The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Savage but not uncommon — one story of a lynching
Georgian Mary Turner among many named at Montgomery site.
The lynching memorial that opened last week in Montgomery has exposed anew the barbarism and savagery of white supremacy in the post-Civil War South.
The memorial lists thousands of people across the country, many of them tortured, all of them murdered, for any reason the white mob could devise — or for no reason at all. The documented tally in Georgia was 637. Some in Georgia today don’t know about these crimes. Some can’t forget about them. But from the time of Reconstruction until well into the 20th century, these horrors were and
remain part of our story.
A database maintained by the Tuskegee Institute offers a spare record of unimaginable carnage in Georgia: six men lynched for arson in April 1899 in Palmetto.
Three months later, eight men lynched in Early County, all accused of “rape and robbery.” In 1892, a man lynched in Dalton because he “voted Democratic.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery commemorates the deaths of these and 5,000 other people taken by mobs that hanged, shot or burned their victims to death. Sometimes they did all three.
So Mary Turner knew she was about to die.
It was May 19, 1918, almost exactly 100 years ago. The lynch mob in Brooks County had already tortured and killed eight black men in two days — retaliation for the shooting death of a white planter.
Turner’s husband, Hayes, was one of the dead. What happened to him, and what would happen to Mary, reflected the brutal social order of the day.
“The foundation of the South was white supremacy,” said E.M. Beck, a retired sociologist at the University of Georgia and co-author of “A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings 1882-1930.” “And when you start getting challenges to social and economic order, then you start (moving toward) things that support the old order. Black folks weren’t seen as part of the community. They were seen as necessary ‘foreign’ labor. The white folks were ‘the community.’ When those boundaries began to break down, then you begin to see this violence.”
As the mob carried Mary Turner to the Little River, which forms the border of Brooks and Lowndes counties, they took her past the tree where the mutilated corpse of her husband still hung. Near the Folsom Bridge, they hung Mary Turner upside down by the ankles, doused her body with gasoline and burned her clothes off.
That was just the beginning.
“This is one of the more heinous and brutal ones in terms of butchering people,” said Mark Patrick George, a former Valdosta State University sociology professor who helped put up a memorial marker for Turner. “But that wasn’t that uncommon.” Mary Turner’s “crime”? Having the audacity to complain about her husband’s lynching, insisting he wasn’t guilty, saying she would report the names of the men who killed him. Or as the newspapers reported at the time, making “unwise remarks.”
‘There was a definite silence’
The psychological impact of those killings continues to affect families a century later.
When Charles T. Forehand visited Brooks County, he would stay with his great-grandmother, the younger sister of Hayes
Turner. She told of how part of his bloodline was exterminated in the woods 100 years ago. And Forehand remembers once venturing into those woods alone.
“I started taking pictures of the area — and there was a definite silence. No birds. No crickets. Nothing,” he said. “When I got back to my car it was almost as if I was having an out of body experience.”
Lavon Gant, whose grandfather was Mary Turner’s brother, lived a different experience. She moved to New Jersey when she was 3 but often visited the area as a child. Her mother made sure she knew every detail of the lynching.
“We were always inquisitive about race relations and our family,” said Gant, 70. “What my mother told me always stayed with me because it was so horrific, and I could not believe that something like that could happen. It was so horrific. It has never left me what they did to her.”
‘Bore a very poor reputation’
Hampton Smith, 25, was the brutal boss of the Old Joyce Plantation who, according to NAACP secretary Walter White, “bore a very poor reputation in the community because of ill treatment to his Negro employees.”
When he couldn’t find enough workers, he would pay for convict labor, a forced-labor scheme in which prisoners were hired out to businesses, farmers and others. One of the men Hampton Smith paid for was Sidney Johnson, who had been convicted of shooting dice.
After one too many beatings, Johnson shot and killed Smith and fled to Valdosta. As was the custom, a mob gathered, intent on tracking down Johnson. But the mob wound up slaughtering at least five black men — perhaps as many as 10 — before they found Johnson.
On May 17, they killed Will Head, Will Thompson and Julius Jones.
On May 18, they killed Eugene Rice near the Old Camp Ground, although it was acknowledged that he knew nothing about the murder. They also arrested Mary Turner’s husband, Hazel “Hayes” Turner, in Valdosta because he had threatened Smith earlier for beating Mary.
As deputies transported
him from Valdosta to Brooks County, another mob seized Turner and hanged him.
It is unclear when the three unidentified bodies found in the Little River were placed there. Or when Chime Riley, found in the Little River with turpentine cups tied to his hands and legs, was killed. Or whatever happened to Simon Schuman, who was never seen again.
‘Spectacle lynching’ of Mary Turner
But on May 19, the killing continued with Mary Turner. As NAACP investigator Walter White wrote, “The method by which Mary Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details are so horrible that it is with reluctance that the account be given.”
No one knows whether she was still alive after her clothes were burned off. And it mattered not at all that Mary Turner was a young woman, eight months pregnant. As her body hung from the tree, someone took a knife, “such as one used in splitting hogs,” and laid open Mary Turner’s abdomen. Her baby fell to the ground and cried.
A member of the mob crushed the baby’s head. Others in the mob shot Turner’s body hundreds of times.
The brutality of Turner’s murder has haunted Carol Anderson, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winning book “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.” Anderson said such killings were not simply a satisfaction of blood lust.
“Lynching is about black people not knowing their ‘place,’ which is subordinate to whites,” Anderson said. “In spectacle lynchings, it was about sending a signal to the black community. ... ‘This is what we’ll do to you if you get out of place, and there’s no power that will come to your rescue.’”
On May 22 Sidney Johnson, who had killed Hampton Smith, died in a shootout with the police in Valdosta. But a mob still stormed the house, mutilated Johnson’s body, put a rope around its neck and dragged the corpse from a car down the busiest street in town. They finally tied what was left of the body to a tree and burned it.
‘It has 5 bullet holes in it’
Mark Patrick George, now a college teacher in Oregon, grew up in Valdosta.
He used to fish and canoe in the Little River, but he did not hear about Mary Turner until 2006.
“They killed her where I put in my canoe. How did we not know about this? It was submerged and buried, at least in the white community,” George said. “My grandmother was 18 when this happened, and my grandfather was in his 20s. I would not have been surprised if he had been there.”
In 2012, a group called the Mary Turner Project paid for a marker a few yards from where she died. George and volunteers placed the memorial themselves, using water from the Little River to mix the concrete. George got a call recently from a state official asking whether he wanted to replace the marker. Someone had shot it up.
“I told them no. It has five bullet holes in it, and those bullet holes were put there by someone who this sign doesn’t matter to. Just like Mary Turner’s life didn’t matter,” George said. “That marker is a physical artifact that people have to confront.”