May Eleventh, Nineteen Seventy: Six Men Shot in the Back
Near Augusta, Georgia
On May ninth, nineteen seventy, the body of Charles Oatman, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was removed from the Augusta city jail and delivered to a local mortuary. He had been beaten to death while in custody. The medical findings included cigarette burns, marks from a fork, and a deep wound in the back of his head. He had been held in the jail for several weeks. When the Black community of Augusta demanded answers about his death, officials stonewalled.
Two days later, on the evening of May eleventh, somewhere between two thousand and three thousand people gathered in the streets. They ransacked and burned businesses across a one hundred and thirty block area of the city, causing an estimated one million dollars in damage. It was the largest urban uprising in the Deep South during the civil rights era. The grievances behind it were not only about Charles Oatman. They were the accumulated weight of documented police brutality, wrongful arrests, and systematic mistreatment in the county jail over many years.
Georgia Governor Lester Maddox authorized force. Officers received shoot-to-kill orders from their captain. The National Guard and State Patrol were deployed. When it was over, six Black men were dead, all of them shot in the back by white police officers. An FBI investigation followed. Federal trials of two white officers were held. No one was convicted.
James Brown, who was on tour when the news reached him, flew home to Augusta. He went on the radio and urged calm. His presence, his voice, and the music his station played helped bring people off the streets.
The uprising fundamentally altered Augusta's political landscape. It galvanized organizing that opened economic and political doors for Black residents that had been closed for decades. A Georgia Public Broadcasting podcast series, 'Shots in the Back,' documented the events in detail in recent years. The community is still working out what justice looks like for what happened those two nights.
