African American artist to specifically address the savagery of lynch-law. It also commemorates Wells-Barnett and other Black Americans’ organized campaigns to resist this long established institution and contextualizes their struggles. The subject and title of Fuller’s sculpture refer to the 1916 lynching of Hayes Turner and his pregnant wife Mary in Valdosta, Georgia. An account of the horrors inflicted upon the Turners appears in Walter White’s shocking study of lynching and mob violence, titled Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.[48] White graphically narrates the events leading up to, during, and in the aftermath of white mob executions of Black men, women and children throughout the South.
The ethnographic details expose and stress the ritualistic savagery that was characteristic of frenzied white mob actions. Walter White’s passage on the Turners is particularly unnerving:
Not finding the Negro suspected of the murder, mobs began to kill every Negro who could even be connected with the victim and the alleged slayer. One of these was a man named Hayes Turner, whose offense was that he knew the alleged slayer, a not altogether remarkable circumstance, since both men worked for the dead farmer. To Turner’s wife, within one month of accouchment, was brought the news of her husband’s death. She cried out in her sorrow, pouring maledictions upon the heads of those who had thrust widowhood upon her so abruptly and cruelly.
Word of her threat to swear out warrants for the arrest of her husband’s murderers came to her. “We’ll teach the damn’ nigger wench some sense.,” was their answer, as they began to seek her. Fearful, her friends secreted the sorrowing woman on an obscure farm, miles away. Sunday morning, with a hot May sun beating down, they found her. Securely they bound her ankles together and by them, hanged her to a tree. Gasoline and motor oil were thrown upon her dangling clothes; a match wrapped her in sudden flames. Mocking, ribald laughter from her tormentors answered the helpless woman’s screams of pain and terror. “Mister, you ought to’ve heard the nigger wench howl!” a member of the mob boasted to me a few days later as we stood at the place of Mary Turner’s death.
The clothes burned from her crisply toasted body, in which unfortunately, life still lingered, a man stepped towards the woman and, with his knife, ripped open the abdomen in a crude Cesarean operation. Out tumbled the prematurely born child. Two feeble cries it gave--and received for answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form. Under the tree of death was scooped a shallow hole. The rope about Mary Turner’s charred ankles was cut, and swiftly her body tumbled into its grave. Not without a sense of humor or of appropriateness was some member of the mob. An empty whisky-bottle, quart size, was given for headstone. Into its neck was stuck a half-smoked cigar which had saved the delicate nostrils of one member of the mob from the stench of burning human flesh.[49]
The lynch/murders of the Turner family were representative of the pattern of aggressive mob outrages that increased dramatically during and after World War I. The NAACP organized and led the most successful and extended campaign against lynching. The organization’s goal was to educate the public to the evils of lynching and to garner widespread public support to designate lynching as a federal crime.
On July 28, 1917, a predominately Black crowd of 10,000 people, turned out for a “Silent Protest Against the Mob” in New York City. W.E.B. Du Bois led the hushed and orderly crowd in a march down 5th Street to the “tap, tap, tap of a drum corps.”[50] Fuller’s sculpture, Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob), commemorates the Turners’ tragic deaths, and the organized social protest intended to prevent the reoccurrence of such crimes. Thematically, the subject of lynching invokes and relates itself to a whole history in Western art of images which “raise unheralded victims of war and religious persecutions to the celebrated status of “martyrs” and saints.
Stylistically, Warrick Fuller retreats from the idealized naturalism characteristic of turn-of-the-century public and private sculpture. The sculpture’s roughly modeled surface reveals the influence of Fuller’s three years of study in Paris where she encountered and was influenced by the modernist aesthetics of artists such as Auguste Rodin--whose sculptures retain and celebrate the sculptor’s process of creation. Moreover, Rodin reportedly advised and inspired Fuller by telling her “Mademoiselle, you are a sculptor; you have sense of form.”[51] While in Paris, Fuller also met the scholar-activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, who later became one of the co-founders of the NAACP. Du Bois and Fuller formed a friendship and political alliance that was to last for many years. In a letter home, Fuller noted that Du Bois admired her work and had suggested “that I should make a specialty of Negro types--I told him I did not believe I could so specialize but I considered the advice well meant”[52] Despite this early disclaimer, Black people are the subject of all of Fuller’s extant works.[53] With Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob), we see that Fuller manipulates her sculptural materials as well as the new formal language of modernism to make a statement about the modern social condition.
Pleqase see links below for additional info on this women and other women who endured the same.
http://malalatete.typepad.com/mal_a_la_tete/race/index.htmlhttp://www.africaresource.com/ijele/issue5/jackson.html
