Lynching of Mary Turner

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YouTube - Lynching of Mary Turner

YouTube - Lynching of Mary Turner

Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America


East St. Louis, Illinois, exploded on July 2, 1917, in on the bloodiest race riots in American history. Led by white workers protesting the employment of blacks, the white citizens of that town killed from forty to two hundred blacks and drove six thousand from their homes.

There were 60 lynchings in 1918, and 76 in 1919.

More disturbing that the number was the increasing sadism of the mobs.

The Mary Turner lynching of 1918 was unquestionably one of the most barbaric acts ever committed in a civilized country. Though pregant, the black woman was lynched in Valdosta, Geogia. She was hanged to a tree, doused with gasoline and motor oil and burned. As she dangled from the rope, a man stepped forward with a pocketknife and ripped open her abdomen in a crude Caesarean operation. "Out tumbled the prematurely born child," wrote Walter Write. "Two feelbe cries it gave---and received for the answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out the tiny form."


Peace be upon you