May 1918 lynchings

On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day (May 19) his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil, then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.

These lynchings are examples of the racially motivated mob violence by white people against black people in the American South, especially during 1880 to 1930, the peak of lynchings. Brooks County in Georgia, and Georgia among the states, had the highest rates of lynching in the nation during this period.

The NAACP referred to the murder of Mary Turner in its anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In the lynching era from 1880 to 1930, the great majority of these murders were committed in the South. Most of the thousands of individuals lynched in the United States were Black, and most were men, but at least 120 Black women were known to have been lynched between 1865 and 1965.