Vol. 78/No. 16      April 28, 2014

Participants in the action also demanded the reopening of the case of a Black youth, Kendrick Johnson, whose suspicious death last year was ruled an accident by a coroner in Valdosta.

“What happened here was a travesty, and it’s being continued by the authorities,” said Pamela Stevenson, a caregiver. “It’s just not believable that no one knows who committed these killings.”

“The true history of America needs to be told,” said Robert Howard, 72, who began working on the Moore’s Ford lynching case in 1961. “When I was growing up, the case wasn’t to be talked about. There was a circle of fear around it. Why hasn’t somebody been arrested after all these years?”

According to Associated Press reports in 1946, two Black couples, Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, were killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob at the Moore’s Ford Bridge on July 25 that year.

Some 20 Klansmen ambushed the couples as they were being driven by Loy Harrison, a prominent white farmer, who had bailed Roger Malcolm out of jail an hour earlier. Malcolm was charged with stabbing his employer Barney Hester, another white farmer.

Harrison reported that the vigilante mob, armed with shotguns, forced all five from the car and then separated Harrison from the group. The two couples were bound and taken a short distance into the woods where they were repeatedly shot. Harrison was released after swearing to the mob that he could not recognize any of them.

The head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at the time his agency believed the lynching had been planned from the moment of Malcolm’s arrest. The Militant noted in its Aug. 3, 1946, issue that Malcolm was not released until three hours after posting bail, giving the lynchers time to prepare.

“It looks like a state case,” the FBI said in a 1946 statement explaining why it did not plan to investigate.

It wasn’t until last year that the first witness came forward when Wayne Watkins said he heard family members, at least one of whom was a Klansman, boast about the killing. He gave a recorded interview with officials of the NAACP and Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials in which he said he knows who the killers are, some of whom are still alive.

Watkins has since stopped talking. Ed Dubose, former president of the Georgia NAACP, and Tyrone Brooks, president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, said they had turned over Watkins’ statements to the Justice Department and would soon request the case be looked at by the judiciary committee in Congress.

“We won’t stop marching. We won’t stop rallying until there is justice for our son,” Kenneth Johnson said standing at the Moore’s Ford Bridge.

On Jan. 11, 2013, his 17-year-old son, Kendrick Johnson, was found dead inside a rolled up gym mat at Lowndes High School in Valdosta. The medical examiner’s report said Johnson had no significant wounds and speculated that he had gotten trapped inside the mat while attempting to retrieve a pair of gym shoes. The report ruled the death “accidental suffocation.”

But a pathologist hired by the Johnson family said he found blood hemorrhaging underneath the skin around the youth’s jaw and neck and concluded the cause of death was a blunt force trauma near the carotid artery.

Susan LaMont contributed to this article.
 
 
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