Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic descriptions that may be disturbing to some readers.

VALDOSTA — Exhuming a stain on Valdosta’s past this Saturday may finally put murdered Mary Turner to rest.

In May 1918, Mary Turner protested the murder of her husband during a South Georgia “lynching rampage.” She was a 20-year-old black woman. She was eight months pregnant.

Her threats to swear out warrants “enraged locals. ... Mary Turner fled for her life only to be caught and taken to a place called Folsom’s Bridge on the Brooks and Lowndes counties’ shared border.”

There, a mob tied her ankles. They hung her upside down from a tree. The crowd doused her with gasoline, burning away her clothes. Her baby was cut from her and killed. Mary Turner’s body was riddled with bullets.

Ten feet away, Mary Turner and her dead baby were buried in a grave marked with a whiskey bottle and a cigar.

And, for all intents and purposes, Mary Turner was forgotten. Her story wiped away from most area history in both the white and black communities.

This weekend, local folks are scheduled to gather at what is believed to be the site of Mary Turner and her baby’s murder.

The spot will be commemorated with a cross. The cross will eventually be replaced by a historical marker telling her story, which was only one of several acts of violence this month 81 years ago.

What is known of Mary Turner’s death is provided by the Mary Turner Project, a group of Valdosta State University students, faculty and community residents “committed to racial justice by educating ourselves and others about the presence of racism, effects of racism, and how to become involved in eliminating racism.”

Project members Mark George, a VSU sociology professor, and Tracy Woodard-Meyers, also a sociology professor and director of VSU’s Women’s and Gender Studies, met with The Valdosta Daily Times to discuss Mary Turner and this weekend’s ceremony.

“I don’t think these things go away until they are acknowledged,” George says, answering the question that many have posed. Why now? Why rehash a tragedy from 80 years ago, one in which all of the participants are likely dead?

It’s a question the Mary Turner Project often encounters. Included with the history of Mary Turner’s murder is an answer to the question, “Why Now, 2009?”

Part of the answer states, “We should bring them up to acknowledge the lives lost, along with the reality that no justice has ever occurred for the victims, families and many others affected by these events.”