Mary Turner

Mary Turner (died 19 May 1918) was a married black woman and mother of two who was lynched by a white mob in Lowndes County, Georgia, for having spoken out in protest at the lynching death of her husband Hazel "Hayes" Turner the day before. Her unborn child was also brutally murdered. The Turner murders followed the murder of an abusive white plantation owner by one of his black workers, and were associated with the deaths of 11 other black men during a manhunt and lynching rampage by whites. These deaths are examples of the racially motivated mob violence by whites against blacks 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.

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 and most of the thousands of individuals lynched in the United States were black, including at least 159 women.

She was born Mary Hattie Graham to Perry Graham and his wife, Elizabeth "Betsy" Johnson, in Brooks County, Georgia. Sources differ on the exact year of her birth. She had an older sister Pearl, and two younger brothers, named Perry and Otha.

She married Hazel "Hayes" Turner on 11 February 1917, in Colquitt County, Georgia. They had two children, Ocie Lee and Leaster Turner.

Hampton Smith was 25 years old and married when he owned the Old Joyce Place, a large plantation near Morven, Georgia, in Brooks County. He had an abusive reputation among black workers, making it difficult for him to recruit workers. Smith resolved the labor shortage (as did many planters) through using convict labor; he would pay the fees that black men were assessed for infractions and gain their labor for a period of time. Among the workers whom Smith gained this way was Sidney Johnson, after paying the police the man's $30 fine (a high payment for a farm worker) after being convicted of "playing dice." This system had little oversight by authorities, and the black men were often abused in what Douglas Blackmon called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). The legislature and local governments passed laws criminalizing many minor infractions in an effort to convict blacks and force them to work for planters.

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