Mary Turner & Hayes Turner

Mary Turner, 19 and eight months pregnant, and her husband Hayes Turner, 25, were lynched one day apart in Brooks County, Georgia, in May 1918, during a mob rampage that killed at least 11 to 13 Black people in the wake of a white plantation owner's murder. After Hampton Smith, known locally for abusing Black farmworkers, was shot and killed by an employee named Sidney Johnson on May 16, 1918, a mob of hundreds began seizing and lynching Black residents with no connection to any investigation, based only on rumor. Hayes Turner, who had previously been jailed for threatening Smith after Smith beat Mary, was seized from sheriff's custody and lynched on May 18. When Mary Turner publicly denounced her husband's killing and vowed to seek warrants against the men responsible, a mob of several hundred captured her the next day, hanged her upside down from a tree, and burned and shot her to death; she was still alive when a member of the mob cut her unborn child from her body. No one was ever charged in the deaths of Mary Turner, Hayes Turner, or the other Black residents killed during the same two-week rampage.

Barney, GA · Brooks County County

• 1918: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• The killing of Hampton Smith, the resulting mob rampage across Brooks and Lowndes counties, and the lynchings of Mary and Hayes Turner, per contemporaneous NAACP investigation led by Walter F. White, later academic history including Julie Buckner Armstrong's “Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching,” and the Equal Justice Initiative's documentation of the period's racial terror lynchings.
• Hayes Turner had previously served time on a chain gang for threatening Hampton Smith after Smith physically beat Mary Turner; when Smith was killed, Turner was arrested based on rumor of a conspiracy among Smith's mistreated workers, with no evidence directly tying him to the shooting.
• While being transferred to a jail in a neighboring county for his own safety, Hayes Turner was intercepted by a mob of roughly 40 masked men, who took him from the custody of the sheriff and county clerk and lynched him; his body was left hanging publicly for at least a day.
• Mary Turner, upon hearing of her husband's death, publicly stated he had nothing to do with Smith's killing and said she intended to seek legal warrants against the men who lynched him; this public statement enraged the mob further.
• A mob of several hundred people captured Mary Turner the next day, May 19, bound her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree at Folsom Bridge, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire; while she was still alive, a member of the mob used a knife to cut her unborn child from her body, and the infant was then killed as well before the mob shot Turner's body hundreds of times.
• NAACP Secretary John R. Shillady sent an open letter to Georgia Governor Hugh Dorsey and regional business organizations demanding that mob members be identified and prosecuted; no one was ever charged in connection with any of the killings during the two-week rampage.
• The lynching of Mary Turner directly prompted NAACP officials to press Congressman Leonidas Dyer to draft federal anti-lynching legislation; the resulting Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922 but was repeatedly blocked in the Senate by Southern Democratic senators and never became law.

• The identities of the mob members who lynched Hayes Turner, Mary Turner, and the other Black residents killed during the same two-week period were reported to investigators and the Georgia governor's office at the time, but none were ever officially confirmed, charged, or prosecuted.
• Whether Hayes Turner had any actual connection to Hampton Smith's killing, as opposed to being targeted based on a prior personal conflict with Smith and rumor of a broader conspiracy, was never established through any legal proceeding.
• The full number of Black residents killed during the Brooks-Lowndes rampage is reported inconsistently across sources, ranging from at least 11 to as many as 13, reflecting how incompletely the killings were documented even at the time.

• BlackPast.org — “Mary Turner (1899-1918)”
• Equal Justice Initiative — “On May 19, 1918: Mary Turner, Pregnant, Lynched in Georgia for Publicly Criticizing Husband's Lynching”
• Wikipedia — “May 1918 lynchings” (sourced case history)
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs