Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their livesand their mourningmatter. With introductions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great grand-nephew 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 womens bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynchings terror in American history.

Reviews

In this particular historical moment when young Black people are engaged in a renewed struggle against state violence, Mary Turner's story resonates. She insists that we #SayHerName too. -- Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA, from the preface
Harrowing. ... This succinct work confronts readers with atrocity, in a necessary tribute. * Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) *
[Elegy for Mary Turner] retells the story [of Mary Turner's murder] in a manner at once unflinching, and, at turns, delicate. The delicacy is owed to Williams' rendering. -- Rosalind Bentley * Atlanta Journal-Constitution *
Essential ... Williams doesn't just deplore unspeakable evil or try to argue with it. She confronts it in its own realm - the realm of art. -- Etelka Lehoczky * NPR Books *
Elegy for Mary Turner brings America's brutal history of 20th century lynching alive through Mary Turner. -- Bill Berkowitz * BuzzFlash *

Author Bio

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams is an artist and teacher, currently an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa in Art and Gender, Womens, and Sexuality Studies. She has worked with incarcerated women since 1994. Her scholarship - both graphic and textual - has been published by the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, the International Journal of Comic Art, and many others.