Elegy for Mary Turner - Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

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 and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives-and their mourning-matter.

Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew 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.