Convict Leasing, Lynch Mobs, and the Killing of Mary Turner

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In 1918, Georgia, a plantation owner with a reputation for beating the help, ends up dead.

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And what follows isn't justice.

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It's a mob with a hit list and zero interest in getting the right guy.

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13 people would be murdered.

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One of them, 8 months pregnant.

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This isn't just a story about a crime.

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It's about what happens when power, racism, and revenge all link arms and start marching.

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Before we dive in, if you like your true crime, brief and bingeable, you're in the right

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place.

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Hit follow now for at least two new episodes every week.

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This is 10 Minute Murder.

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Let's get into it.

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May 1918, Southern Georgia.

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Things weren't exactly peaceful, but they were holding, barely.

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Tensions simmered just beneath the surface, like a pot someone forgot they left on the

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stove.

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And then someone turned the heat all the way up.

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Enter Hampton Smith, mid-20s, wealthy, white, and unfortunately in charge of a lot more

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than just his own bad decisions.

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He ran a place called Old Joyce Plantation near Moorven in Brooks County.

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The guy had money, but when it came to character, that account was overdrawn.

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Hampton needed labor to keep his fields productive and his profit steady.

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What he didn't need, apparently, was any level of decency or humanity in how he got it.

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Hampton Smith wasn't just disliked.

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He was infamous, known for beating his workers and squeezing every ounce of labor out of them.

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The man turned his plantation into a sweat-soaked nightmare.

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It wasn't exactly a recruitment dream.

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And shocker, people didn't line up for the job.

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So Hampton did what many white plantation owners in the south were doing after the abolition

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of slavery.

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He went to jail, not as an inmate, but as a shopper.

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Old black residents were regularly arrested for things like vagrancy, or in this case,

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playing dice.

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Petty offenses or failure to pay inflated fines landed people in jail.

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Once they were inside, their bail could be paid by anyone, including men like Hampton,

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who'd then lease them for labor.

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Convict leasing, they called it, a system that had all the hallmarks of slavery just with

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slightly more paperwork.

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In the 1918 Georgia, it was thriving.

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That's how Sydney Johnson entered the picture.

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Young, black, and physically strong, he called Hampton's eye like a Craigslist ad for a

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used truck that still runs.

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$30 to the county got Sydney out of jail and straight onto the old Joyce plantation.

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Hampton didn't exactly see Sydney as a person.

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He saw him as a return on investment.

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Sydney would eat, when told, work until told to stop, and sleep only when there was nothing

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left to squeeze out of him.

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That was the plan.

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But Sydney Johnson wasn't built to be anyone's property.

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And Hampton Smith, he was about to learn that the hard way.

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Sydney Johnson may have been trapped in a system that treated him like property, but he never

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saw himself that way.

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He was a convict, yes, but a slave?

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No.

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Not in his mind, and that refusal to surrender his dignity, that made him dangerous.

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He didn't just take Hampton Smith's cruelty on the chin.

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Sydney talked back.

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He challenged.

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He held on to what little agency he had left, even when it earned him beatings.

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He had a sharp mind and a sharper mouth, and both of those things put a target on his back.

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Still, he kept going.

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Until one day, he couldn't.

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Sydney got sick.

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Too sick to work.

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He said so.

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Hampton didn't care.

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He beat him anyway.

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That moment broke something.

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Sydney grabbed a gun from the property and made his way to the plantation house.

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Through a window, he saw Hampton and his wife.

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He pulled the trigger.

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Hampton's wife was wounded, but managed to get away.

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Hampton didn't.

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He died instantly.

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Just like that, the man who had spent his life brutalizing others was gone.

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Sydney fled, but what he left behind was more than a body.

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To the white community of Brooks County, this wasn't just a killing.

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It was an uprising.

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An offense against the natural order they believed in.

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They weren't going to let that go.

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A mob started forming.

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Angry, armed, looking for revenge, and they didn't care if they had the right man.

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They just wanted blood.

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After Hampton Smith's death, anyone black and anyone nearby suddenly looked like a suspect

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didn't matter if they had a connection to the crime or not.

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If your name was whispered in the wrong place or if you'd ever had a run in with Hampton,

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you were a fair game.

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And a lot of people had.

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Two men, wheelhead and Will Thompson were taken by the mob and lynched.

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When it was over, their bodies had been riddled with bullets, not once or twice, over 700

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times.

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Then came Chime Riley.

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He didn't work for Hampton.

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He had no, known ties to the plantation, but that didn't stop anyone.

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He was lynched too.

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His hands and legs were tied up with turpentine cups before his body was thrown into the little

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river.

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The list kept growing.

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One name kept coming up near the top.

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Hayes Turner.

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Hayes had worked under Hampton and had the scars to prove it.

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The two had history and not the good kind.

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Hayes had taken a lot of abuse from Hampton until one day he stopped taking it.

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He pushed back.

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He threatened him.

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That's when Hampton made it personal.

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To make an example of Hayes, Hampton grabbed his wife, Mary Turner, and beat her in front

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of him.

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Mary was eight months pregnant at the time.

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People heard about what happened, but what they really latched on to was this.

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Hayes had motive.

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Strong motive.

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So he was arrested and hauled off for questioning.

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Not to figure out what happened, just to check a box.

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Hayes Turner never made it to trial.

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While being transferred between jails, the mob got their chance.

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They ambushed the transport, ripped Hayes from custody, and linched him.

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His body was left hanging from a tree for two full days.

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It wasn't justice.

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It wasn't law.

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It was rage on display.

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Back home, his wife Mary had no idea.

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She was caring for their two young children and preparing for the birth of a third.

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She found out the way a lot of people found out terrible things back then.

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Through the newspaper.

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And what she did next took courage.

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Most people couldn't even fake.

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Mary spoke up loudly.

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She called out the mob for killing her husband and said publicly that they should be arrested

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for it.

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In 1918, Georgia, that kind of statement from a pregnant black woman was not seen as just

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bold, but as dangerous.

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The mob turned its attention to her.

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Mary tried to run, but they caught her before she could make it out of town.

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They dragged her outside the city limits.

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They tied her to a tree upside down.

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They poured gasoline on her clothes and burned them off of her body.

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And then when she was still alive, they sliced open her stomach with the butcher's knife.

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Her unborn baby fell to the ground and let out two cries before someone in the mob stomped

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its skull with the heel of their boot.

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Then they turned their guns on Mary.

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Hundreds of bullets.

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They didn't just kill her.

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They tried to erase her.

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The murder of Mary Turner and her child pushed the violence into something even darker.

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People started calling it what it was, the lynching rampage.

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And it wasn't over.

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Sydney Johnson, the man whose act of defiance had kicked all of this off, had escaped Brooks

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County and made it to a neighboring Lowns County.

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He stayed hidden for a while, but hunger will out you faster than anything else.

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In the spirit, he asked another black man for food.

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That man went to the police.

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Knowing Sydney was armed and had already killed one white plantation owner, law enforcement

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didn't come lightly.

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A full armed unit surrounded the house where Sydney had holed up.

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A shootout erupted.

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Sydney managed to wound three officers, but was fatally shot in the process.

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When they entered the house, he was already gone, but the mob wasn't done with him yet.

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He had spread fast, a crowd gathered outside the house angry, they'd been denied a lynching.

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So they took what was left of Sydney's body, mutilated it, tied it to the back of a car,

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and dragged it through town.

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They brought him back to the old Joyce place, right where his entire story started, and

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hung his body from a tree.

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Then they set it on fire.

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Even after Sydney's death, two more men were killed by mobs trying to finish the job.

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The rampage finally burned itself out.

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Thirteen people had been murdered, Mary Turner and her baby among them.

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As the violence spiraled, over 500 black residents tried to flee Brooks County, but even

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that wasn't allowed.

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White residents made it clear anyone who tried to leave could end up dead too.

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The aftermath dragged on for years.

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Tensions didn't dissolve.

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They hardened.

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And while government officials made noise about banning lynching, that didn't exactly stop

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anything.

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No one from the mob was ever arrested.

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No one was held accountable.

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But Mary Turner's name didn't disappear.

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Decades later, the courage Mary Turner showed finally started to resonate.

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In 2008, a group called the Mary Turner project was founded.

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Its mission, to educate, acknowledge, and try to stitch together what was broken.

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They focused on the events of May 1918 and the almost 600 lynchings that took place in

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Georgia between 1877 and 1950.

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They raised support to install a historical marker near the site where Mary was murdered.

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It went up in 2010.

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And then someone shot it five times.

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By 2013, it had to be repaired.

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Since then, it's been shot at 27 more times, hit by a vehicle and completely replaced

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as recently as 2021.

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People tried to erase the truth, just like they tried to erase her.

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But history has a way of surviving anyway.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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Brief and bingeable True Crime.

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I'm Joe the host, and it's getting to be that time of year, so if you heard a low hum in

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the background, this whole time, that's my air can

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conditioner.

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Doing its best to keep up and not turn me into a puddle.

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It's getting to be, I live in the South, in case you didn't know.

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And it's getting to be that time of year where I'm just sweating all the time.

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And if you, in future episodes, hear that happening, not me sweating, but my air conditioner, just

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mind your business.

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That's not meant for you.

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That's meant for me.

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Anyway, a very heavy story today.

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And if you're still here, I appreciate you.

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Stories like this one are hard to hear, but they matter.

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And thanks for sticking around with the whole thing.

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Make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss future episodes, whether they are historical,

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tragedies like this one, or just other run-of-the-mill bizarre true crime stories.

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Follow along on social media if you want to see what the inside of my brain looks like

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from time to time, not literally.

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That's weird, I probably shouldn't have said that.

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I know that the true crime community is very literal, especially when it comes to anatomy.

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What I mean is how I think.

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You can better see that on social media.

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I just be posting stuff.

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Anyway, you can go to 10minutemurder.com.

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It's got everything.

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Links to social media, it's got transcripts, it's got merch, episode links, blogs, all of it.

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Stay cool, stay safe, and I will talk to you next time.

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Thanks for listening.

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[Music]