Rachel Marie-Crane Williams - Elegy for Mary Turner

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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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

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 )

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Fournier by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

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

by Julie Buckner Armstrong

by C. Tyrone Forehand
(great-grandnephew of Hayes and Mary Turner)

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 Whites 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 farmers almanac is from the 1918 Illustrated Barkers 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

by Mariame Kaba

Untangle the spitting men from the mob

Unsay the word nigger

Release the firers 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 Sheriffs 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, Its just a Negro, and another commenting that the incident didnt 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 wasnt 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 persons 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.