Editing Taylor County, Georgia (section)

==History==
Taylor County was created on January 15, 1852, by an act of the [[Georgia General Assembly]] from portions of [[Macon County, Georgia|Macon]], [[Marion County, Georgia|Marion]] and [[Talbot County, Georgia|Talbot]] counties. The county is named for [[Zachary Taylor]], twelfth [[President of the United States]].<ref>{{cite book | url=http://www.kenkrakow.com/gpn/t.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030917143007/http://www.kenkrakow.com/gpn/t.pdf |archive-date=September 17, 2003 |url-status=live| title=Georgia Place-Names: Their History and Origins | publisher=Winship Press | author=Krakow, Kenneth K. | year=1975 | location=Macon, GA | pages=222 | isbn=0-915430-00-2}}</ref>

Taylor County is also widely known for its history of racism and Jim Crow era subjugation of its African-American populace, which continued long into the 20th century.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Klibanoff|first=Hank|date=October 13, 2010|title=Maceo Snipes – The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project|url=https://coldcases.emory.edu/maceo-snipes/|access-date=October 13, 2010}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|last=Barry|first=Dan|date=October 13, 2020|title=Killing and Segregated Plaque Divide Town|website=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18land.html}}</ref> An especially egregious case is the 1946 lynching of [[Murder of Maceo Snipes|Maceo Snipes]], a World War II veteran and the first African-American to vote in Taylor County, for which he was murdered by the KKK on his doorstep in the hours following. Although not immediately succumbing to his wounds, Mr. Snipes death was eventually caused by the lack of availability of "black blood", or transfusions from a black person, at a [[Butler, Georgia]] hospital to which he was forced to walk three miles with gunshot wounds to his back. The murderers were never tried or otherwise held to account for their crimes, despite the involvement of the FBI. Mr. Snipes' murder was a motivating factor in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s first and only letter to the ''[[The Atlanta Journal-Constitution|Atlanta Constitution]]'' at age 17, decrying the terrorism [[Moore's Ford lynchings|experienced by black citizens]]<ref>{{Cite web|date=October 13, 2020|title=4359004-GBI-Moore-s-Ford-File|url=https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4359004-GBI-Moore-s-Ford-File.html}}</ref> in the state at that time, which occurred largely at the hands of or with the blessing of the local and state authorities.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Kaminsky|first=Mia|date=October 13, 2020|title=Self-Defense Alibis and the Myth of Black Criminality|url=https://coldcases.emory.edu/self-defense-alibis-and-the-myth-of-black-criminality/|access-date=October 13, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Black Veterans Killed in Fight for Democracy in U.S.|url=https://www.zinnedproject.org/collection/black-veterans/}}</ref>