#SayHerName 1918, 1949, 2017: Mary Turner & The ‘Wife of the Victim’ 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 by Ansel Elkins
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In doing some research about the history of lynching in the U.S. 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.”2 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 28 year old Black chalk-miner living in a rural town called Irwinton, Georgia. He was a family man who cared for a wife, 3 children, mother, father, and two sisters. By all accounts, Caleb Hill was a hardworker and had a stubborn streak. He refused to back down from confrontation. On the morning of March 30th 1949, Hill who had been jailed the night before for an altercation was kidnapped from his cell and later found dead. He had been shot several times and was 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 1000 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 (37) and Malcolm Vivian Pierce (27). One of the men turned out to be the cousin of the Sheriff. However, after spending nine days in jail, an all-white grand jury freed the men ruling that there wasn’t enough evidence for a trial. Between 1892 and 1940, over 3,000 people, overwhelmingly black (2600), were lynched in the U.S. In the 1890s, lynchings “claimed an average of 139 lives each year, 75% of them Black (Without Sanctuary, p. 12).” 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. Journalist and activist Ida B Wells theorized that: “Lynching was a direct result of the gains Blacks were making throughout the South (Giddings, p. 26). Wells wrote: “[L]ynching 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’ (Giddings, p. 28).” Backed by a criminal punishment system that maintained and enforced white power & 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 & terror, pure and simple.
When we bother to remember the victims of lynching in the U.S. 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, “[b]etween 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.”3 One of the women lynched by a Southern white mob is the subject of this book: 19- year old Mary Turner. Turner’s name is etched in history in part because of the unspeakable brutality & cruelty of her murder in May 1918. She was 8 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 re-inserts Mary Turner into our modern retelling of a 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 & crushed beneath the boots of some of the participants. She was shot, mutilated, and set on fire. Her death 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 her 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 traumas of his lynching. She was made a widow and we don’t know her name. She’s 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 U.S. 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 2017. 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. Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage with its exquisite and emotional art is incredibly relevant today. It is a lament for the dead and 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 13 years old as a way to explain the legacy of U.S. 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 “[r]eenter 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. -Mariame Kaba 1. http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR36.3/ansel_elkins.php 2. http://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/31164-wife-of-the-lynch-victim 3. https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2016/05/10/lynching-of-women-in-unitedstates-blog-series-the-lynching-of-belle-hathaway/.
Hidden Memories
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’s haunting graphic narrative Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage 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. Pregnant and nearing her due date, Mary swore to seek justice against the well-connected mob ringleaders. Her act of speaking out prompted a 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 cut the fetus from her body and crush it into the ground. “Her talk enraged them,” a local newspaper explained. Williams scripts the words onto the book’s cover around the image of mother-and-baby bones. Turner’s death galvanized anti-lynching activists and artists of the late 1910s and 1920s. The story made international news and prompted 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 it 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. 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 were based in sexual assault accusations, and most of those were spurious at best. More common were incidents where blacks 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 increasing 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 reigns, 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-Lynching 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% of all lynchings – their stories still count. 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 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 discuss 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. In others, such as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ poetry, Turner’s murder captures the essence of Jim Crow violence. Rachel Marie-Crane Williams joins these contemporary artists and writers by making visible lives that white supremacy would rather we forget. 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 journal.
To support the text’s found-object look, Williams opens with an image from a 1918 Daily Record Calendar, which she returns to as transitional device. “Don’t trust your memory / jot it down,” the calendar reminds its keeper, who writes in the midst of the melee, “So many negroes were killed. They are afraid. . . . I baked peach pie today.” The writer, presumably a white woman, could be one of those Americans about which James Weldon Johnson spoke: neither condoning nor condemning. She acknowledges the extreme violence and its effects on others, but she does not care enough to do more than “jot in down.” No lynching rampage will get in the way of her baking! Williams further highlights the juxtaposition between the mundane and extraordinary, the natural and unnatural 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. Readers will carry around the stunning images of Williams’s Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage long after turning the book’s last page. Turner’s story, awful though it may be, deserves that place of remembrance in our hearts and minds. Turner died a brutal death, but she risked her life for justice. A group of men feared this powerless woman’s act of speaking out so much that they stole her life and her dignity. Every work of art created in Mary Turner’s name repudiates their actions by restoring her humanity to the world. -Julie Buckner Armstrong
I learned of Mary Turner and the horrible fate that befell her and her family when I was doing research about the 1943 race riot in Detroit. I am intimately familiar with the cultural and geographic landscape in which she was killed. I spent most of my childhood in Eastern North Carolina and left to go to graduate school in Tallahassee. I worked on and off in at a college in Bainbridge, Georgia and drove through Valdosta, Georgia many times on my way from Tallahassee to Nashville. The landscape, where Mary Turner’s murder took place is familiar to me, bucolic, haunting and gothic. There is evidence everywhere of what Frank B. Wilderson, III (2010) calls the Settler/Slave/Savage triangle. In the deep South of Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, overgrown with live oaks and resurrection ferns; there is hardly a county where a history of lynching and murder is not present. There is a tree that bears the title of “The Old Lynching Tree” in the heart of Tallahassee, just a stone’s throw away from Valdosta. There are reminders of the murders of black and indigenous people everywhere. Mary Turner’s story was compelling to me for many reasons beyond my connection to the landscape and the South. In the past, I have worked as a doula for a number of women from all walks of life, I have carried two children to term and lost one to a miscarriage. For me, the physical state of pregnancy felt both very powerful and very vulnerable. I can easily imagine the incredible bravery of Mary Turner, who was only twenty-one, a mother with two small children, speaking out against such violence. She had so much to lose. Perhaps, after her husband was lynched she felt like there was little that the white mob could take, beyond her family, that would wound her deeper. I wonder if she assumed her gender, motherhood, widowhood, or pregnancy would protect her from the epidemic of mob violence against African-Americans that was sweeping though her state. Did she wonder if all of these identity markers would override her blackness? It was rare for women to by lynched and even more rare for them to be pregnant. Was she so grief stricken that her emotions were more powerful than her fear of death? How could anyone with a beating heart not empathize with a person in this situation, with a man who is terrified, or a woman who is terrified and pregnant? That is the rub of this story, a lack of feeling for others, feelings of hatred for other people who are deemed by the irrational human mind as different, devious, less worthy of humanity. Can our connection with victims of violence, who are not our kin, be made stronger through relational thinking? It is clear that we value people even more when we can place labels such as mother, wife, son, daughter, etc. on their identity. Can we empathize with people about whom we know little? Can we stretch our imaginations beyond labels to feel their humanity when those labels are not so easily represented by our own experiences? Conversely, when we hear stories such as Mary Turner’s most decent people imagine that they could never participate in such acts of brutality. That in fact, they would stand against such acts, they would protest. We imagine that none among us would ever harm a human being in this way, no one in our social or familial circle. But, the white men that did this horrible thing were citizens in good standing in the community. They had families of their own. People in their community and family knew what they did, watched it happen, and some white people even felt as though it was just. The names of the white men who formed the mob were published and known. They suffered no retribution. Beyond an initial experience of empathy, recognition, or repulsion, I hope this work pushes audiences to ask, how do people who are vulnerable because of their identity for example, their race, class, citizenship status, sexual orientation, or gender continue to needlessly suffer, even today? What structures are in place, that make their lives worse? What can we change? Can we find the courage to speak out like Mary Turner? What are we willing to risk? Historical events, such as this lynching spree, make clear why there is still a lingering sense of terror that is just beneath the surface for many people of color. History teaches us that at any point in time, people who are marginalized or oppressed, could become victims in an irrational whirlwind of violence that ends in their suffering and/or death. When this happens, the chances of justice being rendered by people in authority and/or by the state, are slim. This particular story of mob violence, a lynching rampage, and the murder of Mary Turner parallels our present day state of gender conventions and race relations. As a cis, heterosexual, middle class, educated, American, white woman, I will never deny that I benefit from these systems of oppression and racial violence. I work as an artist and scholar to understand structural inequality not only as a step toward self-awareness, reflection, and honesty, but because I feel morally compelled, and because this work raises the kinds of questions that all people, but especially people with privilege need to explore, understand, and confront if they are committed to seeing, naming, rejecting and ridding our country of white supremacy and structural oppression. I have been making illustrative images related to race and history for nearly a decade. I make these materials primarily for museums, community organizers, and teachers. Confronting the worst parts of our history is essential to a worthwhile education. Learning these stories is not about asking us to stay stuck in the past, or take personal responsibility for events that transpired before we were born, but it is important to understand the persisting and cumulative history of white privilege and patriarchy in our country. It is imperative that we recognize the reasons that white supremacists and neo nazis, who once wore masks, are now fearlessly parading in public spaces. We must also understand the impact and deadliness, when those of us who have privileges such as whiteness, turn
away from such violence in silence and shame rather than confronting it. There is a clear line of history-- vigilantism, lynching, policing and state-sponsored violence have historically been honed as weapons to control people because of their race, their gender, and their class status. Today, according to a number of researchers, women of color, like Mary Turner, are the victims of disproportionate incarceration, over-policing and under-protection by law enforcement and society as a whole. The tenets of violence and oppression go well beyond our justice system. Every system in our country is infected with our history of racist and sexist violence against people of color, people who are poor, and people who identify at LGBTQ. In our health system, the disparities people of color and people who are LBGTQ experience deeply impact the overall quality of care they can expect to receive. Infant mortality rates are shocking; infants like Baby Turner, who are black, die at twice the rate of infants who are white. Graduation rates in high school and college are much lower for black and Hispanic students than for white students. In terms of economics, the poverty rate for all people of color in our country is higher than it is for white people. Our justice department just recently announced that it is ok to discriminate against LGBTQ people in the workplace. Structural inequality is ubiquitous. This means people of color, like Mary Turner, and people who are LGBTQ have and continue to live in a nation where they are under more police scrutiny than other groups, they are more likely to be incarcerated, their treatment by health care workers is more likely to be insufficient or subpar, they are more likely to live in poverty than their white or non queer counterparts, and their chances of completing a successful education or earning a living wage are lower. Within this particular story, the issues of race and gender are central. There are various fear-based myths and ideologies that white supremacists have employed to legitimize vigilante violence against blacks. The most common are as follows, 1) black men want to rape and defile white women, 2) black men are planning an armed revolt against the white men who have property, influence, and money. 3) black people are planning to dominate whites and end the white race through reproduction, rape, white infanticide, homicide, and miscegenation, 4) whites must keep “uppity” black people in their place; it is the “natural” social order that whites are a superior race and should have dominion over black and brown people who are naturally less suited to a life style of civility. These fear based myths and ideologies have been trotted out again and again in different guises for hundreds of years. They are sometimes obvious, for example in the chants of the recent white supremacists protesters in Charlottesville and at other times much more difficult to tease out such as when politicians speak about the mythical issue of black on black crime. In reality whites kill each other at roughly the same rate and to argue that this kind of violence is particular to African Americans is a racist way of saying, “Those people are not like the rest of us.” My aims in this work are to link a historical story to the social and personal empathy of viewers. It would be easy to say that I made these images to educate whites about racism and patriarchy. But I don’t believe that whites don’t understand racism or white supremacy. I don’t believe people don’t understand sexism. I believe that many people don’t understand that the things they see on the screens in front of them are not new, that they are part of a much longer thread within our countries history. Lynching is an act of violence and in this case of white supremacy. People who are lynched are hanged, shot, drowned, dismembered, burned, dragged, and/or beaten by groups of people who are both physical actors in the horror and passive bystanders. Often, the bodies of lynching victims are left in the place where the murder happened so that others will see the aftermath and feel fear. In the past, people who came to see the bodies of lynched people were historically recorded engaging in acts such as, picnicking, taking photographs, collecting souvenirs like body parts, scraps of cloth, or rope to prove they saw the bodies. In the first half of the twentieth century people even collected postcards with images of lynched bodies. In the year that Mary Turner was viciously lynched, 1918, the NAACP reported that 18 people had been lynched in Georgia. We can’t say with certainty that this number is accurate. It is difficult to collect accurate numbers because in some instances municipal laws, recorders of death, and law enforcement would obscure the historical records linked to violence and murder. World War I provides a backdrop for the year 1918. Walter White wrote to President Woodrow Wilson that from the time that World War I started until July 25, 1918, 289 black people had been victims of mob violence. According to the 2005 Senate Resolution apologizing for lynching in America 4,742 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968. The resolution also states that 99% of the perpetrators escaped punishment. (Prior to 1882 there are no reliable sources for recorded lynchings.) According to some sources Mary Turner is one of four pregnant black women that were recorded as lynched and one of two that had their babies forcibly removed from their wombs. Much of the story that I present is inspired by the tireless work of Walter White. He joined the NAACP in 1918, just two years after graduating from college. He spent several hot months during that first year shuttling back and forth between Quitman, Georgia and New York, New York collecting information
about this event. He used his field research to write to the Governor, Hugh Dorsey, and President Woodrow Wilson asking them to investigate the lynchings and make public statements of disapproval and disdain. Much like Trump’s initial response to Charlottesville, the responses White received ranged from silence to, to mild disapproval, to letters blaming the black community for the violence. He wrote an account of the rampage for the Crisis called, “The Work of a Mob” which was published in September of 1918. This particular article inspired the text, which accompanies the images in this project. The work was also informed by the careful scholarship of Julie Armstrong who wrote Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching. Also the important work of the Mary Turner Project was key to this project. On their website they have archived a series of documents and newspaper accounts that are part of the story. In 2010 the state of Georgia erected a monument to commemorate the memory of Mary Turner on the site where she was killed. Shortly after it was erected, it was vandalized by a person or people who shot it five times, thus leaving bullet holes in the plaque. Initially, I imagined this series as a small wordless graphic novella in the spirit of Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, and Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová. I carved each image into battleship linoleum and printed them with black ink on Rives BFK. It took me almost a year to complete the images. Many of them were quite difficult to create in terms of the content. I wanted them to be raw and hard to see, to feel very close and personal. In the end the images were not enough. I am a painter. The words and elements of drawing added a particular context to the prints, a voice. Without them it would be hard to distinguish this series of grisly murders from a generic story about lynching. I used a hawk quill pen and a bottle of ink to slowly write the text for each image. I was inspired by the scrawl of the hand-written postcards that were part of my grandmother’s collection from World War I. The writing was so careful and beautiful. By using their names and telling the story of their deaths I hope people who see and read this know that the victims had names. They were particular people with rich lives and stories that ended in a brutal way, in front of large numbers of other people who stood by and watched. Each victim in this series died while experiencing a great deal of suffering, humiliation, and fear. -Rachel Marie-Crane Williams 2017