The Brooks-Lowndes lynchings of 1918 (also known as the Lynching Rampage of 1918) were a series of lynchings during May 1918 in Brooks and Lowndes Counties, Georgia.[1] At least 13, and as many as 18 people were murdered in retaliation for the murder of white planter Hampton Smith, and the wounding of his wife. Among the lynched was Mary Turner and her unborn child, whose gruesome murder became a cause célèbre for anti-lynching activists.
Investigation
editWalter F. White, NAACP assistant secretary, arrived in south Georgia to conduct an investigation into the lynchings.[2] While Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey was given a complete investigation of the Turner murders which included the names of two instigators and 15 participants, nobody was ever charged with or convicted of their killing.[3] Four years later, in 1922, Leonidas Dyer introduced anti-lynching legislation into the U.S. House of Representatives which was passed, but blocked in the Senate.
References
edit- Notes
- ^ Meyers 2006, p. 214.
- ^ Janken, Kenneth Robert (2006). Walter White: Mr. Naacp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 32–41. ISBN 978-0-8078-5780-9. Retrieved 14 May 2013.
- ^ Bernstein 2005, p. 176.
- Bibliography
- Meyers, Christopher C (2006). ""Killing Them by the Wholesale": A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 90 (2). JSTOR: 214–235. JSTOR 40584910. Retrieved 14 May 2013.
- Armstrong, Julie Buckner (2011). Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3765-4.
- Bernstein, Patricia (2005). The First Waco Horror. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.