VALDOSTA — In a country polarized on almost every topic, race continues to be at the top.

Most recently, the memorializing sign at the location of some of the most horrific lynchings by white mobs in Georgia’s darkest age has been shot at several times in the last few months.

This is nothing new. It has happened before, five years ago.

The Mary Turner Project has worked, along with many other citizens throughout the years, to bring awareness to the heinous lynchings of 13 over several tragic days in Lowndes and Brooks counties.

An award is being offered for $200 to someone with information about the defacement.

At the time of the lynching, Turner was eight months pregnant. Her husband had already been lynch. The lynchers tied her ankles together and her baby was cut from her womb.

Eleven others were lynched on that sad day.

The oral history of this event carries on today. An annual memorial service dedicated to Mary Turner is held in May.

This was not an uncommon occurrence during this period in Georgia’s history.

From Wikipedia:

Mary Turner (c. 1885^[1] – 19 May 1918) was a young, married black woman and mother of two who was lynched by a white mob in Lowndes County, Georgia, for having protested the lynching death of her husband Hazel “Hayes” Turner the day before in Brooks County.^[2] She was eight months pregnant, and her unborn child was also brutally murdered.^[3][4] The Turner lynchings followed the murder of a white plantation owner in Brooks County by one of his black workers. They were followed by deaths of another 11 black men by a white mob in Brooks and neighboring Lowndes counties during a manhunt and lynching rampage. These lynchings are examples of the racially motivated mob violence by whites against black people in the American South, particularly in the era of 1880 to 1930, the peak of lynchings. Brooks County in Georgia, and Georgia among the states, had the highest rates of lynching in the nation during this period.