Mary Turner

Mary Turner

Mary Turner (c. 1885 – 19 May 1918) was a young, married black woman and mother of two who was lynched by a white mob in Lowndes County, Georgia, for having protested the lynching death of her husband Hazel "Hayes" Turner the day before in Brooks County. She was eight months pregnant, and her unborn child was also brutally murdered. The Turner lynchings followed the murder of a white plantation owner in Brooks County by one of his black workers. They were followed by deaths of another 11 black men by a white mob in Brooks and neighboring Lowndes counties during a manhunt and lynching rampage. These lynchings are examples of the racially motivated mob violence by whites against black people in the American South, particularly in the era of 1880 to 1930, the peak of lynchings. Brooks County in Georgia, and Georgia among the states, had the highest rates of lynching in the nation during this period. The NAACP referred to Mary Turner's murder in its anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In the lynching era from 1880 to 1930, the great majority of these murders were committed in the South. Most of the thousands of individuals lynched in the United States were black, including at least 159 women.

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