VALDOSTA, Ga. — Lee Henderson closes his eyes and pictures Mary Turner holding her swollen belly and breathing heavily as she runs from the lynch mob.

“Daddy’s dead, and now they’re coming for me. How do I save you?”

Henderson, a Valdosta resident who spent years researching Turner’s life, said he imagines the 21-year-old woman saying these words desperately to the baby inside her.

But she couldn’t save the baby. An eight-month pregnant Turner was soon captured and strung up by her ankles near the Lowndes County-Brooks County line in South Georgia. An enraged mob of white men doused her with gasoline, burned her clothes and cut the baby from her womb.

Only a couple cries from the baby were ever heard. Turner was then shot repeatedly.

Turner’s lynching – which happened a century ago next month – was so brutal that some details have been omitted here.

Back then, word of the savagery spread beyond the South and helped fuel an anti-lynching movement that was beginning to take hold elsewhere. Even the White House was alerted about the violence playing out in Brooks County.

But today in South Georgia, where Turner was swept up in a lynching rampage that killed about a dozen people, the story of her death doesn’t appear to be so widely known or told.

There have been efforts to fix that. A group behind the Mary Turner Project pushed for a historical marker to be placed in the remote area near where she died.

Mark George, a Valdosta native and a sociology professor who helped start the Mary Turner Project while at Valdosta State University, said one of the goals of the effort was simply “to undisappear people.”

“Injustice was done, and that needs to be told,” said George, who is white and now teaches in Portland, Ore. “If you want to know history, you just can’t know the parts that you like.”

Within a few years, the marker had been riddled with bullets. The group chose not to have the marker replaced.

A Disease

Now, a new memorial hundreds of miles from where Mary Turner and her baby were killed is intended to amplify their story, as well as the stories of thousands of other black Americans who were killed by lynch mobs in the decades after the Civil War.

About 800 six-foot steel monuments hang in the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. They are meant to suggest the tragic and unjust end that befell about 4,400 people from 1877 to 1950.

The Equal Justice Initiative will open the privately funded, first-of-its-kind memorial in the United States to the public this Thursday along with an accompanying museum called the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

“Slavery doesn’t end in 1865. It just evolves,” Bryan Stevenson, the director of the Montgomery-based nonprofit, said on a recent CBS segment. EJI declined a request for an interview.

Thousands of lynchings took place mostly in the South. Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings, according to an EJI report. Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana had the highest statewide lynching rates.

But the group also documented examples as far northeast as Orange County, N.Y., and as far west as Kern County, Calif.

The massive memorial is designed to represent the scale of the national horror.

“I don’t think we get to pretend that this stuff didn’t happen. I don’t think you can just play it off. This is like a disease. You have to treat it,” Stevenson said during the CBS segment.

Each monument represents a county where a documented lynching occurred and is engraved with a list of the dead in that county. Some counties – such as Anderson County, Texas, and Brooks County, Ga. – will have longer lists inscribed than others.

Replicas of the monuments sit near the memorial – waiting for the counties they represent to claim and install them back home.

Lingering Scars

The lynching victims were often accused of a crime, but not always.

There was 15-year-old Willie James Howard, who was snatched up in Suwannee County, Fla., in 1944 after sending an admiring note to the daughter of one of his captors. With his hands and feet bound, Howard was forced to jump into a river as his father watched at gunpoint.

And in east Texas, just southeast of Palestine, nearly two dozen black residents were reportedly gunned down indiscriminately during the 1910 Slocum Massacre for reasons that remain unclear. Many surviving black residents then fled the area en masse.

In Georgia, more than two-thirds of lynching victims were in police custody when a lynch mob seized them, according to Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina.

“Lynching is a manifestation, I think, of Americans’ and overwhelmingly white Americans’ willingness to bend or outright break the law if the law is inconvenient to the exercise of their power,” Brundage said.

Brundage, who wrote “Lynching in the New South,” which focused on Georgia and Virginia, said the number of lynchings nationwide could have been as high as 5,000.

Yet, he noted that there seems to be little public awareness today of this history and its lasting imprint.

“There is a level of ignorance about something that we should not be ignorant about,” Brundage said. “Not just because of the tragedy for the people who died at the hands of lynch mobs and who were executed illegally for reasons that were determined by the people who killed them, rather than by any fair system of justice.

“Aside from that injustice, there’s also of course the scar that it left for all those people who participated in the lynchings and all of those people who were intimidated by them,” he said.

‘There has to be a reconciliation’

Lee Henderson has been haunted by Mary Turner’s story ever since his college professor pulled him aside more than a decade ago and suggested he do an online search for “Mary Turner.”

That conjured up the story of a woman who was killed for protesting the lynching of her husband, who had been accused of conspiring to murder a local farmer. Mary Turner and her husband both worked for the farmer, Hampton Smith, and a group of workers was said to have plotted the murder in the Turner home.

As the story goes, Smith had a reputation for beating and abusing his workers so he struggled to find willing employees. He turned to a common tactic at the time, paying an inmate’s fine and allowing the debt to be repaid through work.

One worker, who had been jailed for gambling, was beaten just days before the murder after he refused to work while sick. That employee later killed Smith, shot his wife and ransacked the home.

At the time, there were also accusations that Smith’s wife was sexually assaulted during the attack, although that claim was later discredited. The farmer’s pocket watch was later found in Turner’s possession.

The accuracy of these accounts would never be explored through the judicial process.

A mob quickly formed, attracting Smith’s family members, community leaders and others from the region, and one newspaper account at the time said the mob grew to more than 500 people. The manhunt ended with the lynchings of a dozen or more people during the course of nearly a week.

Mary Turner drew the mob’s ire when she threatened to take out arrest warrants for the men who killed her husband, who she said knew nothing of the plans to murder Smith.

Henderson said he wanted to learn all he could about Turner and how this violence affected the community.

One day, when Henderson interviewed a 96-year-old woman who grew up in Brooks County, he said she whispered to him as he prepared to leave: “Now, we ain’t going to get in no trouble with these white folks, is we?”

“For her, it was like it happened the day before,” the 67-year-old Henderson said. “It’s still happening.”

Henderson, who is a Baptist preacher and radio newsman in Valdosta, said he plans to be there when the memorial to Turner and the thousands of other lynching victims opens Thursday.

“There has to be a coming together to acknowledge,” Henderson said. “There has to be a coming together to say, ‘Yeah, it happened, and we’re sorry.’ There has to be a coming together so people can say, ‘Yeah, it happened, but we forgive.’

“Because just like descendants of the mob are still here, the descendants of the people who were lynched – they’re still here, too. And the pain lives in one’s psyche. How do you get rid of it?” he said. “There has to be a reconciliation.”

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for The Valdosta Daily Times, CNHI’s newspapers and websites.