Editing Brooks County, Georgia (section)

===Post-Reconstruction and imposition of Jim Crow===
After the war, many [[freedmen]] worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Following the war and the [[Reconstruction era]], Brooks County was one of the areas with a high rate of racial violence by whites against blacks. Its 20 deaths make it the county in Georgia that had the third-highest number of lynchings from 1870 to 1950.<ref>[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-supplement-by-county.pdf ''Lynching in America''/ Supplement: Lynchings by County]{{Dead link|date=July 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}, 3rd Edition, 2015, p. 3</ref> (From 1880 to 1930, Georgia had the highest number of such extrajudicial murders in the country).<ref name="meyers2006killing">{{cite journal| author=Meyers, Christopher C| title= "Killing Them by the Wholesale": A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia| journal=The Georgia Historical Quarterly| year=2006| volume=90| number=2| pages=214–235| publisher=JSTOR| url=https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_q6VhhkczIYU2hSTHJtbHFmWGc/view?usp=sharing |access-date=May 14, 2013}}</ref>  See, for example, the [[Brooks County race war]] of 1894.

In May 1918, at least 13 African Americans were killed during [[May 1918 lynchings|a white manhunt and rampage]] after Sidney Johnson killed an abusive white planter.<ref>{{cite news|last=Gullberg|first=Greg|title=South Georgia Citizens Fight To Keep Mary Turner's Story Alive|url=http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/South_Georgia_Citizens_Wont_Let_Mary_Turners_Story_Die_With_Her_152849035.html|newspaper=WCTV|date=May 22, 2012}}</ref> Johnson had been forced to work for the man under the state's abusive [[convict lease]] system. Among those killed were Hayes Turner, and the next day his wife [[Mary Turner (lynching victim)|Mary Turner]], who was eight months pregnant. They were the parents of two children. Mary Turner had condemned the mob's killing of her husband. She was abducted by the mob in Brooks County and brutally murdered at Folsom's Bridge on the Little River on the Lowndes County side; her unborn child was cut from her body and killed separately. During the next two weeks, at least another eleven blacks were killed by the mob. Johnson was killed in a shootout with police. As many as 500 African Americans fled Lowndes and Brooks counties to escape future violence.<ref>{{cite web|title=Remembering Mary Turner|url=http://www.maryturner.org|publisher=The Mary Turner Project|access-date=March 30, 2014}}</ref>

Mary Turner's lynching drew widespread condemnation nationally. It was a catalyst for the Anti-Lynching Crusaders campaign for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by [[Leonidas Dyer]] of [[St. Louis]]. It proposed to make lynching a federal crime, as southern states essentially never prosecuted the crimes.<ref>{{cite web|last=Armstrong|first=Julie|title=Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching|url=http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/mary_turner/|publisher=University of Georgia Press|access-date=March 30, 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140415104051/http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/mary_turner/|archive-date=April 15, 2014}}</ref> The Solid South Democratic block of white senators consistently defeated such legislation, aided by having [[Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era|disenfranchised most black voters]] in the South. In 2010, a [http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/valdostadailytimes.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/2/d6/2d672227-73cc-5008-b4d8-788ef8eb97a6/53e1e98bdcd6b.image.jpg?resize=738%2C760 state historical marker], encaptioned "Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage," was installed at Folsom's Bridge in Lowndes County to commemorate these atrocities.