Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 3 reviews on
In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten Black men and one Black woman--Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time--were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens.
Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives--and their mourning--matter.
Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on Black women's bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching's terror in American history.
"Harrowing ... This succinct work confronts readers with atrocity, in a necessary tribute."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Retells the story [of Mary Turner's murder] in a manner at once unflinching, and, at turns, delicate. The delicacy is owed to Williams' rendering."
--Rosalind Bentley, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Essential ... Williams doesn't just deplore unspeakable evil or try to argue with it. She confronts it in its own realm--the realm of art."
--Etelka Lehoczky, NPR Books
"Elegy for Mary Turner brings America's brutal history of 20th century lynching alive through Mary Turner."
--Bill Berkowitz, BuzzFlash