Column: A brief essay on malignant minds

Published 9:54 am Friday, February 10, 2017

MOULTRIE, Ga. —  

I don’t know how many times I had passed that roadside plaque and paid little attention to it. But on this day something caused me to pull off the road and read a horrible story. 

The plaque I refer to is right near the Little River bridge just past Barney, Ga., where people fish, picnic, swim and otherwise enjoy one of nature’s treasures. 

I read the inscribed words and felt a sickness in the pit of my stomach. Those few words are a brief essay on man’s inhumanity to man. 

The brief story on the plaque has a title: Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage of 1918.

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It says: “Near this site on May 19, 1918, 21-year-old Mary Tuner, eight months pregnant, was burned, mutilated and shot to death by a local mob after publicly denouncing her husband’s lynching the previous day. In the days immediately following the murder of a white planter by a black employee on May 16, 1918, at least 11 local African Americans, including the Turners, died at the  hands of a lynch mob in one of the deadliest waves of vigilantism in Georgia’s history. No charges were ever brought against known or suspected participants in these crimes. From 1889-1930, as many as 550 people were killed in Georgia in these illegal acts of mob violence.”

The plaque was erected by the Georgia Historical Society, Lowndes/Valdosta Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Valdosta State University and other historical entities.

Since reading this plaque, I talked to several people who remembered their grandparents talking about these lynchings. 

The perpetrators of these heinous crimes are dead and gone. So are those people who should have brought the murderers to justice.

We often revisit details of the Holocaust where millions of Jews were slaughtered by that mad man Adolf Hitler. Sometimes people will ask why the story of the Holocaust is rehashed so much. And the answer is so that we can be cognizant of what mad men and mob mentalities can do.

Now the story of Mary Turner is not numerically equivalent to the Holocaust. But in our little neck of the woods, it was a Holocaust. The ignorance and the hatred are no less malignant to the heart of man than the wickedness of Adolph Hitler.

When I studied Georgia History in high school, I don’t recall these particular events.  I suppose our texts, not so distant from the horrible time element, sanitized what was passed onto us as knowledge. 

As I stood there I realized that February is Black History Month. And while many of us honor the many great accomplishments of African Americans, we would be remiss not to recognize that sorry time in American history when evil men, often hiding their identities in extreme cowardice beneath white sheets, struck  horror into the lives of fellow human beings simply because of skin color. And yes, like the Holocaust, we should routinely revisit those horrors with the same resolve that we will never let this happen again.

I was told that someone shot the plaque, defacing it. And it was replaced. I cannot confirm this, but if it’s true, then that reminds us that we still have sick-minded, ignorant people among us. 

Perhaps today we tend to think of terrorism as being of foreign seed. Not so. The story of Mary Turner confirms this. (Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)