On June 13, 2026, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, the Strickland family, the African American Alliance and other community partners will gather to dedicate a historical marker honoring Denna and Estella Strickland. The marker, erected through the Georgia Historical Society’s statewide historical marker program, will stand in the Mount Calvary Baptist Church cemetery in Moreland, Coweta County, Georgia, where Denna and Estella are buried alongside generations of their family.
The dedication confronts an enduring pattern of racial terror carried out by deputized white citizens in Coweta County and forces public recognition of a long-suppressed act of racial violence.
On October 17, 1932, Coweta County bailiff Sam Thompson arrived at the Strickland family home with two white men, Cecil Hunter and Theo McDonald, claiming authority to arrest Denna Strickland’s son, M.C. Strickland, after witnessing a minor car accident involving him. Thompson was not involved in the accident and the wagon owner accepted repairs made by M.C.’s father, Ector Strickland. Nonetheless, reports state Thompson claimed to have been deputized to demand three dollars in damages. When the men arrived at the Strickland family home, M.C. was not there. Thompson forced his way inside the house and opened fire. Denna Strickland and her daughter Estella Strickland were killed. Sixteen-year-old Onelious Strickland was shot but survived, while fourteen-year-old Buford Strickland witnessed the killings. No charges were brought against Thompson, Hunter, or McDonald.
The marker will, for the first time, situate these events in the physical landscape where they occurred and acknowledge broader patterns of racial violence that plagued Coweta County during the Jim Crow era.
A Landscape Shaped by Deputized White Citizen Violence
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white civilians in the American South were often deputized by local officials and empowered to act as agents of law enforcement. Sheriffs assembled posses, granting temporary authority to private citizens to pursue suspects, thereby blurring the boundary between policing and mob violence. In practice, these deputized civilians often carried out acts of racial terror against Black residents with little fear of prosecution. Across Georgia, killings were routinely reported as the work of a “posse” or search party, language that masked the extrajudicial nature of the violence and helped sustain a system in which white civilians exercising official policing powers enjoyed impunity from prosecution for the crimes they committed.
An account of the killings of Denna and Estella Strickland invites engagement with a longstanding history of racial violence in Coweta County.
Records from the period document repeated examples. In 1889, a Black man named Henry Hines was tortured by a mob after being accused of stealing cotton. One of the men involved in the attack was later deputized to arrest him. In 1897, a deputized white man shot and killed a Black tenant farmer named George Daniel after claiming Daniel raised a piece of wood during an arrest attempt. No arrest followed.
The county was also the site of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, one of the most widely publicized acts of racial terror in United States history. A white mob tortured and burned Hose alive before thousands of spectators outside Newnan. In the aftermath of the lynching, another Black man, Elijah Strickland, was lynched by a deputized mob, having been accused of participating in the crime.
By the early twentieth century, county law enforcement, deputized civilians, and white supremacist organizations often operated in concert. Local newspapers openly praised the Ku Klux Klan for assisting officers of the law and maintaining order. Racial hierarchy was enforced through both social custom, official police authority, and deputized civilians.
Whose Names Were Remembered
The landscape surrounding the Strickland family cemetery suggests who Coweta County has honored and who has erased. Denna and Estella Strickland are buried at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Moreland. But the roads surrounding the cemetery bear the names of the men connected to the violence. The cemetery is on Cecil Hunter Road and is surrounded by roads named for members of the Hunter and Thompson families.
For decades, the men who participated in the events of October 17 remained visible in the public landscape of Coweta County. Meanwhile, despite calls for accountability and sustained coverage by the NAACP, Black clergy, and the Atlanta Daily World, the lives and tragic deaths of Denna and Estella Strickland remained largely absent from public memory.
The Strickland case was investigated by CRRJ media advocacy student Dakotah Kennedy in 2021. Kennedy conducted significant archival research, traveled to Coweta County for an event honoring the Stricklands, and helped bring renewed attention to the case.
The historical marker to be dedicated on June 13 is a step in this process of public acknowledgment. Historical markers cannot undo the violence of the past, but they can call upon us to confront its consequences.
Nearly a century after Denna and Estella Strickland were killed in their own home, this marker will ensure that their names and their story are part of Georgia’s public memory.
Top: The gravesites of Denna and Estella Strickland, in Mount Calvary Baptist Church cemetery in Moreland, Coweta County, Georgia.
This article was written by Lydia Beal, CRRJ’s Research Associate.
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