacks by white mobs in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

The group has begun construction of a memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, which could open by March 2018.

To Chief Dekmar, however, the apology in the town he has called home since 1995 is about more than righting history’s wrongs. It is also an effort, in the age of the Black Lives Matter movement, to address some of the deepest roots of minority mistrust in the police, and create a better working relationship between officers and the community.

“It became clear that something needed to be done to recognize that some things we did in the past are a burden still carried by officers today,” Chief Dekmar said in a recent phone interview. “Institutions are made up of people, and relationships go like this: Before you trust somebody, you need to know that they know that they did you wrong, and that you’re stepping up and apologizing for it.”

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A Sept. 9, 1940, article in The New York Times about the lynching of Austin Callaway. The fatal cruelties inflicted upon him are to be acknowledged Thursday evening.Credit...The New York Times

Chief Dekmar, 61, a New Jersey native raised in Oregon, embraces a view of law enforcement that extends beyond the narrow goals of protecting the good and locking up the bad.

He tends to speak about his department as one organ of a broader social body, though one that is perhaps more exposed than others to its ills. He leads regular meetings of a “community outreach committee” in which he shares with other civic leaders what his officers see on the streets — homelessness, juvenile delinquency, children with learning and literacy issues — and looks for ways that various small-town entities might work together to solve them. He has also sought to address trust issues: The department, he said, has mandated the use of body cameras on officers for the last five years.

The chief became familiar with the lynching of Mr. Callaway only about two or three years ago, when one of his officers overheard two older African-American women who were looking at old photos of the LaGrange police on display at the headquarters building.

One woman said to the other, “They killed our people.”

Chief Dekmar began researching the episode but found, he said, only “sketchy reports” — there was “no investigation I could find, no arrest, no follow-up by the media.”

Indeed, the details of the crime appear to have been deliberately obscured for the 1940-era residents of LaGrange. Then, in 2014, Jason M. McGraw, a student at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, wrote a research paper about the lynching. He noted that while newspapers around the country had reported that a band of masked whites had abducted Mr. Callaway, the local paper, The LaGrange Daily News, wrote only that Mr. Callaway had died “as a result of bullets fired by an unknown person or group of individuals.”

The paper’s headline on the Sept. 9, 1940, article declared, “Negro Succumbs to Shot Wounds.”

Mr. Callaway is generally believed to have been 16 or 18 years old on Sept. 7, the day he was arrested and charged with trying to assault a white woman. According to Mr. McGraw’s research, six white men arrived at the jail that night with at least one gun, forced the jailer to open the cell and forced Mr. Callaway into a car. He was driven to a spot eight miles away and shot in the head and arms.

He was later found by a roadside and taken to a hospital, where he died.

Mr. McGraw noted that the investigation of Mr. Callaway’s death fell to the town’s police chief, J. E. Matthews, and the Troup County sheriff, E. V. Hillyer, but that an investigative report was never made public.

Chief Dekmar has learned that generations of African-Americans were well aware of what happened.

“There are relatives here and people who still remember,” he said. “Even if those people are not still alive, down through the generations, that memory is still alive. That’s a burden that officers carry.”

As Chief Dekmar learned more about the case, he decided that something must be done to acknowledge it. The city he has sworn to protect is less than 70 miles southwest of Atlanta. Before the Civil War, LaGrange was a wealthy hub in Georgia’s cotton kingdom: Troup County, of which LaGrange is the seat, had the state’s fifth-largest number of slaves.

Today, according to recent census figures, the city is about 48 percent black and 45 percent white. A Kia plant in nearby West Point, Ga., suggests an economic future for the area beyond the textile industry that once sustained it. But nearly one in three LaGrange residents live in poverty.

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The audience at LaGrange College on Thursday for a speech by Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Residents say race relations here, as in many multicultural American communities, run the gamut from friendly to frayed, depending on the day and the issue. When LaGrange College, a private liberal arts school in town, announced that it had invited Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, to speak at a Martin Luther King Jr. event scheduled for Thursday, protests poured in, in part because Mr. Lewis had questioned the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.

On Thursday, some businesses around town bore signs promoting Mr. Lewis’s appearance, while some homes featured pro-police signs declaring “Back the Blue.”

For the last two years or so, city and county residents, including Chief Dekmar, have been engaged in a program of racial reconciliation and racial trust-building. At a monthly meeting this summer, Chief Dekmar approached the president of the county N.A.A.C.P. chapter, Ernest Ward, and asked if he would help set up a public apology for the lynching.

Mr. Ward served on the police force for nearly two decades starting in the mid-1980s. He acknowledged that some of his fellow black residents harbored an us-versus-them attitude toward the police. “I lost many friends when I became a police officer,” he said, “because they felt that I sold out.”

He was asked how much the apology would help with day-to-day police work. “I believe it’s a start,” he said. “And it’s helped me to have a newfound respect for Chief Dekmar.”

“Historically certain people in the white race don’t like to bring up the past when it may not show a good light on their ancestors,” Mr. Ward said. “And so they would prefer to keep things hidden.”

Chief Dekmar issued his apology to relatives of Mr. Callaway on Thursday night at Warren Temple United Methodist Church here.

The month after the shooting, Mr. McGraw noted, a church minister named L. W. Strickland wrote to Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice who was then a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P., telling him that the local branch of the rights group had asked the authorities to look into the case, but that “nothing is being done — not even acknowledgment of our requests.”

Some white LaGrange residents said on Thursday that they were deeply skeptical about whether the apology would have any practical effect. They noted that the crime took place before most people here were even born.

“I don’t care if they apologize or don’t,” said Jessie East, 74, who works at a furniture and appliance shop. “It’s not going to change a thing that happened 77 years ago.”

But to others, including one of Mr. Callaway’s relatives, the apology was a step toward healing.

“I speak your name, Austin Callaway, and ask God for forgiveness for the people that did this inhumane thing to you,” Deborah Tatum, a descendant of Mr. Callaway, told the congregation. “Some might say ‘forgiveness’? And I say to you that I believe God when he tells us that there is power and freedom in forgiveness.”

Alan Blinder reported from LaGrange, and Richard Fausset from Atlanta.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: White Police Chief Apologizes for a 1940 Southern Lynching. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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