The gruesome Moore's Ford lynchings occurred 73 years ago today, and while the brutal murders of George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom, still remain unsolved, hope for justice revisits the case as the courts currently consider at last unsealing grand jury transcripts from 1946.
1946 was one of the most racially charged years in Georgia history and politics, particularly because it was the first time black voters were allowed to participate in the Georgia Democratic Primary. Months after the two married couples were waylaid and then lynched by a mob of 20 white men in Walton County, a grand jury met for three weeks in December, the same month racist Governor Eugene Talmadge died before extending his Dixiecrat dynasty by a fourth term. This set off the infamous "three governors controversy" (1946-1947), when Herman Talmadge maneuvered slipping into his father's trademark red galluses on inauguration day in January 1947 and served as governor for two months before the Georgia Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional. He'd return in 1948, though, and again in 1950 for four more years of the same brand of segregationist populism and black voter suppression pushed by his father. Of the Moore's Ford murders, all governor-elect Eugene Talmadge, who'd run on a platform of white supremacy, had to say while vacationing in Cheyenne, WY was that "things like that are to be regretted."
📷 Atlanta-Constitution, July 27, 1946
