1946 lynchings of 4 African Americans in Monroe, Georgia

What do you do when you want to call attention to four lynchings that did not have happened July 25, 1946 on the Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia?  

If you’re Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-GA), an honorary member of the biracial Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, you advocate reopening the lynchings and perform a reenactment of that dark afternoon, a little after 6 p.m., in Walton County, where four Black sharecroppers were ambushed, physically attacked and mindlessly slaughtered in a hail of bullets fired from the rifles, pistols and shotguns of 15 to 20 Ku Klux Klan.

In 1946 an NBC news broadcast described the mass killings as “one of the most vicious lynchings to stain our national record". Though none of the victims were hanged by the neck, they ended up dead and mutilated. 

The 1,000 member Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials unanimously passed a Resolution March 1999 in which they outlined reasons the cold case should be reopened. 

Lines 2-32 through 2-39 in the Resolution stated: “. . . . after the atrocity, poet Wilborn Victor Jenkins had called the Moore’s Ford Bridge ‘a spot made horrible forever’ and it will remain so, a blight on the national conscience until justice is done".      

                                                                              

Roger Malcolm

An afternoon reenactment was staged at the entrance of the Moore's Ford Bridge. It was performed by an African Americans cast. They played the roles of victims and the KKK, wearing white theatrical masks. About 200 people attended the reenactment. Some of them were so overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of the murders that they were brought to tears. The performance was designed to generate new interest in the 65-year-old lynchings. Brooks believed that a couple of the killers were still alive and living in Monroe County as of 1999.

Walton County District Attorney Ken Wynne said June 23, 2010, that he understood the need to bring closure to the case with a successful conviction. However, without new evidence, eyewitnesses, and names attached to an indictment, the DA said his hands are tied. A 2001 investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation failed to uncover new evidence and witnesses.

DELIVERED VICTIMS

The murdered sharecroppers were Roger Malcolm, 24, his wife Dorothy Malcolm, 20, sister to George Dorsey, 28, and his wife, Mae Murray Dorsey, 23. Dorothy was seven months pregnant. Like many lynchings in the South that made Americans gasp in shock and disbelief, these horrendous slayings, also known as the "Monroe Massacre" demanded international attention, enlarging the blood stain on America’s racial history.

The Atlanta Daily World, a Black newspaper, covered the mass killings from beginning to end. Reaching back into its archives, the paper’s July 28, 2005, issue reprinted some of its 1946 headlines: 

“Lynching Been Staged At Monroe”; 

“Monroe Massacre”; 

“$10,000 Reward Offered For GA. Lynchers”; 

“FBI Probers Take Over Monroe Massacre”; 

"Lynch Victims laid to Rest on GA. Black Sunday”; 

“White Methodists Blast Monroe Mob”; 

“Negro Publishers Ask Arnall, Truman to Act On Mobsters".

The murders put people’s rage on edge for two reasons: two of the victims were women, one seven months pregnant and George Dorsey was a veteran who recently returned to the state after being in World War 11.

Re-enactment of mass killing of Roger Malcolm, Mae Murray Dorsey, Dorothy Malcolm, George Dorsey as they were rounded up to meet their death by ambush in 1946, Monroe, Georgia.

WHAT HAPPENED ON MOORE'S FORD BRIDGE

As the story is told, Malcolm stabbed a White farmer, Barnette Hester with a pocketknife. The farmer had tried to break up a fight between Malcolm and his wife, Dorothy. Hester was not fatally stabbed, but his life stood on the edge of death for a several days. Malcolm had been drinking and was chasing his wife who was scared he was going to kill her. She ran into the yard of Hester. He told Malcolm to leave. They got into an argument. Hester ended up getting stabbed. 

Malcolm ran and hid in a field, but the sheriff caught him, putting him in jail. He was in jail for 11 days in jail. His bond was set at $600. Loy Harrison, a White farmer, paid Malcolm's bond. Malcolm and his wife Dorothy, May Murray Dorsey and George Dorsey worked as sharecroppers for Harrison. Reportedly Harrison had refused to pay Malcolm's bond but then changed in mind. 

Speculation is that the ambush that followed Malcolm's release from jail was a disaster in waiting that was planned in advance. Harrison took a different route to his farm. FBI investigators said it was not necessary to cross the Moore's Ford Bridge to get to Harrison's farm. 

The carload of people (Harrison, Malcolm, Dorothy, George, Mae Murray) was abruptly blocked by another vehicle on the one lane wooden bridge. A number of armed White males, supposedly members of the KuKlu Klan, was waiting for them. The couples were forcibly removed from the automobile and taken down a dirt trail out of sight along the Apalachee River, on the border of Walton and Oconee counties. Roger Malcolm was the first snatched out the car. He was the one they wanted. The other ended being collateral damage.

Whereas Harrison life was spared, Malcolm (born March 22, 1922), Dorothy (born July 25, 1926), George (born November 1917) and Mae Murray (born September 10, 1922) shot an estimated 60 times at close range with shotguns and pistols. 

According to many stories written about the 1946 massacre the sharecroppers were shot so many times it was difficult for family members to recognize them. Malcolm’s body was the most mutilated.  Dorsey had recently returned to Monroe after serving almost five years in World War ll in the Pacific War.

Loy Harrison (L) who bailed Malcolm out of jail is shown in this July 26, 1946 photo, talking to Sheriff J.  M.  Bond (C) of Oconee County, and Coroner W. T. Brown at Walton County, where the four Blacks were killed near Monroe, Georgia a day earlier. Bond is holding a rope allegedly used to bind the hands of two of the four victims. 

Giving his version of what happened, Loy Harrison described a well-dressed man who was orchestrating the small mob's action.  He said the leader was "A big man who was dressed mightily proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. 

"He pointed to Roger Malcolm and said, 'We want that nigger'. Then he pointed at George Dorsey, and said, 'We want you, too Charlie'. I said, 'His name ain't Charlie'. Someone said, 'Keep your damn big mouth shut. This ain't your party'".

Over 20 FBI agents were dispatched to Walton County at the request of President Harry Truman, who ordered an investigation into the mass killings. As an incentive for eyewitnesses to come forward with information that would lead to an arrest and prosecution, the FBI offered a hefty $12,500 reward. The reward amount was later raised to $64,000, with donations coming from the NAACP, The Chicago Defender Newspaper, labor unions, religious and civic organizations.  

Unfortunately, no one in the tight-knit rural community stepped forward to tell what they knew or had witnessed. With the threat of a visit from the KKK, not only were Blacks scared to tell what they suspected, Whites were equally afraid of vigilante retaliation. The Truman administration formed the "President's Commission on Civil Rights" as a result of the lynchings.

Harrison was an eyewitness to the massacre, but he said he did not recognize any one in the lynch mob. None of them had their faces covered. They lived in the same area as Harrison. After a six months investigation the FBI named 55 suspects in a 500 page synopsis. Some of the suspects told the FBI they could not remember where they were on the day the massacre. The case was closed without anyone getting arrested or prosecuted. The report revealed that Harrison was a former Ku Klux Klansman, and a known bootlegger in the area.

The FBI officially closed the case January 29, 196.

It was pointed out in a September 1946 issue of the New Republic magazine that there were several unanswered questions surrounding the investigation. Questions such as: "Why was the bail set so low for Malcolm? Why did Harrison bail Malcolm out of jail? Why did Harrison take a lonely road to his farm instead of the paved highway”? (The Spokesman, July 1, 2005) 

A New York Times story dated March 31, 2005, stated that Monroe’s Police Chief Ben Dickerson told the FBI that “a mob of White men gathered days later in the woods south of town to figure out how ‘get Roger out of jail,’ presumably to lynch him for the attack on Hester".

A WRITER’S LONE INVESTIGATION

For four years Laura Wexler, a White woman from the North, conducted her own investigation of the lynchings. She wanted to help solve the case with new discoveries. But she ran into a town full of stumbling blocks. She read an uncensored copy of the FBI’s original report, leading her to writing Fire In A Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, published in 2003. In an interview with NPR’s Renee Montagne, Wexler said, “. . .  in [the] early days after the lynching, telegrams arrived at the White House at the rate of one every two minutes".

Wexler said she got the title of her book after listening to local people. During a Morning Edition interview on NPR, Wexler said, "A canebrake is a thicket of river cane which almost looks like bamboo". When she tracked down some of the names on the FBI list of suspects, she looked them up in current phone books for Walton and Oconee counties. Her next step was to start knocking on doors, seeking interviews. All but two of the suspects had died.

“I ended up talking to a lot of widows,” she told Montagne. “One White man told me, ‘this lynching is like a pile of dog crap. The best thing to do is bury it and go on.’ I did confront two men whom the FBI named as suspects in the lynching in 1946. It was eerie talking with them, but not frightening". she said.

Wexler writes that George and Dorothy Dorsey were the first to be buried. She related that many friends and relatives stayed away from the funeral out of fear. Their “own mother missed the funeral because she had trouble finding someone willing to drive her there. At the funeral the relatives of Mae Murray Dorsey intimated that she was the ‘most innocent’ of the four lynching victims--that she’d been lynched by association. Mae Murray Dorsey, unlike the faces of the three other victims, was not destroyed by gunshots".

She said only 10 people attended Malcolm’s funeral. After the funeral, his grandmother who raised him, fled to Chicago. “I can’t explain the way I felt when I was notified of his death,” she later told a reporter in Chicago. “But something in me died too. They took my boy away from me like a dog".

Wexler writes that Dorsey was entitled to a burial with full military honors, which he received. In 1999 in a military memorial service was held for Dorsey, which was organized by the bi-racial Moore’s Memorial Committee.

Though all four victims were prepared for burial by the Black owned Dan Young’s Funeral Home, they were buried in unmarked graves. The graves were abandoned until the Moore’s Memorial Committee was formed in 1977 to commemorate the victims. The Committee found three of the unmarked graves, giving them proper burials and headstones.

In April 2005 Rep. Tyrone Brooks said this of the 1946 Monroe Massacre, “This was the most heinous collective crime ever perpetuated against African Americans in this state". Sixty years later, no one has been prosecuted for the crimes.

Researching this story, I discovered there are many versions of the lynchings or mass kiling. Some writers omitted details; whereas  some writers embellished details, giving a fuller picture of the lynchings. Read Chapter One of Laura Wexler's detailed story of the murders.