George mentions a more recent incident to demonstrate the importance of understanding what happened to Mary Turner. He refers to a 2002 incident involving three local white teen-agers who reportedly painted a Barbie doll black and hung it in a mock lynching. The teens allegedly intended the incident as a practical joke, but it upset many in the black community.

Had young people known the very real horrors and history of the region’s lynchings and racial divides, perhaps such an incident could have been avoided, George says. The Mary Turner Project was created as a response to this ignorance.

George adds that the project is not intended to vilify Valdosta, Lowndes County or Brooks County. The South holds no exclusive rights to racism, he says. Racism has run the course of American history from North to South, and sea to shining sea.

Mary Turner’s story is part of our region’s chapter in America’s racial saga. And Mary Turner and her unborn child were only two of the souls lost that tragic time in a faraway May.

Christopher C. Meyers, Tracy Woodard-Meyers’ husband, wrote a history of these events titled “‘Killing Them by the Wholesale’: A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia.” Many years ago, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a report on the incident “The Work of a Mob.” Several months ago, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts mentioned Valdosta in a column on racial horrors of the past; he was referring to these incidents.

The story begins with a white man named Hampton Smith who owned a Brooks County plantation. He reportedly had a reputation for abusing employees. He would bail people out of jail, and they would work for him to pay off the debt.

Smith bailed out Sydney Johnson, a 19-year-old black man “arrested for ‘rolling dice’ and fined $30.” Smith beat Johnson for not working. Johnson claimed to be sick. After the beating, Johnson shot and killed Hampton Smith.

“What ensued after the shooting was a mob-driven manhunt for Johnson and others thought to be involved in his decision to kill Hampton Smith,” according to the Mary Turner Project. “That manhunt lasted for more than a week and resulted in the deaths of at least 13 people, with some historical accounts suggesting a higher number of persons killed.”

Mary Turner was one of the people killed.

Following Mary Turner’s murder, Sydney Johnson died in a shoot-out with police on Valdosta’s South Troup Street. A crowd of 700 people bore witness to the castration of Johnson’s dead body. A rope was tied around his neck and he was dragged to Campground Church in Morven. “There, what remained of his body was burned.”

It is believed more than 500 people fled Lowndes and Brooks counties during this episode.

On Saturday, both black and white plan to meet at the site where Mary Turner died a gruesome death. At a site of violence, they plan to meet in peace and acknowledge the past.

The Mary Turner Project commemoration is scheduled for Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., luncheon at Hahira Recreation Center, with guest speakers; 1:30 p.m., travel to ceremony site, west of Hahira on Highway 122; 2 p.m., ceremony to lay a marker at the site of Mary Turner’s death.