TheLoop21.com

By: Susan Anderson (follow this member)
Thu, 09/18/2008 - 00:00

(Read more of our stories about the Covenant with Black America.)

Citizens in Georgia are grappling with a traumatic past that won’t go away — the lynchings and white mob violence that were a form of homegrown terrorism against African Americans throughout the United States.

Just weeks ago, state and federal investigators re-opened a gruesome, 60-year-old case, the last documented mass lynching in the United States. In 1946, a mob of white men brutally killed two, young African American couples, Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, while a crowd of 200 people watched. The slaughter occurred in Moore's Ford, Walton County, Georgia. The victims were dragged out of their car, then shot hundreds of times. George Dorsey was a WWII veteran, home nine months from military service. Dorothy Malcom was seven months pregnant. The white attackers cut her unborn baby from her womb. (A moving, disturbing re-enactment of the Massacre at Moore’s Ford Bridge, conducted by advocates who want the crime solved and the community healed, is posted on YouTube.)

Last year, Associated Press writer Greg Bluestein uncovered materials in FBI files pointing toward suspicions that one of the South’s most notorious racists, three-term Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, sanctioned the murders to sway rural white voters during a tough election campaign.

At the time, the savage killings galvanized black leadership around the country, was reported in the New York Times and on national radio, and influenced President Harry Truman to send anti-lynching legislation to Congress, who blocked it. The Justice Department's investigation of the crime was seen as inadequate at a time when the U.S. government was vigorously prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

The probe into the crime was hampered by local whites, who kept their mouths shut in racist solidarity with the possible suspects – 55 at the time – and would not assist FBI investigators. Blacks, too, clammed up, out of fear of reprisal. No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes. Left out of the history books, it became a “taboo subject,” as reporter Adam Thompson put it in a story for the Athens Banner Herald.
 
In 2003, Laura Wexler's book, Fire in a Canebreak, exposed the crime and the complexity surrounding it. In its review of the book, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote, “Where there was no justice in economics or in the practice of democracy, or in social life or in education, there could be no justice in criminal prosecution.”

Changes happening slowly

Thankfully, things have begun to change. In 1991, Clinton Adams, a white man, came out of hiding and told what he witnessed during the mob murder of the Dorseys and the Malcoms when he was a child. In the 1990s, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began reporting on the case after ignoring it for decades. In 2003, NPR ran an interview with Wexler.

But the renewed investigation is largely the result of citizen efforts to push for prosecution and heal their community. A group of black and white residents 10 years ago formed the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee, “committed to telling the story, honoring the dead, promoting healing and social justice, and creating a living memorial to the victims of this horrible crime.” The Coalition for the Peoples Agenda, an association of more than 30 civil rights, labor and progressive organizations in Atlanta, headed by the Rev. Joseph Lowry, one of the founders of the SCLC, is involved in activities to keep the issue alive.

Politicians are part of the push, too. Since 2004, in an annual "call for justice," the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials has conducted a re-enactment of the lynching, and is offering a $35,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of the killers. Legendary civil rights leader and Georgia Congressman John Lewis has repeatedly introduced legislation to give the Department of Justice and the FBI the funds to reopen Civil Rights-era criminal cases that have gone cold. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was named after teenager Emmett Till, who was murdered and mutilated while on a summer vacation on Money, Miss., in 1955. The bill has yet to pass the Senate.

In the past, officials argued against opening these cold cases, because there are no surviving suspects, or witnesses. But in the case of the lynching of Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks says there are five suspects in the slaying who are still alive, according to CNN.

In a New York Times interview, Brooks explained the push to re-open and solve the case. "We cannot find closure until there is prosecution. We cannot find reconciliation until there is prosecution."