The Mary Turner lynching rampage
16-24 May 1918; Mary Turner was killed on 19 MayFolsom Bridge over the Little River, Brooks and Lowndes county line, Brooks County, GA
Mobs lynched at least eleven Black people across Brooks and Lowndes counties in a week. Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was killed for publicly objecting to her husband's lynching.
Note: Describes the killing of a pregnant woman and her unborn child in graphic terms.
On 16 May 1918 Hampton Smith, a white planter in Brooks County known for bailing Black men out of jail to work his farm and then beating them, was shot and killed by Sidney Johnson, one of those workers. Over about two weeks white mobs ranged across Brooks and Lowndes counties, lynching at least eleven Black people, most of whom had no connection to the killing.
Hayes Turner, lynched on 18 May, was among them. His wife Mary Turner, thirty-three and eight months pregnant, said publicly that the lynching was unjust and that she would swear out warrants against the men who did it. On 19 May a mob took her to Folsom Bridge over the Little River, hanged her by her ankles, burned her clothes from her body, cut her unborn child from her and killed it, then shot her.
No one was ever charged. Mary Turner's killing became the centrepiece of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders' campaign for the Dyer anti-lynching bill, which the US Senate killed by filibuster in 1924. Roughly 500 Black residents left the two counties, part of the departure that carried hundreds of thousands north in those years.
Counts of the dead in that week vary; contemporary investigators documented at least eleven killings.
Sources
- LynchingNew Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia Humanities and University of Georgia Pressgeorgiaencyclopedia.orgThe New Georgia Encyclopedia's survey of lynching in Georgia, including the Brooks and Lowndes county killings and Mary Turner.
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3rd edition)Equal Justice Initiative (2017)eji.org