Civil rights museum opens sweeping new gallery on Reconstruction
“Lynching. 1918. Twenty-one. Pregnant. Burned. Publicly. Day. White. Eleven. Died. Against.”
The 11 words stamped into the 400-pound iron plate created by the artist Lonnie Holley could each stand alone, fragments of violence and loss.
Taken together, they form a stark indictment of the nation’s long struggle over race — and of the unfulfilled promises that followed Reconstruction, a period defined by cyclical bursts of progress and backlash that continue to reverberate.
On May 19, 1918, a lynch mob in Brooks County tortured and killed eight Black men in retaliation for the shooting death of a white planter.
One of the victims was Hayes Turner. His wife, Mary Turner — 21 years old and pregnant — insisted her husband had no role in the killing and threatened to report the names of the mob.
The men turned on her instead.
They carried her to the Little River, the border between Brooks and Lowndes Counties, passing the tree where her husband’s mutilated body still hung.
Near the Folsom Bridge, they suspended her upside down from an oak limb, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.
As she hung there, someone used a knife “such as one used in splitting hogs” to cut open her abdomen. Her baby fell to the ground and cried.
A member of the mob crushed the child’s head. Others fired hundreds of rounds into Mary Turner’s body.
Decades later, the state erected a historical marker to acknowledge the crime. But the marker itself became a target — repeatedly vandalized in the same spirit of denial and resistance that marked the original act of terror.
It now bears 11 bullet holes, each one piercing a word in the text.
“Lynching. 1918. Twenty-one. Pregnant. Burned. Publicly. Day. White. Eleven. Died. Against.”
“This marker has become an artifact in itself,” said Kama Pierce, chief program officer for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. “Mary Turner’s story symbolized the anti-lynching movement, and the attacks on the marker show we’re still in the same cycle. The events happened in 1918, and the violence continues symbolically today. That’s the story we’re telling.”
The bullet-riddled state marker, donated by Mary Turner’s descendants, now stands as the emotional centerpiece of The Center’s new permanent gallery devoted to Reconstruction, the turbulent 12-year period immediately after the Civil War, when the United States first attempted to build a multiracial democracy.
The exhibition, titled “Broken Promises,” is part of The Center’s $58 million expansion and opens to the public Friday.
“Reconstruction reminds us that progress on rights in America has never moved in a straight line. Every expansion of freedom has been accompanied by efforts to limit those gains,” said Jill Savitt, the CEO of the Center. “Recognizing that pattern helps us understand the forces that have long shaped America, up until today.”
The exhibit traces the rapid political and social gains made by nearly 4 million newly freed Black Americans from 1865 to 1877, who organized schools, secured voting rights, won elections and reshaped civic life across the South.
It also chronicles the violent reaction that followed, including widespread racial terror, political disenfranchisement and the rise of Jim Crow laws that erased many of those gains.
“Historians are just beginning to fully understand how pivotal those 12 years were,” Pierce said. “Had it been successful — had there not been that Great Compromise — who knows where we’d be as a country.”
The 1877 Great Compromise was a political bargain that awarded the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction.
Using the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells as its narrative guide, the gallery focuses on three cities where Black advancement triggered deadly backlash: Wilmington, Atlanta and Tulsa.
Pierce, who curated the exhibit, also highlights lesser-known voices such as Alexander Manley, Jessie Max Barber and Mary Jones Parrish, all journalists who documented or witnessed their communities’ destruction.
“They were our historians,” she said. “They told the truth in real time.”
“Broken Promises” incorporates artifacts from the “Without Sanctuary Collection,” that includes a lynching noose and postcard-style photographs once circulated as souvenirs of racial terror. Throughout the exhibit, signs warn visitors: “Attention: Graphic Content.”
Large maps chart the geography of racial terror, showing the sites of lynchings between 1877 and 1950, and race massacres between 1863 and 1943.
“We wanted people to understand that lynching wasn’t confined to these three cities,” Pierce said. “It was widespread, normalized and often treated as entertainment.”
The exhibition closes by drawing explicit connections between Reconstruction and the present.
A wall of books traces a century of parallel progress and backlash, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Ku Klux Klan’s march on Washington, from the Civil Rights Movement to modern debates over voting rights, policing and national memory.
Pierce points to another wall where a line from the late U.S. Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis appears in scripted letters: “Emmett Till was my George Floyd.”
“We’re presenting facts and evidence and hoping people connect the dots,” Pierce said.
The opening of “Broken Promises” comes a month after The Center completed a nearly yearlong renovation that almost doubled the museum’s footprint and refashioned its role in Atlanta’s tourism and cultural landscape.
“Broken Promises” occupies the top floor of the new Arthur M. Blank Inspiration Hall, a wing designed to serve children and families through hands-on storytelling about Reconstruction and racial violence.
The Mellon Foundation awarded The Center a $2 million grant to support the project. A companion family gallery, still under construction, is expected to open in April.
“This was a massive collaborative effort,” Pierce said. “Hundreds of people — historians, designers, descendants, community members — understood how important it was to finally tell this story in a permanent way.”
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.
