Mary Turner and the Mob: The Brooks-Lowndes Race Riot of 1918 in History and Memory

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 violence in Brooks County not only as a series of lynchings in the rural South but also as events best understood as part of a sustained wave of racial violence during the long Red Summer, beginning in East St. Louis in 1917 and continuing until the Tulsa Massacre in 1921.

Thomas Aiello is Professor of History at Valdosta State University and specializes in African American History.