April 7, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

Review of Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching , Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, (Verso, March 2021)

In 2010, the Mary Turner Project, Lowndes/Valdosta Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Valdosta State University’s Women and Gender Studies Program, erected a monument by the side of the road, near the site of Mary Turner’s lynching in May 1918. The plaque read: “Near this location … Mary Turner, 8 months pregnant at the time, was lynched. Mary was kidnapped and brought to this place for objecting to the lynching of her husband Hayes on May 19. After being brutally killed Mary’s body was buried near here in a makeshift grave marked only by a whiskey bottle with a cigar inserted in the bottleneck. Mary and Hayes’ murders were part of a larger lynching rampage that unfolded that week in May of 1918. Other victims include Will Head, Will Thompson, Julius Jones, Eugene Rice, Chime Riley, and Simon Schuman, along with two other unidentified victims. No one was ever formally charged in any of these crimes.”

Since the memorial’s dedication, it has been shot up and vandalized. In 2020, the Mary Turner Project replaced the memorial with a narrow steel cross, meant to withstand bullets, trucks, and vandals.

History told truthfully, wrote Miguel de Cervantes, the 16th century Spanish novelist, dramatist and poet, is “the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future." But what is historical truth and through what lens do we understand history? While the work of the New York Times’ 1619 Project --developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others – is not without controversy, it explores slavery and the expression of its American white supremacist evolution into the 20th century through a new lens. Using essays, stories, and podcast voices, the 1619 Project brings alive the horrors of slavery as well as the resilience of African Americans even as the institutions of slavery continued to be codified into laws, policies and racist practices.

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams new graphic narrative, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching, (Verso, March 2021) brings America’s brutal history of 20th century lynching alive through Mary Turner. Williams’ new book  uses the popular and accessible genre of the graphic narrative to tell the story of Mary Turner. Such stories are essential to capture the truth of a time that we can never forget.

On May 19, 1918, Mary Turner, a twenty-one-year-old pregnant black woman was tortured, lynched, burned and mutilated by a mob of white Georgians. Hundreds then watched while Turner’s baby was cut from her body and stomped to death.

Mary Turner’s lynching was the culmination of “a weeklong spree of mob violence following a white farmer’s murder near Valdosta, Georgia,” Julie Buckner Armstrong wrote in the book’s Afterword. “At least eleven African Americans were lynched, including Turner’s husband Hayes.”  Mary Turner and other women that were lynched and subjected to mob violence but, also those left behind in terror because of the lynching of their fathers, brothers, and husbands.   

On her website, Williams writes: “The first time I heard the story of Mary Turner it resonated with me. It made cold stones in my stomach that refused to pass. It made me feel visceral pain and revulsion. Not only because I am a mother and that I have carried babies in my womb, not only because when I heard this I was a doula and had witnessed women giving birth and bearing children, not only because like all of us I had seen first hand the inherent horror of ubiquitous racism, not only because I had been to the place where this happened but because it was not rare. Because it happened so many times in our culture. Because black women, even now are still being punished for speaking out, for existing, and for having children.”

“Much of the story that I present is inspired by the tireless work of Walter White.” William said in an email. “White joined the NAACP in 1918, just two years after graduating from college, and he spent several hot months during that first year shuttling back and forth between Quitman, Georgia and New York, New York collecting information about this event. In September 1918, White, Assistant Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Brooks and Lowndes Counties, Georgia, wrote  “The Work of a Mob,” which was published in the September 1918 issue of Crisis:

The murder of the Negro men was deplorable enough in itself, but the method by which Mrs. Mary Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details are so horrible that it is with reluctance that the account is given. It might be mentioned that each detail given is not the statement of a single person but each phase is related only after careful investigation and corroboration. Mrs. Turner made the remark that the killing of her husband on Saturday was unjust and that if she knew the names of the persons who were in the mob that lynched her husband, she would have warrants sworn out against them and have them punished in the courts.

This news determined the mob to ‘teach her a lesson,’ and although she attempted to flee when she heard that they were after her, she was captured at noon on Sunday. The grief- stricken and terrified woman was taken to a lonely and secluded spot, down a narrow road over which the trees touch at their tops, which, with the thick undergrowth on either side of the road, made a gloomy and appropriate spot for the lynching. Near Folsom's Bridge over the Little River a tree was selected for her execution -a small oak tree extending over the road.

At the time she was lynched, Mary Turner was in her eighth month of pregnancy. The delicate state of her health, one month or less previous to delivery, may be imagined, but this fact had no effect on the tender feelings of the mob. Her ankles were tied together and she was hung to the tree, head downward. Gasoline and oil from the automobiles were thrown on her clothing and while she writhed in agony and the mob howled in glee, a match was applied and her clothes burned from her person. When this had been done and while she was yet alive, a knife, evidently one such as is used in splitting hogs, was taken and the woman's abdomen was cut open, the unborn babe falling from her womb to the ground. The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into the body of the woman, now mercifully dead, and the work was over.

 In The Elegy of Mary Turner, Williams employs a range of media, including photos of pastoral Georgia woods and a peaceful flowing river, newspaper clippings, a telegram, a postcard. These are juxtaposed with linoleum block cuts of men in shackles, and, ultimately, a block cut of Mary Turner’s body, burnt and mutilated …hanging from a tree. The short halting cursive explanations of many of the block cuts are jarring. Williams’ task, visually bringing buried history into current-day memory is a daunting. 

“I have driven through Valdosta many times on my way from Tallahassee to Nashville,” Williams told me in an email. “The landscape where Mary Turner’s murder took place is familiar, bucolic, haunting and gothic. It is marked by what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls the Settler/Slave/Savage triangle of violence and killing. In the deep south of Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, filled with live oaks and resurrection ferns, there is hardly a county where a history of lynching, colonial brutality, displacement, and murder are not present. There is a tree that bears the title of ‘The Old Lynching Tree’ in the heart of Tallahassee, just a stone’s throw away from Valdosta. There are reminders of the murders of Black and Indigenous people everywhere.”

The Tuskegee Institute (now University) documented approximately 4,750 lynchings between 1882 and 1968, nearly three quarters of this killed were African Americans. In the 1890s, lynching “claimed an average of 139 lives each year, 75 percent of them Black,” according to historian Leon Litwack in Without Sanctuary.

“Between 1837 and 1946, 173 women were victims of white mob violence in the United States,” Dr. Trichita M. Chestnut wrote for the US National Archives. “Of the 173 women lynched: 144 were African American, 25 were white, 3 were Mexican, and 1 was Native American.”

Marianne Kaba notes in an Introductory essay to Elegy for Mary Turner: “According to her biographer Paula Giddings, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells theorized that ‘lynching was a direct result of the gains Blacks were making throughout the South.’ In her autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells wrote, ‘lynching was merely an excuse to get rid of the Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down’.”

The lynching of Mary Turner sparked outrage and organizing, and then disappeared into the sinkhole of lynching history. “The Anti- Lynching Crusaders, used Turner’s story as a centerpiece of its fundraising campaign to support the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill (which passed the House but stalled in the Senate),” Julie Buckner, author of Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching, wrote in the Afterword of Elegy for Mary Turner.

At her website, Williams writes: “When I thought of the story of Mary Turner it appeared in my mind as images in this vein. As block prints. I wondered if I could produce her story as a wordless graphic narrative much like these artists had produced stories of political strife, inner turmoil, epic journeys and everyday life as graphic narratives. Over the course of roughly a year I created over 20 linoleum cuts.”

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams is an artist, an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa and a University Ombudsperson. She has focused her work on women’s issues, community, art, and the incarcerated. According to her bio at her website, “American alternative/single creator comics and graphic novels have been at the heart of her creative scholarship for the past few years.” In addition to Elegy for Mary Turner, she is working on a graphic novel about the Detroit Race Riots of 1943, a mini comic about police brutality, and The Prison Chronicles, a series of stories about working in women's prisons.

Williams’ A War in Black and White published in 2013, details the 1898 coup and subsequent massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the toxic editorial cartoons of Norman E. Jennett, which fed the Democratic Party machine and led to the murder and disenfranchisement of black men through fear and racial hatred.

The January 6 insurrection at the Capital clearly demonstrated that white supremacy is alive and well in America. If we are to change our future, the crimes of white supremacy cannot be relegated to sometimes dry and seldom read history books. These crimes must be understood at a visceral level as a part of 20th century history as well as our present. For example, many Americans now know of the previously suppressed history of the Tulsa massacre of 1921, during which a white mob killed over 300 and burned down the Greenwood “Black Wall Street” section of town because it was central to the stories of two recent hit TV series: Watchmen and Lovecraft Country.

To move forward as a nation seeking racial justice, we must understand our history in its ugliness as well as through stories of progress. Museums, memorials, monuments and visual arts offer powerful means to tell history. The Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching” uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place. The experience is overwhelming.

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams graphic story of one woman, Mary Turner, thrusts us into the horror and history of lynching at a very personal and individual level. We cannot turn away.

Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications.

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