Elegy for Mary Turner
Subtitle: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching
By: by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2021
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Format: paperback
Number of pages: 57
ISBN-13: 9781788739047
Copyright date: 2021
Description: A lyrical and haunting depiction of American racial violence and lynching, evoked through stunning full-color artwork.

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives—and their mourning—matter.

With introductions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great grand-nephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on black women’s bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching’s terror in American history.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments
pagenum: vi; title: Introduction: Say Her Name - 1918, 1949, 2021 - Mary Turner and the 'Wife of the Victim'
pagenum: viii
authors: Mariame Kaba; label: Elegy for Mary Turner
title: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching
pagenum: 1; title: Afterword: Hidden Memories
pagenum: 51
authors: Julie Buckner Armstrong; title: Postscript: A Place to Lay Their Heads
pagenum: 55
authors: C. Tyrone Forehand
description: great-grandnephew of Hayes and Mary Turner