Historians say the massacre claimed five white lives and more than 200 Black lives, though the true number of Black deaths is unknown and some estimates put it much higher.

Between 1865 and 1965, there were nearly 5,000 racial terror lynchings of Black people, according to a Howard Center analysis of the Beck-Tolnay inventory of Southern Lynch Victims and the Seguin-Rigby National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States. Approximately 120 of those victims — about 3% — were Black women.

Mary Turner was one of at least 11 victims in Georgia’s Lowndes and Brooks counties during what became known as the Lynching Rampage of 1918.

The violence, known as the Slocum Massacre, was incited by a rumored uprising that never happened.

In 1906, two of Atlanta’s most prominent newspapermen committed an act that many of today’s journalists would consider a sin.

The language used in news coverage of lynchings often sought to justify the deaths of Black victims to white readers.

Kentucky newspapers contributed to a climate of terror by calling the victims bad negroes, “barbaric” or lazy and promiscuous.

Lynchings, were a form of racial terror, said historian Elijah Gaddis, an assistant professor of history at Auburn University. No state used the tactic more than Mississippi.

The Yazoo City Herald, a white-owned newspaper, covered lynchings, sometimes delivering inconsistent or problematic reporting.