Elegy for Mary Turner
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Halftitle Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Elegy for Mary Turner
Afterword
Postscript
All royalties from this book will go to the National Center for
Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia
First published by Verso 2021
© Rachel Marie-Crane Williams 2021
Introduction © Mariame Kaba 2021
Afterword © Julie Buckner Armstrong 2021
Postscript © C. Tyrone Forehand
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors and artist have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-904-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-907-8 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-906-1 (UK EBK)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Say Her Name — 1918, 1949, 2021 —
Mary Turner and the “Wife of the Victim”
by Mariame Kaba
Elegy for Mary Turner:
An Illustrated Account of a Lynching
Afterword: Hidden Memories
by Julie Buckner Armstrong
Postscript: A Place to Lay Their Heads
by C. Tyrone Forehand
(great-grandnephew of Hayes and Mary Turner)
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to Rylie and Jack Kelley, who allowed me to skip suppers and take over our dining room for almost two years making prints. A huge and mushy thank you to Don Ward, my partner. I also want to thank Charles and Sharon Williams for helping me finish this project by allowing me to work at Dauntless Wood. To Mariame Kaba, an ongoing light and muse, Julie Buckner Armstrong for cheering me on and encouraging me to look and look again. I want to thank Julie Bowland, Deborah Davis, Teresa Mangum, Steve McGuire, Leslie Schwalm, Laura Kastens, Valdosta State University, the Englert Theater, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the University of Iowa for their generosity and care. I want to thank Audrey Grant, Mark Patrick George, the Mary Turner Project, and Mr. Charles Tyrone Forehand for telling me wonderful stories and being a ray of sunshine at the end of a long journey, Jessie Kindig, who took a chance and who has been so helpful in making this book better and better, finally, Mark Martin (not the race car driver) and the staff of Verso Books. I also want to thank the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the amazing librarians and archivists who helped me along the way.
Text Sources
My account of events is based primarily on Walter White’s article, “The Work of a Mob,” in Crisis Vol. 16 (September 1918).
Newspaper clippings are from the archives held at the Library of Congress: Atlanta Constitution, May 18, 1918 and May 24, 1918; Atlanta Journal, May 24, 1918.
The telegrams, letter from Governor Hugh Dorsey, and clipping from the New York Tribune are from images taken in the Library of Congress Archives, NAACP collection, Box II L7, Box I C336, Box I C337, Group Series I, Series C, Box 353, Part I C:428, and Part I C:432.
The farmer’s almanac is from the 1918 Illustrated Barker’s Almanac printed by the Barker, Moore & Mein Medicine Co. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The postcards are from Valdosta, Georgia, and were printed by an unknown company before 1918. The photos, baby shoes, and letters are from sellers on Ebay. The wood-grain paper is Nepalese Lokta gold and cream woodgrain from Dick Blick.
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, 2020
Introduction: Say Her Name — 1918, 1949, 2021 — Mary Turner and the “Wife of the Victim”
by Mariame Kaba
Untangle the spitting men from the mob
Unsay the word nigger
Release the firer’s finger from its trigger
Return the revolver to its quiet holster
Return the man to his home
Unwidow his wife
“Reverse: A Lynching,” Ansel Elkins
In doing some research about the history of lynching in the United States a few years ago, I came across a haunting photograph.
I found it in a book about an exhibit by Marion Palfi. Palfi called herself a “social research photographer” and documented poverty and oppression in America through her work. The photograph was titled “Irwington, 1949, Wife of the Victim.” I was curious about the provenance of the photograph so I did some digging. The caption that accompanied it quotes the wife as saying: “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore died.” But who was Caleb?
Caleb Hill Jr. was a twenty-eight-year-old Black chalk-miner living in a rural town called Irwinton, Georgia. He was a family man who cared for a wife, three children, mother, father, and two sisters. By all accounts, Caleb Hill was a hard worker and had a stubborn streak. He refused to back down from confrontation.
On the morning of March 30, 1949, Hill, who had been jailed the night before after an altercation, was kidnapped from his cell and later found dead. He had been shot several times and been badly beaten. Caleb Hill was lynched.
The New York Times published several articles about this case because the FBI became involved. The initial story told by Sheriff George Hatcher was that Caleb Hill grabbed his gun and shot at him as he was being arrested. Hatcher added that Hill had a terrible reputation and had been arrested several times before. The jail was located on the second floor of the Sheriff’s home. He explained that while he was asleep two white men kidnapped Hill. He claimed to have no leads as to who the kidnappers were.
The New York Times captured the reaction of the citizens of Irwinton, a town of less than 1,000 people, by quoting one person saying, “It’s just a Negro,” and another commenting that the incident “didn’t upset a checkers game.”
Two men were eventually arrested a few days after the lynching. They were Dennis Lamar Purvis (thirty-seven) and Malcolm Vivian Pierce (twenty-seven). One of the men turned out to be the cousin of the sheriff. However, this pair spent only nine days in jail before being freed by an all-white grand jury, which ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence for a trial.
Between 1892 and 1940, over 3,000 people, overwhelmingly Black (2,600), were lynched in the United States. In the 1890s, lynchings “claimed an average of 139 lives each year, 75 percent of them Black,” according to historian Leon Litwack in Without Sanctuary. The decades spanning the early 1880s through the early 1930s have been called the “lynching era” by some historians. This is a period of American history that many people think they understand and yet have never actually studied.
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’.” Backed
by a criminal punishment system that maintained and enforced white power and supremacy, Black people were subjugated, oppressed, and exploited. Black people who were lynched were usually first tortured and then once they were dead, their bodies were often mutilated. Sometimes the lynchers would drop the dead Black person’s remains on the doorsteps of other Blacks in the community as a warning that if they got out of line they too could meet this fate. It was racist intimidation and terror, pure and simple.
When we bother to remember the victims of lynching in the United States at all, we usually think of Black men. While it is true that the majority of those lynched in America were in fact Black and male, Black women were also disproportionately targeted. In fact, writes Dr. Trichita M. Chestnut for the US National Archives, “Between 1837 and 1946, 173 women were victims of white mob violence in the United States. Of the 173 women lynched: 144 were African American, 25 were white, 3 were Mexican, and 1 was Native American.”
One of the women lynched by a Southern white mob is the subject of this book: nineteen-year-old Mary Turner. Turner’s name is etched in history in part because of the unspeakable brutality and cruelty of her murder in May 1918. She was eight months pregnant at the time. Her lynching is also known to us today because it was the subject of an NAACP investigation led by Walter White.
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’s project reinserts Mary Turner into our modern retelling of the history of lynching. Turner’s story disrupts prior narratives about lynching as we see that it wasn’t a punishment for Black beastly men raping white virginal women. An argument over labor and the lynching of her husband Hayes precipitated Turner’s brutal murder. Several hundred people watched as Mary was hung upside down, her fetus cut from her womb and crushed beneath the boots of some of the participants. She was shot, mutilated, and set on fire. Her death was truly horrific. The lynchers were never held accountable for their barbaric crime.
In this particular historical moment, when young Black people in particular are engaged in a renewed struggle against state violence including police killings and mass incarceration, Mary Turner’s story resonates. As organizers today insist that we must #SayHerName in reference to the Black women (cis and trans) whose lives are cut short by state-sanctioned violence, Mary Turner calls out to us from the grave. She insists that we #SayHerName too. She reminds us that Black women have always been subjects of unlimited and unaccountable violence at the hands of white people.
Caleb Hill Jr.’s wife was left behind to deal with the trauma of his lynching. She was made a widow, and we don’t know her name. She is memorialized in a photograph as “wife of the victim.” Though nameless, invisible, and silenced, she is also a Black woman victimized by lynching. It would be good to be able to #SayHerName too in order to honor her loss. Rachel’s book demands that we expand the scope of who the victims of lynching were beyond those killed. Families and entire communities were impacted, too. In this way, the book fits into a feminist tradition of storytelling.
The lynching of Mary Turner illustrates how Black people (including Black women) have been targeted by extremely cruel violence and punishment throughout our history. Her murder by a white mob was a product of US slave history and also set a pattern for current racial violence. While lynching is a historically specific form of racial terrorism, racist violence still exists against Blacks in 2021. The historical debasement of Black bodies continues. We have always been considered killable and disposable. This remains true today. We still have a culture in this country that sanctions the violation of Black bodies often with impunity.
Elegy for Mary Turner, with its exquisite and emotional art, is incredibly relevant today. It is a lament for the dead and a call for memorialization of the living. It is art that elicits blinding rage and offers an opportunity to grieve. I have told Mary’s story to Black girls as young as thirteen years old as a way to explain the legacy of US slavery, Reconstruction, and racialized gender violence. Rachel’s work will be a mainstay in my teaching and organizing going forward. In her haunting poem “Reverse: A Lynching” that opened this essay, Ansel Elkins imagines undoing a lynching so that we might “reenter the night through its door of mercy.” Rachel’s book about Mary Turner offers no mercy but it does push us toward accountability. This is what’s needed now more than ever.
Afterword: Hidden Memories
by Julie Buckner Armstrong
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’s haunting graphic narrative Elegy for Mary Turner joins a long line of works giving voice to a story that refuses silence.
Mary Turner died on May 19, 1918, during a weeklong spree of mob violence following a white farmer’s murder near Valdosta, Georgia. At least eleven African Americans were lynched, including Turner’s husband Hayes. Reportedly pregnant and nearing her due date, Mary swore to seek justice against the well-connected mob ringleaders. Her act of speaking out prompted vicious retaliation. Hundreds of people gathered at Folsom’s Bridge on the Little River to watch the mob hang, shoot, and burn the woman—then, according to witnesses, cut the fetus from her body and crush it into the ground.
“Her talk enraged them,” a local newspaper explained.
The cruel irony: Turner’s murder occurred on Pentecost, according to a Farmer’s Almanac page that Williams includes among the narrative’s found objects. In Christian traditions, Pentecost marks the day that the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles in tongues of fire, giving them the power to speak God’s message of love in all languages. Turner’s lynching, which took place during church hours before several hundred witnesses, spoke loudly about the power of hate.
It also made international news, galvanizing anti-lynching activists and artists of the late 1910s and 1920s, and prompting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to investigate. Walter White’s resulting exposé, “The Work of a Mob,” published in the September 1918 Crisis, functions as a key resource for Williams, as it did for sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller and writers Carrie Williams Clifford, Angelina Weld Grimké, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer.
These figures formed part of a larger early twentieth-century effort to change public opinion about lynching, seen then as an acceptable form of extra-legal or “frontier” justice. As the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson explained during a speech at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching, most white Americans did not condone lynching, but they did not condemn it either. Yet lynching had less to do with justice than with using violence to enforce white supremacy. The Tuskegee Institute (now University) documented approximately 4,750 lynchings between 1882 and 1968; nearly three-quarters of those killed were African American. Mobs justified their actions by saying they needed to protect white women from Black male rapists. However, less than 30 percent of documented lynchings involved sexual assault accusations, and most of those were spurious at best. More common were incidents where Black people paid the ultimate price for overstepping strict Jim Crow racial codes. Black political, economic, and social success in the decades after slavery’s end met with an increasingly virulent white backlash. Large-scale spectacle lynchings, where mob members tortured and mutilated their victims, grew in popularity. These events, which drew men, women, children, photographers, and souvenir hunters, were designed to send a forceful message about who held power’s reins, and who did not. Such was the case in May 1918: a lynching rampage that spread out over two counties had its roots in a labor dispute and led to the death of a woman whose only “crime” was speaking her mind.
Mary Turner’s story stood out for its barbarism, for the way it revealed lynching’s origins in white supremacy, and for the way it embodied lynching’s complicated gender dynamics. The rape myth’s triangle between white mobs, white females, and Black men had no place for Black women. But they played multiple roles in a larger historical narrative: as victims themselves, as loved ones left behind, and as activists. Their resistance ranged from individual acts of fighting back against daily indignities to collective group action. One organization, the Anti-Ly
nching 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). Groups such as the Crusaders argued that while female mob victims might be statistical anomalies—roughly .02 percent of all lynchings—their stories still counted.
Williams dedicates her book to those women and children whose deaths by mob violence are largely forgotten.
For decades, Turner was one of those women. Her story became part of what artist Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis called in a 1985 painting on the subject Hidden Memories. No one actively suppressed this history. Instead, it occupied a liminal space, both present and absent: discussed in pages of out-of-print books or held close by people who did not talk about it publicly. Recovery efforts of the Black Arts and Feminist movements—which focused on the stories and voices of those overlooked in traditional historical narratives—helped to bring “hidden memories” like Turner’s to light. In some works, such as the notebook sketches of artist Kara Walker and Alice Walker’s novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Turner’s memory remains a faint trace. For writers such as poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and dramatist Lekethia Dalcoe, Turner embodies a potent force of resistance to Jim Crow violence: Black love.
Like other contemporary artists, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams makes visible what white supremacy tries to erase. The book demands that readers see, that we remember. Williams transports us into memory space in multiple ways. Images evoke the woodcuts and linocuts popular during the heyday of 1930s anti-lynching activism. She sets those images on a background of the past’s sepia tones and captions them in an old-fashioned spiky, spiraling cursive— as if we have stumbled onto a scrapbook or memento-filled journal. To create the text’s assemblage aesthetic, Williams includes photographs, news clippings, postcards, and letters to remind readers that this seemingly incomprehensible incident occurred in an actual place and time. Especially pointed are drawings of white people going about the daily activities of farm life while mayhem continues around them. “Many were upset, some were ashamed,” Williams describes these local white residents, who easily could be the Americans about which James Weldon Johnson spoke: neither condoning nor condemning. “But they had pies to bake; they had hogs to feed. Their lives moved forward,” the text explains, underscoring how Turner’s and other victims’ lives did not. Williams further highlights the juxtaposition between the mundane and the extraordinary, the natural and the unnatural, life and death with her use of color and texture. Especially during the lynching scenes, she brings in color washes of black dirt, brown leaves, blue river, and red blood. The site of memory that Williams creates is visceral, raw.