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CHAPTER 1
Murder
The store owner's wife looked up in alarm.
"Mrs. Aycock, call the sheriff for me, quick!" Loy Harrison burst out. "They took all of my negroes from me and I suppose they shot them."
"All of them?"
"I suppose so," the agitated Georgia farmer replied.
"How?"
"They blocked the bridge and made me put my hands up. They got Roger out and then pulled George and said, 'We want you too, Charlie,' and pulled him out. I told them this was George and not Charlie, and they said 'Keep your damn mouth out of this! This is our party!'" Then, he said, a group of twenty to twenty-five men had taken the two black men and their wives from him.
Deputy Sheriff, Lewis Howard was eating supper at his home in the Walton County jail, in nearby Monroe, when his wife handed him the phone.
"Somebody took my niggers away from me at the Moore's Ford Bridge and shot them! What must I do?" Harrison exclaimed. According to the deputy sheriff, Harrison said he wanted to go home before his wife heard about the killings, which would upset her.
"You go on home," the deputy sheriff urged, but told Harrison to meet him afterwards at Aycock's store on the Athens highway.
Walton County Sheriff Emory Gordon had just finished listening to the news broadcast at 6:15 p.m. when his deputy called about a band of men seizing a carload of blacks. He continued his meal until he was finished, then set out with two deputies, Howard and Charles "Doc" Sorrells.
It was still light and no one was present when they parked ten miles east of Monroe, near the isolated Moore's Ford wooden bridge over the sluggish Apalachee River, which cut through brush, undergrowth, and thick clumps of grass overlooked by jack pines. Gordon found tire tracks of vehicles that had turned around sharply and sped off. Howard walked down a side path before he came upon the mutilated, blood-stained bodies — two black men and two black women. All had been shot multiple times and had cracked skulls, shattered limbs, gaping wounds, and shredded flesh. The three lawmen did not stay long. They were so overcome by the grotesque array of bodies that one of them would later say they forgot to protect the scene or collect physical evidence before racing back to Monroe to assemble a coroner's jury. As dusk fell over the quiet riverside, the bloodied corpses lay stiffening and unattended.
Bailiff Ray Flanigan was idling at the intersection of Highway 78 and Broad Street in Monroe, the usual meeting place for members of the sheriff's office at this hour, when the three rattled lawmen drove up. Howard told Flanigan to get together a coroner's jury of half a dozen men, then meet him at the crime scene. Flanigan's first call was to brief the one-armed county coroner, sloppily dressed in rumpled clothes and unshaven for days, who would have to oversee formal proceedings beside the corpses.
One man drafted to serve on the coroner's jury was sitting on a bench in Monroe's business district talking with the chief of the city's police, Ben Dickinson, when Deputy Sheriff Howard approached and said, "Uncle Ben, we've played hell. We let the negro go on bond and we have four of them dead at the river."
Meanwhile Deputy Sheriff Sorrells had recruited a mortician with the white-owned E.L. Almand funeral home to serve on the coroner's jury and organize removal of the bodies to the mortuary in Monroe.
Howard made no attempt to inform his wife, so when she became alarmed at his absence, she telephoned Sheriff Gordon's wife, from whom she learned that four blacks had been abducted and shot dead, including Roger Malcolm, whom she had seen leaving the jail on bail less than an hour earlier.
Within half an hour the coroner's jury had been appointed. At about 8:00 p.m. the first carload with Flanigan, Sorrells, the coroner, and two other jurors arrived at the secluded site of the massacre. By now it was darkening and they had to leave the auto headlights on and use flashlights to survey the terrain. Flanigan was swiveling his flashlight near the bridge, trying to locate the bodies, when Howard drove up with the remaining jurors and Loy Harrison. The jury foreman arrived with a physician, followed by funeral home staff in an ambulance, its headlights throwing more light through the quickening darkness.
Word of the slayings had already reached beyond the Walton County seat of Monroe, and scores of people stopped by Aycock's store to ask directions to Moore's Ford Bridge. They continued to come for days after. One carload of visitors unfamiliar with the area explained that they were "just riding around and wanted to see where those niggers got killed." By the time the coroner had sworn in jurors and the physician, an estimated thirty-five to forty men, women, and children had swarmed in to gawk at the carnage. The sheriffs who had seen the lifeless quartet an hour earlier led jurors down a wagon path to the macabre tableau about fifty yards from where the dirt road reached the bridge. Loy Harrison, who had been driving the victims home until, he said, he was blocked on the bridge, identified each by name.
With the aid of flashlights and beams from autos they saw all four corpses lying close together, about thirty to forty yards south of the river. They were somewhat parallel to one another. The coroner and jurors agreed that none of the victims appeared to have tried to run from their captors. They were either facing their executioners or in a profile position when murdered. It also appeared that some shots had been fired into the bodies after they had already fallen. Many of the wounds came from weapons fired at point-blank range into the victims' faces and arms. Laboratory evidence would later find that between six and twelve weapons, including shotguns and pistols, had been fired during the slaughter.
The two males were furthest from the river. The inquest began with George Dorsey, the five feet seven, 131-pound, darker-skinned of the two males. He lay with his face and stomach almost flat with the ground. The bullet and shotgun wounds on his head, back, and arm showed he had had no chance of surviving. George Dorsey, thirty, had come back from World War II only to be gunned down in the boondocks by a band of fanatics.
Roger Malcolm's shattered figure indicated, according to one juror, that he had been singled out for "the worst punishment" of the four. He had apparently looked directly at the firing squad and taken a shotgun blast to the face. Roger, twenty-five, five feet ten, may have fallen backwards, thrown off balance by the velocity of gunfire. He lay on his back with the remnants of his face pointed skywards, and had a ten-foot-long four-ply rope pulled tightly around his neck. One of his assailants had fashioned a halter hitch loop and closed it with two overhand knots, a method commonly used to tie up horses. The hands of both men were bound by a single rope. Gunshots had left reddened paths through Roger's forehead, breast, and hip. In a departure from reports on the other three bodies, the coroner now inserted Harrison's comments to the jurors that he had been blocked at the bridge by twenty or more men, in three Fords and a single Chevrolet car.
Dorothy Malcolm, twenty-four, the smaller of the women, had sustained ghastly wounds when gunned down near Roger, her reputed husband. She had fallen on her left side, with her disfigured face pointed toward her husband. Gashes to her head, chest, and an arm proved the ferocity of the gunmen.
George's wife, Mae, twenty-four, had fallen closest to the river and settled in a somewhat crouched position, touching Dorothy's body. She lay on the edge of the rutted road with her face turned toward the river. A large-caliber bullet, shot downward through her head, illustrated how the killers had moved in to silence their fallen victims at close range. Other gunshots had smashed both of her shoulders. Mae had attended high school, and, according to the FBI, "was apparently from a higher class of negro families than the other victims."
Laconically, the coroner listed the cause of death of three victims as "gunshot wounds at the hands of persons unknown." Only in the case of Mae Dorsey did he write "death by violence [author's italics] of gunshot wounds at the hands of persons unknown."
During the inquest, jurors and law enforcement officers snipped off pieces of the plow line rope to take away as keepsakes. Deputy Sheriff Sorrells cut the noose around Roger Malcolm's neck, but it had been pulled so tightly that when it was sliced loose the rope's impression remained firmly outlined on the skin. One juror cut off a two-foot-long piece from the same rope to take home. "I borrowed a knife from one of the other men who was present and cut off a piece of this rope which was still tied around the dead man's neck," said the juror. Another snipped the rope off Roger Malcolm's hands. A twelve-inch segment of rope, and a separate section eight inches long, both of which Sorrells had cut from George Dorsey's hands, were given to Bailiff Flanigan, who was also given a bullet taken from George's abdomen.
Two of the bodies were loaded into an ambulance even as inquests continued on the remaining pair. An hour passed before they were finished; then the coroner and every juror signed off on reports written up by the physician.
All four coroner's reports recommended payment per victim for services rendered, at the rate of ten dollars to the attending physician, five dollars to the sheriff, and one dollar for each of the six jurors.
The unusual passage of an ambulance, hearse, and other vehicles descending on Moore's Ford had prompted one inquisitive local farmer, Ridden Farmer, and his young son, Emerson, to walk the quarter mile from their house to the crime scene. However, the inquest had not yet begun on the remains of the fourth body when the farmer was overcome by revulsion, threw up, and immediately returned home with his son.
As they left, souvenir hunters came forward, with more arriving later that night and in days to come, leaving their headlights on to illuminate the crime scene and make it easier to scavenge for mementoes. They pried loose bullets embedded in tree trunks behind where the victims had fallen, and carried off pieces of rope and even an empty Luger pistol cartridge case. One scrounger picked up and pocketed a decayed tooth thought to have broken loose from one of the victims during the gunfire.
Back in Monroe, Lewis Howard, a big man with a voice like a frog, returned to the jail. While locking up the inmates he announced, "I done something I sure am sorry about. You know that negro that got bonded out? They have overtaken them and got them."
Sometime after 9:00 p.m., a radio operator in the Atlanta headquarters of the Georgia State Patrol received a call from Sheriff Gordon, asking to speak with anyone from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Told that none were present, the sheriff said he wanted to report a lynching. The operator asked who had been lynched and by whom.
"Four negroes were killed in Walton County," Gordon replied. The radio operator, who quit his job shortly afterwards to operate a grocery store, did not take notes and could not recall whether the sheriff said that they were killed by white men.
"Well, would you like for us to send some GBI men down there?" asked the operator.
"I don't think it is necessary. I have already investigated it," the sheriff answered.
"Well, if you do not request them to come down they probably won't come down as they have all been mighty busy lately," said the operator.
The sheriff hesitated, then said, "Well, you can tell them and they can come on down if they want to."
When the radio operator called the director of the GBI to report the killings, he emphasized that the sheriff had not given any other information or even requested assistance. The chief knew that it was GBI policy never to assist with investigations unless specifically requested by the sheriff or local police. Nevertheless, it had always been the policy of the sheriff's office in Monroe to report even minor offenses to the State Patrol Barracks at Madison, Georgia, a district that covered Monroe. This unprecedented quadruple slaying, however, had gone unreported to Madison, which would have been equipped, according to the GBI head, to send troopers to Monroe at a moment's notice.
Not long after the lynchings, Loy Harrison drove up to the home of Moena Williams, the mother of two of the victims, Dorothy Malcolm and George Dorsey. Moena, forty-four, had been only fifteen years old when she had given birth to George. For the past four years she had lived with her family on a patch of farmland owned by Harrison.
"Come over here, Moena, I've got something to tell you which I know you don't want to hear," he said.
As the portly farmer spoke with her, his brother-in-law waiting in the vehicle heard Moena shouting and crying. They sat on the porch with her slightly deaf husband, Jim Williams. Harrison told her he had been waylaid at gunpoint and that all four passengers had been forcibly hauled off. "I don't know what happened to them." He told her to accompany him back to his house and wait there until he could get news of their fate from the sheriff's office.
After he had driven back, two of his farming friends arrived at Harrison's roadside home. They said Harrison told them, "I had one of the worst experiences I have ever had, a while ago. I was coming from Monroe and when at the Moore's Ford Bridge a bunch of men came out of the bushes and put a gun to my head, walked up to the car and said, 'Get out of there, Charlie!'"
Harrison said he replied, "This ain't Charlie. This is George. What you all up to? You want my money?"
"No, we just want your coons."
Harrison continued, "The group threw a rope around the wrists of both of the negro men and took them about fifty yards down the road." Harrison then heard shooting but he did not know if they were dead. After the shots were fired, the abductors came back to the bridge, appearing to be perfectly calm. Harrison did not appear to be nervous either while relating what had happened because, said one of his visitors, "He ain't that type." Harrison invited his visitors to go down to the river with him "to see about them," but they backed off, one of them explaining he had ten cows to milk. When one of the visitors asked if Harrison had a pistol with him, he replied that he didn't even have a pocket knife.
Moena interjected, "Mr. Loy, you going down there?"
"I ain't scared," Harrison answered. "That crowd done gone."
Williams said he and Moena waited at Harrison's home until he came back between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
"All four of them are dead and are now at the undertaker's parlor," he said.
When she heard that one of her sons and only daughter had been killed, Moena slumped down in a faint.
After she came to, Harrison told her he had made arrangements for the bodies to be prepared for burial. That night Moena and Jim stayed in Harrison's basement at his house. At daybreak he told her to be brave, since they were dead, and nothing could be done about it.
Meanwhile, the nighttime embalming had begun on the bodies of George Dorsey and the two females, but it came to an abrupt halt at the mortuary when it was decided it would be more prudent to let them be handled by a black-owned funeral home. The white mortician felt the move would "facilitate the visits of colored friends and relatives and create a more harmonious handling of the situation." Shortly after midnight, the corpses were delivered to the Dan Young funeral home in downtown Monroe, the owner of which speculated that the transfer was made to save the white undertaker from "the trouble that was coming." As Dan Young received the dead, an observer recoiled, for Roger looked as if he "had as many holes in him as a sifter." Another eyewitness shuddered when he saw "one side of Roger's face shot off."
Abruptly, a few FBI agents who had arrived in Monroe the night after the lynchings were ordered to collect spent ammunition that might still be embedded in the bodies. The crime scene remained unprotected until 8:30 that morning, July 27, when the first FBI agents arrived at the location. A full day and two nights had passed without anyone closing off the bloodstained site to the public.
The order for an additional autopsy was issued by a Walton county superior court judge on the second day after the shootings, when the mortician once again brought the dead out of refrigeration. The autopsy would have to be finished in time for the burial the following morning.
Young had gone to Atlanta earlier that day to get the coffins and other funeral supplies. While there, he had spoken confidentially with Eugene Martin, a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and brother-in-law of Walter White, the formidable executive secretary of the NAACP. Young passed on all manner of information about the unfolding events in Monroe, including unsubstantiated talk among Monroe's blacks of what they had heard and believed. He even spoke of the E.L. Almand funeral home, saying that the son was mayor of Monroe while the father, defeated in the recent primary election for representative to the state legislature, was reportedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He talked openly with Martin and an attorney but refused to be quoted. Young was so fearful for his life that he said he might be killed if such information leaked out. The prospect of retribution so alarmed him that he even wondered whether he ought to flee Monroe. "Under no circumstances does he want his name mentioned in any shape, form or fashion as he had been sought after, and talked to so much, that he is beginning to fear that he might in some way be considered a dangerous man by the guilty parties," Martin wrote to White.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Lynching"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Anthony S. Pitch.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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