May 1918 lynchings
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States.
Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day (May 19), his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire.
Hampton Smith was a 25 year old, although newspaper accounts covering his death inaccurately put his age at 31,[8] married white planter who owned the Old Joyce Place, a large plantation near Morven, Georgia, in Brooks County.
"[1] Authorities exercised little oversight related to convict leasing, and the black men were often abused in what journalist Douglas Blackmon has called "slavery by another name".
[1] Walter F. White, an investigator for the NAACP, was told by mob participants that the bodies of the men were riddled with more than 700 bullets.
He was thrown into the Little River in Brooks County to drown near Barney; turpentine cups were tied to his hands and legs to weigh him down.
Newspaper accounts from a month after the May rampage can confirm that Schuman was arrested by Brooks County authorities in late June 1918 after he was implicated in the murder of Hampton Smith by a man named "Shorty" Ford, then in custody in Jacksonville, Florida on charges related to Smith's murder as well.
A mob had gathered and, deprived of the chance to lynch Johnson, mutilated his body, and dragged it behind a car in a procession down Patterson Street and out to Morven.
At the time of the NAACP's investigation by Walter White soon after these events (see below), the bodies had disappeared from police custody without confirmation of identity.
[10] After Hayes Turner was murdered, his distraught wife Mary, who was eight months pregnant, publicly denounced her husband's lynching.
[10][4] According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP, Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles, her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her body.
"[10] Its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel, and the crowd shot hundreds of bullets into Turner's body.
"[15] Mary Turner (c. 1885[11] – 19 May 1918) was a young, married black woman and mother of three—including an unborn child—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.
[17][18] They were followed by the murders of 11 more black men by a white mob in Brooks and neighboring Lowndes counties during a manhunt and lynching rampage.
In 2008, an article by Julie Buckner Armstrong put her age at 19, but a later historian notes that she did not cite the source of the information.
The Mary Turner Project originally put her age at 21 at her death, implying a birth year of circa 1897.
A historian has noted the link between the erection of the marker in 2010 and the subsequent widespread use of 21 as her age at her death in modern newspaper accounts.
[11] At some point, Mary Hattie Graham gave birth to a son named Willie Lloyd Smith.
Mary Hattie Graham married Hazel "Hayes" Turner on 11 February 1917, in Colquitt County, Georgia.
[19]: 33 The lynching murders of Hayes and Mary Turner, and several other black people, caused a brief national outcry.
Shortly before the trial began, a group of men took an African-American prisoner from the Hamilton County Jail in Jasper, Florida claiming that they had the legal authority to do so.
The man was later found dead in the Withlacoochee River, west of Valdosta, bound and with a gunshot wound to the head.
(Per Thomas McCulley) [20] A newspaper account reported the incident as being yet another death related to the Hampton Smith case.
His defense attorneys argued that the whole thing was a case of mistaken identity and that the real "Shorty" Ford had been taken from a jail and drowned.
[22] Walter F. White, NAACP assistant secretary, went to south Georgia to conduct an investigation into the Brooks-Lowndes lynchings.
They helped gain support for a state historical marker to be installed that memorializes Mary Turner and these events.
[25] Since 2013, the plaque now has as many as 27 bullet holes and more recently, was struck multiple times by “some kind of off-road vehicle,” Mark Patrick George, coordinator for the Mary Turner Project, announced in October 2020.
