Early November 18, 1921, a 15-year-old was walking to her work at the local telephone exchange when she was allegedly assaulted by William Turner.[2] Before being arrested, the brother of the 15-year-old had shot Turner in the leg.[3]
Lynching
Aware of the possibility of a lynching, Sheriff Mays tried to drive Turner to Marianna, Arkansas. However, a group of masked white men stopped the sheriff, dragged Turner out of the car and shot him dead. At the same time, a separate mob stormed the jail in rear of the Phillips County Courthouse.
As the ambulance arrived on word of the shooting a larger mob of people pulled his body from the ambulance and shot his corpse several times. Then to chants from the mob of "Burn the body! Burn the body!" his body was doused with gasoline and set on fire.[3] The Black paper, St. Louis Argus wrote, "after the celebrants had had their fill," they called the victim’s father, August Turner, to come to the little city park to and remove his son's bullet-ridden, charred remains. [3][4]
Red Summer
Two years earlier there were several incidents of civil unrest in the so-called
Chicago Race Riot and Washington D.C. race riot which killed 38 and 39 people respectively. Both had many more non-fatal injuries and extensive property damage reaching into the millions of dollars.[6]
National memorial
Memorial Corridor, National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018, in a setting of 6 acres (2.4 ha). Featured among other things, is a sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo of a mother with a chain around her neck and an infant in her arms. On a hill overlooking the sculpture is the Memorial Corridor which displays 805 hanging steel rectangles, each representing the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place and, for each county, the names of those lynched. According to the Equal Justice Initiative from 1880 to 1940 Phillips County had the highest rates of Lynching per year at 11.82 (Per 100,000 Residents) and had the most Lynching Victims at 245.[7]
