The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. In 1918, Walter White of the NAACP, writing about a recent spate of lynchings in Georgia, warned readers of his article that “the method by which Mrs. Mary Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details are so horrifying that it is with reluctance that the account is given.”35 Mary Turner had been vocally protesting the lynching of her husband, and her cries for justice made her a target for a white racist lynch mob. When they caught up to her, they tied her ankles and hung her upside down from a small oak tree. Turner was eight months pregnant at the time, but that fact elicited no mercy from the mob, who applied gasoline and oil to her pregnant body. They struck a match and lit it, burning off her clothes. Then, while she was still alive, one man took a knife commonly used for killing hogs and cut open her womb. The child fell from Turner’s midsection, and according to White, “The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel.”36 In the aftermath of this event, five hundred black people fled the community.