On July 14, 1946, four African American sharecroppers were lynched at Moore’s Ford in northeast Georgia in an event now described as the “last mass lynching in America.” Yet the killers of George Dorsey, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcolm, and Dorothy Malcolm were never brought to justice. The violence and public outcry surrounding the event reflected growing African American challenges to Jim Crow in the post-World War II years as well the failures of state and federal authorities to address racial inequality and violence in the South.
A fight between Roger Malcolm and his wife Dorothy sparked the crisis that unfolded in mid-July in Walton County, just sixty miles outside of Atlanta. On July 14, Malcolm was arrested by local authorities after stabbing white overseer Barnette Hester who had intervened in the domestic conflict. Hester may have had a forced sexual relationship with Dorothy Malcolm. Eleven days after this assault on July 25, white landowner J. Loy Harrison drove Dorothy Malcolm and fellow sharecroppers George and Mae Murray Dorsey to the Monroe, Georgia, jail to bail out Roger Malcolm. A large white mob stopped Harrison and the two couples on their return trip near the Moore’s Ford Bridge on the Apalachee River.
What happened next was hotly debated by Harrison and other witnesses. Loy Harrison was reputed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as were many others who gathered at Moore’s Ford Bridge. Ultimately, the mob beat the sharecroppers before tying them to a tree and shooting them to death. George Dorsey was a World War II veteran recently returned from service in the Pacific while Dorothy Malcolm was seven months pregnant.
According to Loy Harrison’s testimony:
“A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. He pointed to Roger Malcom and said, ‘We want that nigger.’ Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger, and said, ‘We want you, too, Charlie.’ I said, ‘His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George.’ Someone said ‘Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party.’
Then silently, Harrison watched. One of the black women identified one of the assailants. The mob took both the women to a big oak tree and tied them beside their husbands. The mob fired three point-blank volleys. The coroner’s estimate counted sixty shots fired at close range. They shot and killed them near Moore’s Ford Bridge spanning the Apalachee River, 60 miles (97 km) east of Atlanta. After Mae Murray Dorsey was shot, her fetus was cut from her body with a knife.
Even though the mob wore no masks, Harrison said he didn’t recognize any of the men. From the start, Harrison was the only known eyewitness and one of the main suspects.
There were rumors of local law enforcement’s involvement, too, in what appeared to be a conspiracy. Malcom had been in the Walton sheriff’s custody and was dead an hour after his release from jail.
Authorities concluded that the main motive for the lynching was revenge. Roger Malcom stabbed a white farmer during an argument 11 days earlier.
However, a secondary factor was racial intimidation linked to the 1946 gubernatorial election in Georgia.
That year, African Americans had won a Supreme Court battle ending the all-white primary, which for decades had effectively blocked African Americans from voting. Eugene Talmadge, one of the Democratic candidates for governor, used the new black enfranchisement to mobilize supporters and appealed to rural whites with virulent racist rhetoric. The Democratic primary occurred just a few days after the stabbing.
Aftermath
The public nature of this attack gained national press attention. In Georgia, lame-duck Governor Ellis Arnall, recently defeated in a bid for a second term in the 1946 Democratic gubernatorial primary race because of his limited support of African American voting rights, pushed the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to assist local authorities in a search for the killers. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leaders rallied public attention to the crime to force action by the federal government. Ultimately, U. S. President Harry Truman offered a $12,500 reward for information and directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take action in the case. Truman later referenced the Moore’s Ford lynching as influencing his decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and to integrate the military in 1948.
Despite these actions, there were no prosecutions for the crime committed at Moore’s Ford. FBI investigators gathered shell casings and bullets from the tree where the four sharecroppers were executed but found no witnesses willing to testify as to the identities of the perpetrators, even though at least fifty-five individuals were reported to have participated in the mob action. Walton County convened a grand jury to hear evidence about the crime but no indictments followed. The NAACP, frustrated with the lack of justice and other reports of violence toward servicemen returning from World War II, used the case to promote an anti-lynching bill in Congress but membership in chapters of the NAACP across the South dropped in the 1940s out of fear of retribution from the Klan and the state’s white power structure.
Renewed interest in Georgia’s civil rights struggle brought attention to the Moore’s Ford lynching in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s, civil rights activist Bobby Howard worked with the NAACP to renew calls for justice in the case. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the FBI both returned to the case in 2004, questioning many now-elderly witnesses and doing more forensic investigations. These investigations have largely stalled as witnesses maintain their silence about the events of Moore’s Ford.
The murders terrorized an entire community and tore families apart. The victims’ survivors lived with years of anguish and pain. Some left the area never to return.
Roger Malcom Hayes was 2-years-old at the time his father was lynched. His mother, Mattie Louise Campbell, the estranged wife of Roger Malcom, took the toddler to Ohio where a family friend adopted him. Hayes returned on occasion to visit family and he regularly attended the memorial efforts to remember his father and the others lynched at Moore’s Ford, said his daughter Atanya Lynette Hayes.
Roger Hayes was hopeful when authorities reopened the case in 2000 that his father’s killers would be found, but he died in April 2016 with nothing resolved, his daughter said. He would “not be okay” with authorities closing the case:
“He wanted justice,” she said. “He never cared about retributions or money or anything. He wanted someone held accountable for murdering his father. It bothered him that people knew who did and protected those people.”
Among the new details contained in the GBI files is evidence — long suspected — that four of the original suspects belonged to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Investigators found charter membership documents for the Walton County KKK chapter from the 1930s and 40s. A prominent white funeral director in Monroe was listed as the “Exalted Cyclops,” or leader of the chapter, as of 1939. His funeral home initially received the victims before they were transferred to a black-owned funeral home.
Yet even if the investigations have not produced convictions, ongoing local efforts keep the Moore’s Ford lynchings in public view. In 1997 an interracial group of citizens in Walton County created the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee to establish a historical marker at the bridge site. Public re-enactments of the lynchings have become an annual tradition in the region, starting in 2005.