Bullet-pocked marker memorializing 1918 lynching goes on display in
Atlanta
[December 08, 2025]
By MICHAEL WARREN
ATLANTA (AP) — A historical marker from the site of a 1918 lynching that
was repeatedly vandalized in recent years is now safely on display in
Atlanta in an exhibit that opens Monday.
It memorializes an event that some people in rural southern Georgia have
tried hard to erase: the killing of Mary Turner by a white mob that was
bent on silencing her after she demanded justice for the lynching of her
husband, Hayes Turner, and at least 10 other Black people.
Pocked with bullet holes and cracked at its pedestal by an off-road
vehicle, the Georgia Historical Society marker reads in part: “Mary
Turner, eight months pregnant, was burned, mutilated, and shot to death
by a mob after publicly denouncing her husband’s lynching the previous
day. … No charges were ever brought against known or suspected
participants in these crimes. From 1880-1930, as many as 550 people were
killed in Georgia in these illegal acts of mob violence.”
Now each word damaged by bullets is projected on a wall, and visitors
hear those words spoken by some of Turner’s six generations of
descendants.
“I’m glad the memorial was shot up,” great-granddaughter Katrina Thomas
said Saturday night after her first look at the exhibit in the National
Museum for Civil and Human Rights. “Millions of people are going to
learn her story. That her voice is continuing years and years after, it
shows history does not disappear. It lives and continues to grow.”
Americans learned about these lynchings in 1918 because they were
investigated in the immediate aftermath by Walter White, who founded the
Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and would become an influential voice for civil rights
nationwide. A light-skinned Black man who could pass for white, he
interviewed eyewitnesses and provided names of suspects to the governor
of Georgia, according to his report in the NAACP’s publication, The
Crisis.
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Katrina Thomas, a great-granddaughter of Mary Turner, who was
lynched in 1918, poses with her historic marker at the National
Center for Civil and Human Rights, on Dec. 6, 2025 in Atlanta. (AP
Photo/Michael Warren)
Georgia was among the most active states for lynchings, according to
the Equal Justice Initiative ’s catalog of more than 4,400
documented racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between
Reconstruction and World War II. The organization has placed markers
at many sites and built a monument to the victims in Montgomery,
Alabama.
The nation’s first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in 1918
amid national reaction to deaths of Mary and Hayes Turner and their
neighbors in Georgia's Brooks and Lowndes counties. It passed the
House in 1922, but Southern senators filibustered it and another
century would pass before lynching was made a federal hate crime in
2022.
“The same injustice that took her life was the same injustice that
kept vandalizing it, year after year,” said Randy McClain, the
Turners’ great-grandnephew. He grew up in the same rural area where
the lynchings happened but did not know much about them or discover
his family connection until he was an adult.
“Here it feels like a very safe space,” McClain said. “She's now
finally at rest, and her story can be told. And her family can feel
some sense of vindication.”
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