How My Southern Georgia Community Came Together Around the Memory of a Century-Old Mass Murder

Through the Mary Turner Project, Blacks and Whites Confronted and Consecrated Our Violent Past

The Little River snakes its slow-flowing black water along the boundary between Georgia’s Brooks and Lowndes Counties.

It is a place that has been dear to my family for generations. This was the river where my grandmother, the wife of a “white trash” sharecropper, fished for most of her 80 years. It is the place I learned to savor nature. I have swum, camped, fished, and canoed there for much of my life.

It is also the site of one of the most horrible lynchings in U.S. …