Cruelty As a Form of Control
Content note: This article discusses racial violence and includes a description of the murder of Mary Turner and her child.
I’ve been concerned about the reports of Black people found hanging recently. Some of these deaths were quickly described as suicides. While I understand that Black people do die by suicide, including by hanging, I struggle with that explanation because of the history behind lynchings.
Are authorities examining these deaths with the seriousness their circumstances and historical context require or are they asking Black communities to accept conclusions without sufficient transparency?
The History Behind the Rope
After the Civil War ended, both former Confederates and enslavers needed a way to continue controlling Black labor, movement, and economic independence. They turned to terrorizing us. Lynching, mass murder, burning, and sexual violence were all tools used against Black people.
We should have punished the Confederacy. I believe we would be in a different place if we had. The Confederacy lost the war, but many white Southerners remained committed to the social order it had defended.
During Reconstruction, nearly 2,000 documented racial-terror killings over twelve years amounted to approximately one victim every two days. The actual number was almost certainly higher because many deaths were never recorded.
Let’s be clear: lynching wasn’t justice and many victims were never accused of a crime.
Black people were lynched for voting, organizing workers, owning successful businesses, asserting their rights, or refusing to show the degree of deference white people believed they were owed. Plenty of times, accusations were made up (Emmett Till). An accusation could become an excuse for murder without ever being tested in court.
Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people, particularly in the South. They typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but the violence also included torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Some victims were burned alive.
Why Was the Violence So Cruel?
Black people weren’t just killed. They were tortured, mutilated, dismembered, burned, and put on display. It wasn’t enough to kill us; the cruelty was the point.
I can’t understand that level of hatred toward anyone. That’s something that should be studied in the white people who participated and the communities that supported them. What allowed them to treat another human being that way?
Bodies were sometimes displayed for long periods after a lynching as a warning to other Black people. Many of these events were planned and advertised like shows. Whole families would come out to watch. There were photographers taking pictures for postcards, and sometimes spectators took body parts as souvenirs.
As I was reading this, I thought, I wonder who still has some of those pictures or souvenirs hidden away.
The violence showed Black people that the law wouldn’t necessarily protect them. In some cases, the police were in the mobs.
The Lynching of Mary Turner, May 19, 1918, Georgia
The lynching of Mary Turner near the Brooks–Lowndes county line in Georgia was investigated by Walter White on behalf of the NAACP.
After abusive plantation owner Hampton Smith was shot and killed, a manhunt led to a series of lynchings, including the murder of Mary’s husband, Hayes Turner. Mary denied that her husband had been involved in Smith’s killing, publicly opposed his murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested.
On May 19, 1918, a mob brought Mary, who was eight months pregnant, to Folsom Bridge. According to White’s account, they tied her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her with fuel, and set her on fire. She was still alive when a member of the mob cut open her abdomen. Her baby fell to the ground and was killed by a member of the mob. They then repeatedly shot Mary’s body.
The September 1918 issue of The Crisis carried an account of the lynching. No one was held criminally accountable for her murder.
She spoke out against her husband’s murder, and this is what they did to her.
The Spectacle Was Part of the Control
Crowds included women and children. Images of murdered Black people circulated as postcards, and newspapers sometimes announced upcoming lynchings and described them afterward.
The spectacle taught white people that participation carried little risk. It taught Black people that survival could depend on silence, deference, or leaving altogether. Taking body parts as souvenirs made the cruelty even harder for me to comprehend. Someone’s suffering became something another person wanted to keep.
The violence didn’t end with the person who was killed. Everyone else was expected to remember what they had seen and behave accordingly.
Institutions Weren’t Without Fault
Police sometimes surrendered prisoners to mobs. Prosecutors rarely brought charges, and when they did, juries often refused to convict. Lawmakers resisted federal anti-lynching legislation for generations. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act wasn’t signed into law until 2022.
That doesn’t mean murder was legal before then. It means it took until 2022 to pass that specific federal anti-lynching law.
When authorities knowingly refuse to protect a person, conceal evidence, or shield perpetrators, the institution is complicit. This is why so many Black people have little faith in the system.
How can we trust institutions with such a long history of working against us? With no substantial reform. Black skepticism didn’t emerge from nowhere.
What Suicide Rulings Ask Black People to Ignore
When a hanging death is described as suicide without a clear explanation of the investigation, it can feel as though Black people are being asked to forget everything we know about lynching. A public announcement isn’t the same as transparency.
What evidence supports ruling these cases suicides so quickly? Was the scene thoroughly examined? Was a complete autopsy performed? Were surveillance recordings, witness accounts, digital evidence, and possible injuries reviewed?
Was the family kept informed? Were reports of racial threats or relevant local circumstances investigated? Were outside agencies involved when community trust was already low?
Modern-Day Lynching
You may think lynching is an act of the past, but racist killings didn’t end when the old photographs stopped being taken.
James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998. Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and murdered while running in Georgia in 2020. His killers were convicted of federal hate crimes.
That same year, we watched the recording of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer while bystanders pleaded for someone to intervene.
These cases have different circumstances and legal classifications. Floyd’s killing involved police violence rather than a civilian lynch mob. Still, they belong in a conversation about the violence inflicted on Black people and the power others believe they have over our lives.
This history isn’t as far behind us as people would like to believe.
Words Matter
“Hanging” describes a physical circumstance. “Suicide” and “homicide” describe manners of death. Historically, “lynching” identifies an extrajudicial killing committed by others through collective violence or terror. “Racial-terror lynching” also describes its wider purpose of enforcing racial hierarchy.
Calling every hanging a lynching before the evidence is established can distract from the questions that need to be answered. Calling a death a suicide before a credible investigation is complete can close public attention prematurely.
Precise language protects both the argument and the people whose deaths are being discussed.
We Remember for a Reason
Being careful with our words doesn’t mean setting aside what we know about this country. That history is why these deaths raise questions for me and why I struggle with the expectation that Black people should accept an explanation without asking how authorities reached it.
Cruelty created fear, and the spectacle helped spread it. Institutions that failed to intervene reinforced the message that Black people wouldn’t be protected.
I don’t know what happened in these most recent hanging cases, but I find that image extremely difficult to separate from its history. My reaction can’t determine how someone died. It does explain why I want a thorough investigation and more transparency before being expected to accept a conclusion.
Black people aren’t being irrational when we remember lynching. We’re responding to a history in which racial violence was repeatedly concealed, justified, or left unpunished.
History rarely disappears. It changes form.
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“Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
— “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol and recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday
-Smart Brown Girl
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