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Mary and Hayes Turner
Brooks County, Georgia
1918
Recorded by the Anti-Lynching Crusaders...
In May, 1918, a white plantation owner in Brooks County,
Georgia got into a quarrel with one of his colored tenants and the tenant killed
him. A mob sought to avenge the death but could not find the suspected
man. They therefore lynched another colored man named Hayes
Turner. His wife, Mary Turner, threatened to have members o the mob
arrested. The mob therefore started after her. She fled home and was found there the
next morning. She was in the eighth month of pregnancy but the mob of
several hundred took her to a small stream, tied her ankles together and hung
her on a tree head downwards. Gasoline was thrown on her clothes
and she was set on fire. One of the members of the mob took a knife and
split her abdomen open so that the unborn child fell from her womb to the ground
and the child's head was crushed under the heel of another member of the
mob; Mary Turner's body was finally riddled with bullets.

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