VALDOSTA – Troup Street will keep its name intact — at least until spring 2023.

Valdosta State University’s sociology club A Chance to Initiate Opportunities Now has announced that it has cancelled the August petition drive for renaming Troup Street in favor of focusing on upcoming projects such as the Valdosta Women’s Statue and VSU mural.

The inspiration behind the name change was an incident involving the murder of plantation owner Hampton Smith, whose death was the catalyst in a violent series of lynchings in the South Georgia region in May 1918. Hazel “Hayes” Turner was accused of his murder due to a previous conflict with Smith and was kidnapped and lynched in neighboring Brooks County.

His wife, Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant at the time, publicly denounced her husband’s killers and tried to take legal action. She was met with same fate as her husband, taken to the Brooks County line where she was lynched and witnessed her unborn child being cut out of her womb and stomped to death.

D.J. Davis, ACTION president, said he still feels that the story behind Mary Turner deserves its own commemoration in Valdosta through a street name but feels the project deserves “100% focus.”

“We’re getting the women’s statue initiative off of the ground through partnerships and an upcoming town hall. We have to commission capable female artists for the mural. Mary Turner is going to be such an uphill battle, and it’s such an important project that it needs our undivided attention,” he said.

“It’s more of a matter of when than if. We changed Forrest to Barack Obama. We can get this done. It’s just the timing.”

ACTION was instrumental in changing Forrest Street to Barack Obama Boulevard. The group made the case that Forrest was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder.

Troup Street is named for George M. Troup, Georgia’s governor from 1823-27, whose plantation, Val d’Aosta, inspired the name of Valdosta.

The group may still organize a drive in the fall to name another portion of Troup Street after Gerald Johnson, a lifelong Troup Street resident and advocate. City Council member Sandra Tooley has pushed to rename the street for him. A compromise was reached to push naming different portions of Troup Street for Johnson and Turner.

“Johnson helped to allocate funds to fix up Troup Street due to his family and his community. That section between Hill and towards the end of Griffin (Avenue) look so much better, thanks to him. Anybody deserves that street name, it’s him,” Tooley said in a past interview.

ACTION’s primary focus for the rest of the year is obtaining funding to have a statue of “prominent and impactful” women of Valdosta’s history built at the Women’s Building on Patterson Street finalized by Women’s Day 2024. The group would like a women’s mural for either the VSU campus or Downtown Valdosta by the end of the year.