By: Rene Childress
I am well along in the eightieth decade of my life being in this place we all call the United States of America. I have been a concerned and active participant in the struggle to combat how we African-Americans have been treated and perceived by the ruling power structure that controls our existence and well being. Since the first arrival on these shores in 1619 we have had to accept and contend with the most horrendous conditions known to humankind. We have been exposed to chattel slavery, rape, torture,murder and psychological cultural assassination. We and our children carry this burden in our spirit and our psyche. We still to this day believe that the closer we are to the White rapist genes that permeate all of us we are somehow better off than those of us that are further removed from the accursed progenitors of our misery.
I want to give life to the stories that some of our White brethren want to forget. It is just as important as the Europeans refusing to let their history of Anti-Semitism become an after-thought. It is just as important that we remember our history and the slings and arrows of racism that color our past and present. With this as my opening statement I want to initiate a series of historical episodes that can be easily found on the internet if you will follow me on this journey.
It will chill your soul. It will bring tears to your eyes. It will surely enrage you that these things occurred in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It is my hope that by bringing these historical events forward to our current generation we can say to our children this was who we were not who we can be.
My first story of “The Worst Story Ever Told”is the story of Mrs Mary Turner of Brooks County Georgia. She was a black woman who was eight months pregnant. Her husband Hayes Turner was lynched with several other black men after the murder of a white farmer name Hampton Smith. The police found and confronted the confessed killer Sidney Johnson.
Police officers killed Mr.Johnson in a shootout.
The blood lust of the white population was not sated with the killing of Mr. Johnson. The white community wanted to send a message to all the black people in their community that they would not allow the spilling of white blood by a black person without a wide community response. They decided that Hayes Turner who had been known to not accept racial umbrage willfully became a target. He was accused of being a part of a conspiracy to commit the murder of Hampton Smith. He was summarily lynched.
Hayes Turner’s pregnant wife Mary grieving the loss of her husband began complaining to the authorities about the death of her husband. The whites in her county decided she had forgotten her place. A white mob drugged her from her home.
On May 19 1918 Mary Turner was hung from a tree near the Folsom County Bridge. She was eight months pregnant. She was hung upside down. She was bound by her feet. She was set on fire with gasoline splashed all over her. One of her tormentors took a large butcher knife and gutted her, allowing her unborn child to come briefly into existence only to have its head crushed beneath the foot of a member of the mob.
As the case in so many of these stories we are about to traverse. No one was ever prosecuted. This is my first in this series. It will not be the last. I will attempt to use both past and present stories to show that this thing continues and we need to continue to expose and fight to change who we are as a country.