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Teaching about race and social action by ‘digging up the past’: the Mary Turner project

Abstract This paper explores how incorporating localized historical acts of racial injustice into Sociology courses can have a variety of pedagogical and social impacts. The use of one such event, the 1918 lynching of 13 people in South Georgia, led to the formation of the Mary Turner Project (MTP). We document the organization’s work as well as its impact on students and the region, as seen through the lens of public sociology. The MTP installed an official road marker to memorialize the lynching, intervened in a campus controversy involving the Confederate flag, hosted numerous commemoration events, and did classroom-based research and hosted community discussions on lynching and slavery in the local area. Drawing from organizational documents, the paper explores how ‘digging up the past’ and the experience of the MTP may serve as a model for critical sociologists who teach courses on social inequalities and want to make those courses more applicable to people’s every day lived experience.