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A historic marker at the site of a 1918 lynching that was repeatedly vandalized in recent years is now safely on display in an exhibit opening Monday in Atlanta.
It commemorates an event that few people in the rural South remember. Georgia Has tried so hard to erase: The murder of Mary Turner by a white mob intent on silencing her after she demanded justice for the murders of her husband Hayes Turner and at least 10 other black people.
The Georgia Historical Society’s marker, riddled with bullet holes and its pedestal shattered by an off-road vehicle, reads: “Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was burned, mutilated, and shot to death by a mob after publicly denouncing the murder of her husband the previous day. … No charges were ever brought against the known or suspected participants in these crimes. From 1880-1930, these illegal acts were rampant in Georgia. More than 550 people were killed in mob violence.”
Now each of the bullet-damaged words is projected on a wall, and visitors hear the words spoken by some of Turner’s six generations of descendants.
“I’m glad the memorial was shot,” said great-granddaughter Katrina Thomas after seeing the exhibit for the first time at the National Museum for Civil and Human Rights Saturday night. “Millions of people will learn their story. Their voices continue years after years, showing that history does not fade away. It lives on and grows.”
Americans These lynchings became known in 1918 because they were investigated in the immediate aftermath Walter WhiteWho founded the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and became an influential voice for civil rights across the country. According to his report in the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, a light-skinned black man who could pass for white, interviewed witnesses and provided the names of suspects to the governor of Georgia.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative’s list of more than 4,400 documented racial terrorist lynchings in the US between Reconstruction and World War II, Georgia was one of the most active states for lynching. The organization has marked several sites and built a memorial to the victims. montgomeryAlabama.
The nation’s first anti-lynching law was introduced in 1918 amid national reaction to the deaths of Mary and Hayes Turner and their neighbors in Brooks and Lowndes counties, Georgia. It was passed by the House in 1922, but South Senators filibustered it and it will be another century before lynching is made a federal hate crime in 2022.
“The same injustice that took his life was the same injustice that continued to destroy him year after year,” said Randy McClain, the Turners’ great-grandson. He grew up in the same rural area where the lynchings took place, but did not know much about them or his family connections until adulthood.
“It feels like a very safe place here,” McClain said. “She is now finally at rest, and her story can be told. And her family can feel some sense of vindication.”