Black History Month - Day 21
Between 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. Yet, only on March 7, 2022 did the nation’s first ever “anti-lynching” bill pass both houses of Congress. On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed the “Emmit Till Anti-Lynching” bill into law.
Pardon me, but this seems like about a hundred years too late….in fact, it is.
Sponsors of the bill say 200 iterations of anti-lynching legislation have failed to pass since North Carolina Rep. George Henry White first introduced a similar version in 1900. At the time, White was the only Black member of Congress. It failed to pass.
What is even more remarkable than the belated passing of this bill is that Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer crafted the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, one-hundred years ago at the height of anti-black violence and lynching in America. It failed to pass.
Of the 4,743 lynchings in America, 595 occurred in Georgia. One county in Georgia stands out as the lynching capital of Georgia…Brooks County. You can explore an interactive map from the Equal Justice Initiative here, and see just where lynchings took place. EJI MAP There were 20 lynchings in that county alone. Today I’ll talk about one of them.
The Lynching of Mary Turner
This is the story of the lynching of an 8-month pregnant woman by the name of Mary Turner. First, let me explain why I chose to include this story.
Lynchings were brutal public rituals to exert white supremacy in a visual and physical way. It also showed the degree to which black people were dehumanized and treated as something other than human. Most of the victims of lynching were male. But, in the case of Mary Turner, there was the added element of a black woman’s body, that in white supremacist ideology, was never something to be respected or humanized.
I have included this story not because it is gruesome…it is. I included it because it shows a straight line of brutalizinig black women from 1619 to today. Mary Turner is a marker in a long line of gruesome stories.
It was May 18, 1918, and Mary Turner was grieving. Her husband, Hayes Turner, had been lynched without a trial, accused of being an accomplice in the murder of a white farmer. Her unborn baby would be raised without a father. Infuriated by the injustice, she threatened to ask the courts to punish his killers. So, they came for her.
The next day, May 19, Mary Turner was dead.
They came for her because she had the audacity to speak out. Her naked, burned body, pierced by hundreds of bullets, hung from a tree by Folsom’s Bridge, 16 miles north of Valdosta, Georgia. Her abdomen had been cut open. Her baby, a month shy of being born, lay on the ground dead, its head crushed by a member of a white lynch mob who stomped on its skull.
When the Valdosta Daily Times, a white-owned newspaper, described the reason for her death, it said “her talk enraged” local citizens. “The people in their indignant mood took exceptions to her remarks as well as her attitude,” the newspaper said, “and took her to the river where she was hanged.”
We must not forget Mary Turner, or the thousands of other black women that have suffered at the hands of racism. Even the historical markers today are marred and defaced by bigots with no respect for people or their history. The marker for Mary Turner has been defaced over and over.
In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced—one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.
Say Her Name
Black women had been dehumanized, brutalized, raped, and never given any agency as human beings from the beginning of enslavement and even down to today. Today according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women; in New York City alone, Black women are eight times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related complications than white women.
The gynecological experiments conducted on black women in the 19th century by James Marion Sims is prime example of the ideologically driven belief that black women were less susceptible to pain. Sims operated on live black women without anesthesia. His use of Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks.
Today, Black women’s lives are still ignored and devalued. Do you know these names? Bettie Jones, Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna and Yvette Smith, just to name a few. Say their names! The media consistently ignore the lives of black women that have been lost to police violence.
We could also talk about the fast-increasing numbers of black women that are being incarcerated today in prisons. Treatment of black women is worse than the standard. The United States is one of the top incarcerators of women in the world. A new report from the Sentencing Project shows that between 1980 and 2016, the number of women incarcerated in American jails and prisons increased by more than 700 percent, from 26,378 in 1980 to 213,722 in 2016.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports these facts: More than 20 percent of black women are raped during their lifetimes — a higher share than among women overall. Black women were two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than their white counterparts. And, more than 9 in 10 black female victims knew their killers. Black women also experience significantly higher rates of psychological abuse — including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control — than do women overall.
From enslavement, sexual exploitation, rape, disregard for their lives, lynchings, medical experiments, over incarceration, police shootings, and disregard by the media, black women have born a great deal of the racist damage inflicted upon black people. This isn’t just history, it is today. It is time to unsilence this brutal history.