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Armstrong, Julie Buckner. Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011.
Despite the unique circumstances surrounding her death-she was a woman; she was eight months pregnant; she was killed for speaking out against the men that murdered her husband-Mary Turner has, for the most part, been forgotten by history. And, according to Julie Buckner Armstrong, Turner is not alone. Rather, "[she] is one of countless black women whose stories have received insufficient attention in a history of racial violence that for too long has been triangulated between white men, black men, and white women" (3).
Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching is what Armstrong calls a case study of a story and not of an event. This is an important distinction. While seminal texts by Patricia Ber- nstein, Leonard Dinnerstein, James Madison, and James McGovern fully investigate the cases of Jesse Washington, Emmett Till, Claude Neil, and other black men, there are no equivalent studies for female victims of racial violence. And so, after determining that "the range of materials on Turner allows a scholar to study the ways knowledge and percep- tions emerged and changed over time" Armstrong decided to produce her case study (14).
The result, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching, is Armstrong's effort to change the narrative to better reflect that black women "played multiple roles: as victims, as loved ones left behind, and as those who fought back using grassroots, institutional, and artistic forms of resistance" (3). By collecting the stories and efforts of others who had done similar work before her Armstrong participates in the ongoing task of remembering Turner. In addition, this work provides the most complete context for Mary Turner and the various creative works that remember her.
The book is comprised of three parts. First, Armstrong presents an introduction wherein she explains the project and the struggles she faced completing it. Second, she presents a succinct and thoroughly-researched overview of the events of May 1918 during which Mary Turner and ten black men...