Talk:May 1918 lynchings

Contemporary reports from the NY Times that might conceivably be helpful:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9905EFDD163EE433A25753C2A9639C946996D6CF&scp=1&sq=%22Mary+Turner%22+lynched&st=p http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D0CE4DA163BE533A25755C2A9609C946095D6CF&scp=2&sq=%22Mary+Turner%22+lynched&st=p

--Kiz o r  16:14, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
 * This talk page has deleted revisions, but they are entirely devoted to discussing the (copyvio) state of the article at that time. --Kiz o r  16:19, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Nice going
This article has been moving along slowly, but nicely. If you think it is not deserving of a "start" category yet, please, let me know your thoughts. I think we need to expand it a bit, work on the prose, style and cohesiveness a bit, and add more relevant sources (primary and secondary) to push it even higher. Historian (talk) 07:18, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Question on aftermath
"Following the lynchings, more than 500 black residents fled the area, despite threats against the lives of anyone who tried." I don't understand this - does this mean the mob were telling black residents not to leave? If so, why? 2.220.110.216 (talk) 19:42, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

I suspect they were needed for their labor. De facto slavery remained in the south for almost 100 years after the Civil War ( probably it remains in some form or the other today if the FBI was interested to look ). As late as 1927 ( great flood) southern National Guard units were used to keep blacks from leaving the area where they were worked. 75.68.248.198 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:46, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Age
We normally do not use census reports because of the difficulty of establishing that the subject of the article is the person in the census report. This source states "In May 1918, Mary Turner protested the killing of her husband. She was 21 years old and eight months pregnant; previous accounts have suggested she was only 20 years old." notes that the Mary Turner Project calls here 21, and comments that this young age differs from that in other published sources. Doug Weller (talk) 14:46, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this topic. I reverted recent changes to her age because they did not match the birth date in the article and the editor was anonymous without WP record. But I am right now trying to investigate exactly the topic of your point. Please, share anything else you find on it. Historiador (talk) 15:04, 23 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Apparent Problems with Mary's age To and others interested on Mary Turner's age. I looked through the article's history and noticed an ambivalence about her age. Early on, her birth year was adjusted to say she was 19 years-old at the time of her death: 1899.  In November 14, 2014,  changed her birthdate to December 1884. According to the summary comments, the change was based on the following document: (A Place to Lay Their Heads). This document is supposedly written by a family member, but the date it has for Mary's birth is 1885 rather than 1884, and there is no mentioned there of December either.


 * I have looked at more than 20 recent academic publications about her life and only one claims she was 19 at the time of her death (which corresponds with some contemporary newspaper accounts):


 * "The people ... took exception to her remarks".


 * All others, make no reference to her age or her birth. Here are some of the examples:


 * Lynchings of Women in the United States
 * Mary Turner's Blues (same author as the first one)


 * My suggestion is that we move Mary Turner's birth date back to simply 1899, cite the sources, request help from experts and explain the ambivalence. I will move to do this, but will change if the consensus moves in another direction. Historiador (talk) 17:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The December 1884 comes from the census record. The census record other than being slightly off in the year accurately depicts the family as described by her relative in the oral history elsewhere cited. December 1884 is in the least a month away from the year reported in the oral history. Oral history combined with the census report has more weight of proof for her birth day than a few newspaper reports focused upon her death. There is also a racial divide in the literature on her death. Nearly every academic study on her has relied upon the same newspaper accounts that misreport her age. She has relatives and descendants who are still alive today. They have rarely been consulted about the matter of Mary Turner's death for academic studies. The more recent reports of her lynching have recycled the same newspaper accounts. The oral history linked is hosted by people local to the area where the lynching happened, and her descendants are involved in that project, the Mary Turner Project. They treat her more like a human being instead of a case study in lynching. They are also the group responsible for adding a metal marker to the lynching site. If they believe that the author of the oral history is who he says he is, as a person with a master's degree in history I do not see any reason to doubt his story regarding her age. The newspaper accounts are semi-reliable (biased of course) for the events of 1918, but would not be reliable for events of 1899.

That said other than that single instance of oral history and the corroborating census reports, the other published accounts of Mary Turner do give her age at death as 19. I would be in favour of giving either the December 1884 or 1885 and noting in the article briefly the ambivalence, but understand the nature of the situation and will follow consensus. (CaptainStegge (talk) 18:30, 23 November 2015 (UTC))


 * I think I understand what you are saying, but even the family organization offers contradictory information. While the two-page document written by Forehand gives 1885 as the year of her birth, the first page of the Remembering Mary Turner project says she was 20-year-old in 1918, putting her birth year in 1898. I am familiar with the complexities behind oral histories and issues with documentation along the racial divide. As wrote above, censuses are tricky evidence. There is a reason why hardly any scholar working on her has mentioned anything about her birthday. Moreover, though not unique, 33 was not a common age for pregnancy across all divides, which helps explain the hesitancy among scholars to embrace the 1884 year as her birth date. The main issue at play here is that Wikipedia cannot be written based on oral history alone. So, I suggest that rather than explaining this issue subtly in the article, we open a section about the problems surrounding her age, oral history, and documentation. Historiador (talk) 21:15, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Another article editors here might be interested in
Sam Hose's article needs a lot of work. I've added a couple of very good sources, including a recent book which seems to summarise all the earlier work which to the talk page. 09:45, 24 November 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs)

Suggest article on "1918 Lynching rampage in Brooks County, GA"
I understand that the Mary Turner Project has organized to commemorate her and her husband's deaths, as well as other victims lynched in what has been called a "rampage" over two weeks. The MT Project has done much to preserve this history. But I believe that the total of the 13 deaths, most in one county, should also be treated as an article separate from one on Mary Turner, whose death was covered by national papers. A suggested title is above. I am willing to set that up.Parkwells (talk) 14:04, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Date of birth
We are not allowed say things like "the census record is definitely the same person who was lynched"; we need reliable secondary sources that back this up. I didn't bring it up because it contradicted the contemporary news reports on the date of her death, but we would be much better off assuming that this was the same person, because it actually mentions her by the name she was known when she was killed, and actually gives a more credible date of birth than 1899. Additionally, the source you added gives yet another date of birth (1885). It may well have a misprint on the date of her death, as may the tombstone.

Typically, when we have an abundance of (reliable, secondary) sources that contradict each other, we simply provide a survey of what all of them say. The problem here is we have a bunch of apparently unreliable sources (that appear to contain misprints on critical details) and ancient primary sources that Wikipedians are choosing to interpret in a manner we are not supposed to (I include contemporary newspapers for whose authors segregation and lynching werw just facts of life in this latter group). What needs to be done here is to throw out all of the bad sources, and simply list the facts as they can be established and summarize what historians and reputable non-scholarly sources say for the rest, providing appropriate inline attribution.

Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 10:59, 4 October 2016 (UTC)


 * That find a grave you linked is definitely not her. 100% certain of that. White cemetery, over one hundred miles away from where it happened, not where the accounts in every source say she is buried, and not where her descendants say she is buried. I am also a find a grave volunteer. That memorial is one that has been mistaken for her because people have not looked past the name and the year of death. A contributor on find a grave has linked a memorial for the actual Mary Turner's child to that memorial and has created a mess over there that has spun out of hand. That contributor transferred the memorial to a contributor who manages large amounts of memorials and is not really familiar with the situation involving Mrs. Turner's death. I have been to Mary Turner's actual murder/burial site and that is not it. I contacted the contributor over there a few years ago about fixing the problem, but never got a response.


 * I have master's degree in history and also certification in genealogy. The birth year being December 1884 in the census and the oral history account saying 1885 is not that unusual. People did not always keep as good of track as records relating to the birth back then as they do today, which makes it really hard for people today to understand the idea of fuzzy dates. What that oral history account does provide is a list of her siblings, which appear in the census record. That is the most important thing to be taken from the oral history account. Mary Turner and Mary Hattie Graham are pretty common names, but for a person by that name to appear in the same census household alongside people with names known from the oral history account to be those of her parents and siblings, that would be highly unlikely for it to be somebody else. Especially when all of the names of the siblings and parents are spot on. A chance that a Hattie Graham could have a father named Perry and a brother named Perry is one thing, but with each name that is right the likelihood goes up.


 * The newspaper accounts are more reliable for her death date than her birth date. They were published closer to her death and were more about her death, than her birth date. The oral history account would be weighed less in authority if it was not backed up by the census. 1885 is not exactly December 1884, but it a lot closer to Dec 1884 than to the approximate year of 1898/1899 implied by the newspaper accounts of her death. As a historian and genealogist, I would weigh the authority of the oral history account of her birth year higher than I would weigh the academic account of her birth year. The academic accounts are focused on her death, and never bothered to verify details of her life beyond the period of her lynching with other sources.


 * I am not going to mess with her birth year on here because of the need for more authoritative sources than the published oral history account of her grand-nephew (secondary) and the census (primary), but the list of her siblings as given by the census is supported by the oral history account (secondary). The only published secondary source of the 1885 birth year is the oral history account. Everything I was taught in my training as a genealogist and historian tells me that is the most likely date, but I have tried changing it on here before and cited the oral history account, and contributors felt it was more likely for a 19-year-old to be having her third child, than for a 33-year-old to be having her third child.CaptainStegge (talk) 18:27, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I have not read the census (it was difficult to zoom in on my iPad, and it is not a source that we are allowed use on Wikipedia anyway), but you are saying that it too contradicts our article's current birth date? Good. Then we should definitely change it, because the current one is unsourced and is contradicted by all the sources.
 * I did not read most of the rest of your wall of text. I don't really care what graduate degrees you say you have. Most people with higher degrees who use them appropriately are in jobs where the normal m-o is very different from how Wikipedia works. You could be a professor of African American studies, but that would not mean you are more capable of avoiding original research than the rest of us. Additionally, you should read Essjay controversy to understand why saying on your user page that you have an MA will not win you any arguments.
 * Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 21:28, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Also, note that what I was doing in linking the FindAGrave page was original research, the same as linking the census. FindAGrave is not a reliable source, and i don't doubt that it incorrectly attributes "grave" status to random memorial markers where no one is actually buried. It is someone with the same name, whose date of death is exactly two months after the apparent date of our subject. (A misprint like this is at least as probable as a misprint that got the date two days off, since "7/18" looks more like "5/18" than does "5/20".) Additionally, if it is a different person, it at least looks like someone at FindAGrave got them mixed up, too, because of it listing her child as having lived from 1918 to 1918. None of this is usable in the article, and I am not even saying I think any of it might be "true". i am just trying to explain to you one of the reasons we don't engage in this kind of OR on Wikipedia. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 23:12, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * "The wall of text" was explaining the sourcing of the birth year in the texts: oral history account, and traditional academic publications. The academic publications have 1898/1899 date as the article had previously. The last part of "wall of text" explained why even though I know the 1898/1899 date to be wrong, I am not in favor of changing it in order to avoid the problem of original research. Since the majority of published works on her have the 1898/1899 date, and only the oral history account has the 1885 date.CaptainStegge (talk) 03:34, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
 * When you say "oral history", I can only assume, since you are not apparently citing external sources that other Wikipedia editors can check, that you conducted interviews yourself. If so, that is an admirable exercise, and I wish you all the best, but until they are published in some verifiable manner all we can use on Wikipedia are what editors can find in already-published sources. I briefly looked over the discussion above, and no one seems to think that academic publications list her year of birth as 1899. My reasoning is telling me that it's extremely unlikely that when she was 18 or 19 she had married someone five years her senior and borne him two children, and became pregnant with the third. I start with this assumption, and then I checked the sources to see if they disagreed. None of the ones cited in the article did, and the blogs cited on the talk page appeared to have largely been taken down. I read some of the contemporary news reports that also didn't note that she was a teenage mother of three (although I don't know enough about 1910s American local newspapers to tell whether they would have done this). If we can't find any reliable sources giving her date of birth or age at time of death at all, then we should just leave it blank. That is what we do with other historical figures whose biographical details are not known (actually, we often delete articles on modern figures who are not covered in reliable sources in enough detail that we know their date of borth). Our readers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions from the biographical details that can be sourced. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 05:11, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
 * The oral history I have been referring to is the "A Place to Lay Their Heads" by Forehand cited in the article. He was the great grand nephew of Mary Turner. His work does not cite sources, but is a collection of family and community oral history on the lynching.CaptainStegge (talk) 17:18, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Merge discussion
I propose to merge the Hazel Turner article into this one under the new title of Lynching of Hazel and Mary Turner. Both lynchings are from the same incident. Mitchumch (talk) 08:26, 5 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I agree. The lynchings were directly related, and occurred within days of each other. Merging the articles would provide both with valuable context. Norcaes (talk) 09:17, 27 April 2018 (UTC)


 * I support the merge, but it should be "lynchings". deisenbe (talk) 11:01, 27 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Supporting the merge with the same caveat, it should be plural. Doug Weller  talk 12:05, 27 April 2018 (UTC)


 * I support the merge conditionally. The new article title should be something to the effect of May 1918 Lynching Rampage or May 1918 Lynching Rampage (Georgia). The Mary Turner article already covers most of the other victims in it, and the article more or less covers the entirety of the events of May 1918 and reactions to it. While she is the most well-known victim of it currently there were others. CaptainStegge (talk) 21:08, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Support merge, but again don't feel that that the title is quite right yet. I suggest May 1918 lynchings, on the grounds that lynching ("premeditated extrajudicial killing ") is already sufficiently strong and doesn't need the emotive and subjective 'rampage'; while disambiguation with (Georgia) isn't necessary unless there are singificant other sets of lynchings that are notable. Also, there is no need for the caps (not proper nouns). Klbrain (talk) 08:54, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ Klbrain (talk) 21:56, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Major factual discrepancies, disorganized article, plus the alleged motive/excuse for her killing is not even given.
1. This whole article is a disorganized mess. The other associated lynchings are of course noteworthy but it's all lumped together one paragraph after another in the same section. At the very least, Mary's lynching should have its own dedicated section, and maybe some of the other surrounding context should be moved to separate articles and only summarized here.

The historical context is a big deal, but the details of Mary's lynching should not be *obscured* on her own page.

2a. I am not familiar with the dynamically generated references list that this article's uses, so I can't seem to add a reference without mucking it all up, but there is a source over on her husband's page (Hazel "Hayes" Turner) -- ) that has very relevant information that *this* article currently does not say.

I would appreciate it if someone would add that reference to this article as well, and it would also be nice if someone could clean up the references list into something more easily manageable instead of there being mountains of inline markup in the article body like it currently has.

2b. Yes, I am aware that Wikipedia prefers to not rely on primary sources, so if someone has a secondary source that covers that newspaper article's claims (be they truthful or not), that's fine.

It may be worth noting that the Wikipedia article on that newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, says it is a liberal paper and is notable for speaking out against hate groups, so at first glance I see no reason to question its reporting. It is true that it may in part be reporting someone else's justification-lies, but are there are reliable sources that say this?

The newspaper article doesn't mention her baby, which (assuming that part is true) does seem to indicate they hadn't yet done an in-depth investigation.

2c. There are MAJOR details from that newspaper article that the Wikipedia article currently does not mention at all, particularly:

A. The implications that she was supposedly somehow involved in the dispute with or murder of Hampton Smith (that his watch was supposedly found in her possession, and it says that her husband *and she* was involved in a "dispute" over "an account" with the murdered white man, Hampton Smith.)

The wikipedia article currently makes it sound like she had no connection whatsoever to the murdered white man until she supposedly (see below) showed up to complain to the mob about her husband's death.

B.That she was under arrest and taken from the sheriff's custody by the mob--the newspaper says nothing about her confronting the mob, like Wikipedia's article currently says. It's not clear whether she was being placed in protective custody (as the relatives of some of the other lynched men were), or if she was being arrested for his murder due the watch being found in her possession or arrested for some other reason. This seems like an important detail...

See 2b--the newspaper itself seems like a reliable source. I think it is evidence at the very least that the mob had some excuses ready to justify her killing--by implying she was involved in the murder of the man.

Or, if the evidence was not fabricated, it could even be true that Mary was complicit in the murder of Hampton Smith.

And maybe that murder was justified, and no that doesn't excuse the murder of the baby, and yes lynching is very very bad, holy god please go rant at someone else, that isn't relevant here. My only point is the article should describe and reflect reality, including what the actors involved and newspapers at the time were saying. If you have a secondary sources that address what the newspaper claims, feel free to add that.

My own suspicions on the matter (which are not strictly relevant, NPOV etc., but I'm saying this out loud so as to hopefully dispel any suspicion that I'm some Stormfront goon): I don't have time to dig thoroughly into this, but at a quick glance a lot of the scholarship on this appears to be rather shoddy and hand-waving... excuses to wave anti-racism flags instead of scholarly attempts to determine what actually happened and what everyone's motive was and excuse was. Lynching happened and that was bad, yes, but it does no one any favors to pretend that the racist early-twentieth century South was more ghoulish than it actually was. I strongly suspect that, as with Nazi Germany, the majority of the killers at least had sense enough or shame enough to conceal some things (like her being pregnant) and claim some justifications for their actions. Mainstream southern society was never debauched to the extent that you could murder a pregnant woman and her baby for simply complaining that her husband was killed and everyone would just shrug--thus the newspaper, presumably reporting on whatever the authorities told them, (again, this is supposedly some sort of liberal, anti-hate group paper) made no mention of her pregnancy but it *did* mention her connection to the slain white man. This excuse is relevant even if it is false. And I wouldn't be surprised if it were false, but another possibility is that Walter F. White's description is incorrect. He is not a neutral scholar in these matters, after all.

By analogy--yes the Holocaust happened, and yes six million Jews did die, but some people eager to underline the atrocities will go on to exaggerate things--by claiming the Nazis turned Jewish corpses into soap and buttons, for instance. It is a good thing that anti-racism activists exist but it does not follow that anti-racism activists make the best or most impartial historians. So, are any parts of this story being exaggerated? I don't know. I don't have access to a university library and hours and hours of free time. But what we do have here is a primary source that contains claims not present in the Wikipedia article, and other claims that contradict what it says.

It matters if the police and/or the mob implied/claimed that she was involved in the white man's death. It matters if she was taken from police custody by the mob, instead of going herself to confront the mob. Even if these things aren't true, it's still interesting and relevant that a contemporary newspaper claimed that they were true.

I don't have the time or stamina to argue with the endless quibbling from biased parties right now, or reorganize the article's references, or read through secondary sources and try to determine what the consensus is, what is actually real scholarship and what is just unverified, lazy propagandizing, but perhaps someone else does. Godspeed. Blue Rock (talk) 13:55, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

I too have some concerns about the exact details. There is no doubt or question about the fact that Mary Turner was lynched. But the exact circumstances are not quite so certain. The only source for the particularly horrific details seems to be Walter White. White was not a witness, and does not name his own sources nor suggest that they were eye-witnesses either. This is a problem since his account is therefore 'hearsay' and thus not good quality evidence of the facts. And it could be argued that both White and his presumed informants may have had an interest in making an horrific event even more revolting than the facts. Thus as long as White remains the only source all we can truthfully say is 'it was later claimed that...' The lynching may have happened exactly as described, or some element of myth may have entered the narrative. We may never know with complete certainty, and in strict academic terms it would be wrong to suggest that every element of this terrible event is confirmed fact. Steve A. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.145.163.75 (talk) 12:01, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Another Brooks county atrocity
This may be of interest to readers of this article: I was searching for info on the immigration crisis in Brooks County, Texas today, and somehow stumbled across an 1894 article about the "Brooks County race war", and thus created that article. It was briefly national news in December 1894-January 1895. Seems worth more scholarly inquiry.--Milowent • hasspoken 23:03, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Poor article
This article is bad enough that I had to create an account to complain about it.

It's an organizational mess, Mary Turner is mentioned at least 3 times, all of them describing the incident in a different manner. There is also an "early life" section that is totally alien to the section it's placed in.

Somebody should take care of this — Preceding unsigned comment added by Magoloso (talk • contribs) 09:37, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Maybe you can take care of it. Just make small incremental changes, add a summary to each change, add sources ... --The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 15:52, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Mary Turner's Newborn Baby
I changed all instances of "unborn child" to "newborn baby", because the baby was born alive. The article already noted the horrific circumstances of his or her birth, and that the baby cried. SilverCobweb (talk) 23:23, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing
Much of the text is redundant and repetitive. Can we edit this down? 2600:4040:930F:4F00:35F3:971B:902F:A26D (talk) 13:43, 11 May 2024 (UTC)