Looking behind tragedy at Moore’s Ford bridge

updated 8:01 p.m. ET July 24, 2006

MONROE, Ga. - The dirt road that led to Moore’s Ford bridge is paved now, and the creaky wooden bridge has been replaced with a sleek concrete span. But the black letters “KKK” sprayed on the bridge's face are an eerie reminder of the terrible events that happened here 60 years ago.

Bobby Howard brushes back a leafy tree branch, revealing a half-dozen more racist scribblings. He sniffs his disgust, but he is not surprised. He has long forsaken his personal safety to fight the culture of fear that has suppressed the truth of what took place on the bridge. He still hopes that truth may come out — in a courtroom.

The horror unfolded 60 years ago, on July 25, 1946.

Ruby Butler, who was bunching cotton on a dusty road when she saw cars lined up bumper-to-bumper rattling toward the bridge, recalls: “I thought they were having a party down there. They were having a killing party.”

Across town, white farmer Loy Harrison was driving home two black couples, Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, who was seven months pregnant.

There were whisperings around town that George Dorsey, who had fought in the Army during the war, had secretly been dating a white woman, a taboo in the segregated South. And there was no love lost between the townsfolk and Roger Malcom, who had stabbed a white farmer during a knife fight 11 days earlier.

He was still waiting in jail when Harrison paid $600 to bail him out.

When Harrison’s truck rolled near the crossing, a white mob grabbed the two couples from the vehicle, dragged them down a nearby trail and tied them to trees. Using rifles, shotguns and pistols, the mob fired three volleys of bullets, leaving their bodies behind slumped in the dirt, according to investigators.

Wall of silence
President Harry Truman dispatched the FBI to Monroe, a town about 45 miles east of Atlanta.

The feds, however, were met with a wall of silence.

Harrison, the farmer who claimed he’d been “ambushed” but was unharmed, told investigators he didn’t recognize the dozen or so unmasked assailants. Other whites abided by a code of silence. Black people, too, kept quiet, petrified of reprisal if they spoke out.

Ric Feld / Ap Ruby Butler, 89, talks about the night of the 1946 lynching on the Moore's Ford bridge, at her home in Monroe, Ga., on June 5.

Several suspects were named in the FBI’s 1946 investigation, but, partly due to a lack of witnesses, none was ever charged.

“The best people in town won’t talk,” a frustrated Georgia State Patrol Maj. William Spence was quoted as saying.

Howard, living in nearby Social Circle, was 5 years old when the two couples were lynched. It was as a teenager that he began to question why no one was ever brought to justice in the brazen, public killings at Moore’s Ford.

A ride home from a civil rights rally in 1967, at which Howard had shaken hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., convinced him to try to find answers.

Inspirational moment
On the ride, Dan Young, head of the local NAACP chapter, motioned to Howard to glance out the back window of his car. The moment they had crossed the county line, he said, a car had rolled up behind Young’s vehicle, trailing it.

“People are watching every move I make,” Young said. “That’s why I need someone else helping me.”

Howard swore he would, and made good on his word when he returned to Social Circle. He became a civil rights soldier, pushing back legalized segregation in his small town by banding together a group of young blacks who fought to integrate the school system and city pool.

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