Photos for Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America
Immediately after the FBI began its investigation into the Moore’s Ford lynching, these reward posters were posted in and around Walton and Oconee counties. As the weeks passed, the reward for information ballooned to $64,000, thanks to donations from the NAACP, the Chicago Defender, as well as various labor unions and civic and religious organizations.
The funeral of Roger Malcom, 24, drew the smallest crowd–only roughly ten people attended. After the funeral, his grandmother, who had raised him, fled to Chicago. “I can’t explain the way I felt when I was notified of his death,” she told a reporter there. “But something in me died too. They took my boy away from me like a dog.”
At her funeral, the relatives of Mae Murray Dorsey, 23, intimated that she was the “most innocent” of the four lynching victims–that she’d been lynched by association. Many of those who viewed the bodies of the lynching victims in Young Funeral Home agreed; Mae Murray Dorsey’s face, unlike the faces of the three other victims, was not destroyed by gunshots.
George Dorsey was one of a half-million black men from the South to serve in the U.S. Army in World War II. At his death in 1946, he was entitled to burial with full military honors. In 1999, he received those honors in a military memorial service organized by the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee.
Thanks to the efforts of the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, a biracial community group, in 1999 a state historical marker was placed alongside Georgia Highway 78 to commemorate the Moore’s Ford lynching. It is the only official historical marker in Georgia, and one of few in the nation, that commemorates a lynching.
This stone foundation is all that remains of the one-lane wooden bridge that spanned the Apalachee River at Moore’s Ford in 1946. The four victims of the Moore’s Ford lynching were mobbed and killed as they tried to cross the bridge on July 25, 1946.
George Dorsey, 28, and Dorothy Dorsey Malcom, 20, brother and sister, were the first victims of the Moore’s Ford lynching to be buried. Many friends and relatives stayed away from the funeral out of fear. George and Dorothy’s own mother missed the funeral because she had trouble finding someone willing to drive her there.
The current bridge over the Apalachee River at Moore’s Ford is marked with graffiti that hints at the murders committed nearby in 1946. In May 1998, a memorial service for the victims of the Moore’s Ford lynching was held at the bridge.
