A reinterpretation of one of America's most notorious lynchings
The 1918 lynching of Mary Turner by a white mob in Brooks County, Georgia, is remembered and studied mainly because of the horror of an allegedly pregnant woman's murder. In Mary Turner and the Mob, author Thomas Aiello asserts that the gruesome details of Turner's execution have distracted historians from investigating the larger context of these terrible events. Turner was murdered but not pregnant, the author contends, and Walter White, the NAACP investigator in the case, knew this but obscured the facts because of the story's effectiveness. Aiello approaches Turner's murder and broader Brooks County violence not only as a series of rural South lynchings but also as events more accurately characterized as race rioting, fitting just inside the broader Red Summer wave starting with East St. Louis in 1917 and continuing until Tulsa in 1921. Mary Turner and the Mob challenges readers to ask the critical questions necessary to understand why South Georgia was an especially violent place in the early 20th century.
Thomas Aiello is Professor of History at Valdosta State University and specializes in African American history. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Deliberate Disunity: The Life and Times of Louis E. Lomax.
"Thomas Aiello's Mary Turner and the Mob provides a bold new interpretation of the Mary Turner lynching and how its memory is still very much alive and contested today. This book makes a timely contribution that should be required reading for all scholars of memory and racial violence."—Karlos K. Hill, Regents' Professor of the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies, University of Oklahoma, and author of The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre