A sixteen-year-old boy was beaten to death in a Georgia jail cell in 1970. When his community protested, police killed six men over one night. Every single one of the six was shot in the BACK. Augusta, Georgia. Charles Oatman was mentally disabled and had been jailed over the accidental death of his young niece. He was put in a cell with adult men. He was found dead with burns and injuries that the coroner could not explain as anything but a beating. The city met the protests with force. Six Black men died that night: Charlie Mack Murphy, Mack Wilkerson, William Wright, Sammy McCullough, John Stokes and John Bennett. The autopsies all showed entry wounds in the back. None of the six had been identified as having done anything in particular. One was a man walking home. The state said shotguns had been used by officers and that the deaths were a tragic consequence of disorder. No one was prosecuted for any of the six deaths. Two men were later convicted in the killing of Charles Oatman — his cellmates. For fifty years the city did not mark it. There are now historical markers and a growing local campaign for an inquiry, driven mostly by relatives who were children at the time. Six men, six shots in the back, in 1970, in a city with a newspaper and a television station, and it has no name anybody recognises. The Augusta killings are the kind of buried history that made this us decide to remember the names, confront what happened, and ask why so many families were left without answers. Check it out savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…