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

0:00 In 1918, Georgia, a plantation owner with a reputation for beating the help, ends up dead. And what follows isn't justice. It's a mob with a hit list and zero interest in getting the right guy. 13 people would be murdered. One of them, 8 months pregnant. This isn't just a story about a crime. It's about what happens when power, racism, and revenge all link arms and start marching. Before we dive in, if you like your true crime, brief and bingeable, you're in the right place. Hit follow now for at least two new episodes every week. This is 10 Minute Murder. Let's get into it.

0:46 May 1918, Southern Georgia. Things weren't exactly peaceful, but they were holding, barely. Tensions simmered just beneath the surface, like a pot someone forgot they left on the stove. And then someone turned the heat all the way up. Enter Hampton Smith, mid-20s, wealthy, white, and unfortunately in charge of a lot more than just his own bad decisions. He ran a place called Old Joyce Plantation near Moorven in Brooks County. The guy had money, but when it came to character, that account was overdrawn.

1:26 Hampton needed labor to keep his fields productive and his profit steady. What he didn't need, apparently, was any level of decency or humanity in how he got it. Hampton Smith wasn't just disliked. He was infamous, known for beating his workers and squeezing every ounce of labor out of them. The man turned his plantation into a sweat-soaked nightmare. It wasn't exactly a recruitment dream. And shocker, people didn't line up for the job. So Hampton did what many white plantation owners in the south were doing after the abolition of slavery. He went to jail, not as an inmate, but as a shopper. Old black residents were regularly arrested for things like vagrancy, or in this case, playing dice.

2:12 Petty offenses or failure to pay inflated fines landed people in jail. Once they were inside, their bail could be paid by anyone, including men like Hampton, who'd then lease them for labor. Convict leasing, they called it, a system that had all the hallmarks of slavery just with slightly more paperwork. In the 1918 Georgia, it was thriving. That's how Sydney Johnson entered the picture. Young, black, and physically strong, he called Hampton's eye like a Craigslist ad for a used truck that still runs. $30 to the county got Sydney out of jail and straight onto the old Joyce plantation.

2:55 Hampton didn't exactly see Sydney as a person. He saw him as a return on investment. Sydney would eat, when told, work until told to stop, and sleep only when there was nothing left to squeeze out of him. That was the plan. But Sydney Johnson wasn't built to be anyone's property. And Hampton Smith, he was about to learn that the hard way. Sydney Johnson may have been trapped in a system that treated him like property, but he never saw himself that way. He was a convict, yes, but a slave? No. Not in his mind, and that refusal to surrender his dignity, that made him dangerous. He didn't just take Hampton Smith's cruelty on the chin.

3:36 Sydney talked back. He challenged. He held on to what little agency he had left, even when it earned him beatings. He had a sharp mind and a sharper mouth, and both of those things put a target on his back. Still, he kept going. Until one day, he couldn't. Sydney got sick. Too sick to work. He said so. Hampton didn't care. He beat him anyway. That moment broke something. Sydney grabbed a gun from the property and made his way to the plantation house. Through a window, he saw Hampton and his wife. He pulled the trigger. Hampton's wife was wounded, but managed to get away. Hampton didn't.

4:17 He died instantly. Just like that, the man who had spent his life brutalizing others was gone. Sydney fled, but what he left behind was more than a body. To the white community of Brooks County, this wasn't just a killing. It was an uprising. An offense against the natural order they believed in. They weren't going to let that go. A mob started forming. Angry, armed, looking for revenge, and they didn't care if they had the right man. They just wanted blood. After Hampton Smith's death, anyone black and anyone nearby suddenly looked like a suspect didn't matter if they had a connection to the crime or not. If your name was whispered in the wrong place or if you'd ever had a run in with Hampton, you were a fair game.

5:03 And a lot of people had. Two men, wheelhead and Will Thompson were taken by the mob and lynched. When it was over, their bodies had been riddled with bullets, not once or twice, over 700 times. Then came Chime Riley. He didn't work for Hampton. He had no, known ties to the plantation, but that didn't stop anyone. He was lynched too. His hands and legs were tied up with turpentine cups before his body was thrown into the little river. The list kept growing. One name kept coming up near the top. Hayes Turner. Hayes had worked under Hampton and had the scars to prove it. The two had history and not the good kind. Hayes had taken a lot of abuse from Hampton until one day he stopped taking it.

5:47 He pushed back. He threatened him. That's when Hampton made it personal. To make an example of Hayes, Hampton grabbed his wife, Mary Turner, and beat her in front of him. Mary was eight months pregnant at the time. People heard about what happened, but what they really latched on to was this. Hayes had motive. Strong motive. So he was arrested and hauled off for questioning. Not to figure out what happened, just to check a box. Hayes Turner never made it to trial. While being transferred between jails, the mob got their chance. They ambushed the transport, ripped Hayes from custody, and linched him. His body was left hanging from a tree for two full days.

6:28 It wasn't justice. It wasn't law. It was rage on display. Back home, his wife Mary had no idea. She was caring for their two young children and preparing for the birth of a third. She found out the way a lot of people found out terrible things back then. Through the newspaper. And what she did next took courage. Most people couldn't even fake. Mary spoke up loudly. She called out the mob for killing her husband and said publicly that they should be arrested for it. In 1918, Georgia, that kind of statement from a pregnant black woman was not seen as just bold, but as dangerous. The mob turned its attention to her.

7:10 Mary tried to run, but they caught her before she could make it out of town. They dragged her outside the city limits. They tied her to a tree upside down. They poured gasoline on her clothes and burned them off of her body. And then when she was still alive, they sliced open her stomach with the butcher's knife. Her unborn baby fell to the ground and let out two cries before someone in the mob stomped its skull with the heel of their boot. Then they turned their guns on Mary. Hundreds of bullets. They didn't just kill her. They tried to erase her. The murder of Mary Turner and her child pushed the violence into something even darker. People started calling it what it was, the lynching rampage.

7:54 And it wasn't over. Sydney Johnson, the man whose act of defiance had kicked all of this off, had escaped Brooks County and made it to a neighboring Lowns County. He stayed hidden for a while, but hunger will out you faster than anything else. In the spirit, he asked another black man for food. That man went to the police. Knowing Sydney was armed and had already killed one white plantation owner, law enforcement didn't come lightly. A full armed unit surrounded the house where Sydney had holed up. A shootout erupted. Sydney managed to wound three officers, but was fatally shot in the process. When they entered the house, he was already gone, but the mob wasn't done with him yet.

8:36 He had spread fast, a crowd gathered outside the house angry, they'd been denied a lynching. So they took what was left of Sydney's body, mutilated it, tied it to the back of a car, and dragged it through town. They brought him back to the old Joyce place, right where his entire story started, and hung his body from a tree. Then they set it on fire. Even after Sydney's death, two more men were killed by mobs trying to finish the job. The rampage finally burned itself out. Thirteen people had been murdered, Mary Turner and her baby among them. As the violence spiraled, over 500 black residents tried to flee Brooks County, but even that wasn't allowed.

9:18 White residents made it clear anyone who tried to leave could end up dead too. The aftermath dragged on for years. Tensions didn't dissolve. They hardened. And while government officials made noise about banning lynching, that didn't exactly stop anything. No one from the mob was ever arrested. No one was held accountable. But Mary Turner's name didn't disappear. Decades later, the courage Mary Turner showed finally started to resonate. In 2008, a group called the Mary Turner project was founded. Its mission, to educate, acknowledge, and try to stitch together what was broken. They focused on the events of May 1918 and the almost 600 lynchings that took place in Georgia between 1877 and 1950.

10:07 They raised support to install a historical marker near the site where Mary was murdered. It went up in 2010. And then someone shot it five times. By 2013, it had to be repaired. Since then, it's been shot at 27 more times, hit by a vehicle and completely replaced as recently as 2021. People tried to erase the truth, just like they tried to erase her. But history has a way of surviving anyway. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder. Brief and bingeable True Crime.

10:49 I'm Joe the host, and it's getting to be that time of year, so if you heard a low hum in the background, this whole time, that's my air can conditioner. Doing its best to keep up and not turn me into a puddle. It's getting to be, I live in the South, in case you didn't know. And it's getting to be that time of year where I'm just sweating all the time. And if you, in future episodes, hear that happening, not me sweating, but my air conditioner, just mind your business. That's not meant for you. That's meant for me. Anyway, a very heavy story today. And if you're still here, I appreciate you. Stories like this one are hard to hear, but they matter. And thanks for sticking around with the whole thing. Make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss future episodes, whether they are historical, tragedies like this one, or just other run-of-the-mill bizarre true crime stories.

11:36 Follow along on social media if you want to see what the inside of my brain looks like from time to time, not literally. That's weird, I probably shouldn't have said that. I know that the true crime community is very literal, especially when it comes to anatomy. What I mean is how I think. You can better see that on social media. I just be posting stuff. Anyway, you can go to 10minutemurder.com. It's got everything. Links to social media, it's got transcripts, it's got merch, episode links, blogs, all of it. Stay cool, stay safe, and I will talk to you next time. Thanks for listening. [Music]