Maceo Snipes was a veteran and civil rights leader who was murdered in Taylor County, Georgia on July 18, 1946 after Snipes, a black World War II veteran, voted in the Georgia Democratic Party primary.
KKK members were responsible for multiple lynchings of black people who decided to vote following Snipes' murder.
[3] Prior to the election, the KKK had made threats to lynch any black person who dared cast a vote.
All four were suspected KKK members: two were later identified as Edward Williamson and Lynwood Harvey, both WWII veterans.
Snipes' story, along with the murder of the two black couples, received coverage in the newspapers, such as the Atlanta Constitution.
A 17-year-old student at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr., wrote a letter in response to the newspaper's remarks on the killings of Snipes and the Moore's Ford lynchings of two black married couples, George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom.
[10][11] In February 2007, the Georgia NAACP and the Prison and Jail Project sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting a federal probe of the murder of Maceo Snipes.
[12] In announcing the reopening of decades-old suspicious murders in the civil rights era a few weeks after the request, the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment whether the probe would include the Maceo Snipes case.