Moore's Ford lynchings
Tradition says that the murders were committed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton and Oconee counties between Monroe and Watkinsville, but the four victims, two married couples, were shot and killed on a nearby dirt road.
African-American veterans resented being treated as second-class citizens after returning home and began to press for civil rights, including the ability to vote.
The states' exclusion of most black people from the political system across the South since the turn of the century had been maintained through a variety of devices, despite several challenges that reached the US Supreme Court.
[3] Talmadge's campaign was noted for its violent racist rhetoric: he boasted about having assaulted and flogged the black sharecroppers who worked for his family when he was a young man.
[4] Among those who attended the rally were two local white farmers, Barnette Hester and J. Loy Harrison, both of whom spoke afterward to Talmadge at a campaign barbecue.
In 2007 the Associated Press reported revelations about former governor Eugene Talmadge, based on 3725 pages of FBI material related to its 1946 investigation of the Moore's Ford lynching.
[3] Talmadge needed to win enough rural counties in Georgia in order to offset the popularity of his opponent Carmichael in urban areas with higher numbers of residents.
At 5:30 p.m. that day, he was forced to stop his car near the Moore's Ford Bridge between Monroe and Watkinsville, where the road was blocked by a gang of 15 to 20 armed white men.
[9] They shot and killed the two couples on a dirt road near Moore's Ford Bridge, which spanned the Apalachee River, 60 miles (97 km) east of Atlanta.
The Truman administration also introduced anti-lynching legislation in Congress, but was unable to get it passed against the opposition of the white southern Democratic bloc in the Senate.
Together with outrage about the Columbia, Tennessee 1946 race riot, the Moore's Ford lynchings garnered awareness and support from more of the white public for the growing Civil Rights Movement.
[13] In his article "The Murders in Monroe", in The New Republic (September 1946), lawyer H. William Fitelson raised a number of questions about the Moore's Ford case: why did Sheriff L.S.
[13] Fitelson noted that Harrison could have driven the Malcolms and the Dorseys to his farm via the paved highway, which was faster and more convenient, but instead drove down an unpaved dirt side road that was much slower and less used by travelers.
He thought it strange that Sheriff Gordon personally released Malcolm from the Walton County jail late in the afternoon, but he had not visited the crime scene nor attended the coroner's inquest.
[13] Fitelson noted that Mae Dorsey was said to have called out the names of several members of the lynch mob before her death, while Harrison, who had lived his entire life in Walton County, claimed not to know any.
[3] The FBI agents heard allegations that Harrison was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had bailed Malcom out of jail to turn him over to the lynch mob.
[15] Harrison made contradictory statements as he changed his story, at one point saying he had been "directed" by someone whose name he claimed not to remember to use a less traveled road on the way home; the police suspected that he may have been involved in plans for the lynching.
[12] The assistant police chief of Monroe, Ed Williamson, told the FBI about a conversation he had overheard between Talmadge and George Hester, Barnette's brother.
[17] In the telegram to Clark, White said the Moore's Ford lynchings were "...the direct result of a conspiratorial campaign to violate the U.S. constitution by Eugene Talmadge and the Ku Klux Klan".
His body lay in state at the Georgia capitol, where the coffin was surrounded by wreaths of flowers left by well wishers; one card read KKKK (Knights of the Ku Klux Klan).
[20] U.S. District Judge T. Hoyt Davis[21] selected and charged a 23-man grand jury, which included two African Americans, to hear testimony in the case on December 2, 1946.
[29] After hearing nearly three weeks of testimony, the grand jury was "unable to establish the identity of any persons guilty of violating the civil rights statute of the United States.
[31] At about four o'clock on January 1, 1947, brothers James and Tom Verner walked into the municipal ice house, briefly speaking with plant manager Will Perry.
In 1997 Georgia citizens led by Richard "Rich" Rusk established the biracial Moore's Ford Memorial Committee to commemorate the lynching and work for racial reconciliation.
In June 2008, as part of this, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and FBI searched an area at a farm home in Walton County near Gratis and collected material which they believed to be related to the lynching.
There was evidence suggesting that the lynching of Malcom was ordered or at least encouraged by former three-term governor Eugene Talmadge, overheard a day after the stabbing as having offered immunity for people taking care of the African American.
[3] When the allegations about Talmadege were reported, Rich Rusk told a journalist: It would not surprise me if state officials at all levels were implicated, if not in the actual killings, at least in the cover-up that followed.
[41] Researcher Anthony Pitch, author of The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town (2016), located the sealed grand jury testimony in the National Archives.
[42] The US Department of Justice under the Attorney General William Barr asked for a rehearing in the court of appeal, maintaining that to open the testimony would undermine the confidentiality of a grand jury investigation.
[43] In an editorial on April 26, 2020, the Toledo Blade condemned the 8–4 decision of the appeals court, stating: There is no good reason to keep the grand jury transcripts and other evidence about the lynching sealed.
