ATLANTA (AP) — A historical marker from the site of a 1918 lynching that was repeatedly vandalized in recent years is now safely on display in Atlanta in an exhibit that opens Monday.
It commemorates an event that some people in rural southern Georgia tried hard to erase: the killing of Mary Turner by a white mob designed to silence her after she demanded justice for the lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner, and at least 10 other Black people.
Riddled with bullet holes and split at its pedestal by an off-road vehicle, the Georgia Historical Society marker reads in part: “Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was burned, dismembered, and murdered by a mob after she publicly denounced the lynching of her husband the day before…. No charges were ever brought against these known or suspected participants. among the 550 people were killed in Georgia in these illegal acts of mob violence.”
Now every word marred by bullets is projected onto a wall, and visitors hear those words spoken by some of Turner’s six generations of descendants.
“I’m happy that the monument was shot,” said great-granddaughter Katrina Thomas on Saturday evening after her first look at the exhibition at the National Museum for Civil and Human Rights. “Millions of people will learn her story. That her voice continues years and years later, shows that history does not disappear. It lives and continues to grow.”
Americans learned about these lynchings in 1918 because they were immediately investigated by Walter White, who founded the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and would become an influential voice for civil rights throughout the country. A fair-skinned Black man who could pass for white, he interviewed eyewitnesses and provided names of suspects to the governor of Georgia, according to his report in the NAACP publication, The Crisis.
Georgia was among the most active states for lynching, according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s catalog of more than 4,400 documented racial terror lynchings in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II. The organization placed markers at many sites and built a memorial to the victims in Montgomery, Alabama.
The nation’s first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in 1918 amid a national reaction to the deaths of Mary and Hayes Turner and their neighbors in Georgia’s Brooks and Lowndes counties. It passed the House in 1922, but southern senators vetoed it and it would be another century before lynching became a federal hate crime in 2022.
“The same injustice that took her life was the same injustice that continued to vandalize her, year after year,” said Randy McClain, the great grandson of the Turners. He grew up in the same rural area where the lynchings took place but didn’t know much about them or discover his family connection until he became an adult.
“It feels like a very safe space here,” McClain said. “Now she is finally at rest, and her story can be told. And her family can feel some sense of vindication.”