4 Negroes Slain by Georgia Mob -- July 25, 2021

 

Wilmington Morning Star, 27-July-1946

The last mass lynching in the United States, so far, took place in Georgia 75 years ago today, on 25-July-1946. A white farmer bailed out a black man, Roger Malcom, a war veteran, who had been accused of stabbing a former boss. As they drove to the farmer's home with the accused's wife, Dorothy and another African-American couple, George W Dorsey and his wife Mae, a mob stopped the car and murdered the Malcoms and the Dorseys with guns. The Moore's Ford Lynchings shocked many people in the United States, including President Harry S Truman. Federal and state investigators were not able to find enough evidence to convict any perpetrators.

4 NEGROES SLAIN

BY GEORGIA MOB

60-Shot Broadside Mows

Victims Down 50 Miles

From Atlanta

MONROE Ga., July 25. -- (U.P) -- More than a score of white men, led by a six-foot-three giant wearing a black "Simon Legree" hat, dragged four terrified, pleading negroes from a car on a desolate Georgia road Thursday and lynched them with a 60-shot broadside from rifles, shotguns and pistols.

A horrified witness of the mass lynching was J. Loy Harrison, a prosperous Oconee county farmer. Harrison was driving the Negroes -- two men and their wives -- to his farm after posting $600 bond to release one of them from jail where he was held on charges of stabbing a former white employer.

Would Know Lynchers

Harrison vowed that he would recognize two of the lynches if he ever saw them again -- the strapping leader of the band and an undersized youth in G I clothes who held a shotgun at his head while the Negroes were hustled into the woods and mowed down.

The U. S. Justice department joined the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Walton County Sheriff E. S. Gordon in an immediate investigation of what Maj. W. E. Spence of the State Bureau of Investigation said was "the worst thing that ever happened in Georgia."

Party Waylaid

The four Negroes and Harrison were waylaid on the approach of a small plank bridge over the Appalachee river dividing Walton and Oconee counties. It was a wild, remote spot where the road was lined with swamp and lush undergrowth, about 10 miles east of Monroe and 50 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Harrison said the leader of the lynching party was a towering figure of a man, weighing at least 220 pounds. He wore a brown suit and a broad-brimmed black hat, long black hair, mottled with gray, jutted out from his hat and he was deeply sunburned. He spoke like an educated man, giving crisp commands to his fellow lynchers and sounded "like a retired doctor or general." the witness said.