All names of living people have been changed to protect privacy.

Shrieks pierced the air. A mob of armed white men and women yanked two black couples out of a car by their wrists. A noose tightened on one husband’s neck. 

“She’s pregnant!” he pleaded. “You got me. Listen, don’t make them pay for something I’ve done.” 

The group of assailants tied a rope around the other three, ignoring desperate prayers and cries. Gunshots echo in the air. The bodies of Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey slumped to the ground – one lifeless mass after the other.

“Boom!” said director Cathy Gracey, the director of the lynching reenactment. “Complete freeze, remember that… And you stay there until I tell you to move.”

Actors Janie Benedict, Daven Brown, Ken Michael, and Cynthia Chandler resurrected. Thus marked the end of the last rehearsal of the 15th annual reenactment of the Moore’s Ford lynching in Georgia, which takes place on the fourth Saturday of every July. 

On Saturday, July 27, 2019, the Moore’s Ford movement renewed demands for justice for the unresolved lynching at the morning commemoration 73 years after the racial slaying. Even though state and federal investigators have drawn up a list of over 100 suspects over the years, no one was ever indicted in the quadruple killing. 

The lass mass lynching in Georgia took place on July 25, 1946. A white mob shot and killed Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey in Monroe in Walton County, Georgia. Roger Malcolm had been arrested for stabbing his land. The mob cut out Dorothy Malcolm’s seven-month-old unborn child. The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching shocked national audiences at a time when most believed that lynching had passed into historical obscurity.

Horrifying in its brutality––the lynching was one of nearly 600 across the state of Georgia between 1877 to 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal defense nonprofit.

“The Civil War abolished slavery… but we couldn’t seem to make the next steps,” said actor Wallace Reece, who plays former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge.

Remembering a painful past lies at the center of a debate about the best and most appropriate ways to commemorate the Confederacy and legacy of white supremacy in Georgia. Atlanta’s advisory committee has debated whether to move, contextualize, or rename several Confederate statues, monuments, and street names, but the city has yet to take action. In April 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the first national memorial of lynching, called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. On August 23 of that year, Temple Kol Emeth and the Georgia Historical Society rededicated a 2008 marker to commemorate the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man named Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. Nevertheless, the first lynching memorial in the country had already opened in 2000 in the northern state of Minnesota, where historians have recorded only one lynching. The South, meanwhile, saw thousands of lynchings, many of which were never recorded.

The physical representation of such a traumatic history, however, remains deeply controversial throughout the nation among people of all races. 

“It’s not something I need to visually be reminded of,” said Rob Leonard, 52, of Illinois, while touring the more palatable King Center, a memorial park and educational center in downtown Atlanta. “A lynching center represents a violent conflict.”

But, as others believe, without active engagement with the past and acknowledging the truth of history, victorious or shameful, people risk overlooking or diluting racial violence in the South. Remembering that history means confronting a raw reality, said Reeves, the actor. 

“[People] are all tanked up on that moonlight and magnolias nonsense,” Reece said. “People need to stop living in this fantasy land that has been packaged to us by the media and Hollywood.”

As a young white boy in the South and the son of a preacher, Reece lived in an environment of silence around the racism that he believes was imbedded in the history of the South.

“I was raised up on the Civil War, or as my dad used to say, the war of Northern aggression,” said Reece. “But I’ll tell you, he was not quite as backward as you might think. If you asked him what the cause was, he’d look you in the eye and say, ‘the expansion of slavery.’ So he wasn’t a fool, but he did go along to get along. And that’s the guilty secret. It’s not that folks didn’t know any better. It’s that folks did know better and they stood silent or they looked the other way.”

Civil rights leaders exalted in history books often faced arrest, threats, and violent opposition. The leader of the movement to commemorate the Moore’s Ford lynching, former Georgia House of Representatives member Andrew Bradford, has received backlash as a result of his activism. As a child, Bradford remembers attending workshops in his high school years with leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., such as Dorothy Cotton.

“Dorothy Cotton would say, ‘Children, if you’re afraid to die just go home,’” said Bradford. “She would hold up these newspaper headlines and say, ‘Well, you see this civil rights worker was killed in Mississippi. Here’s one in Alabama. Here’s some in Florida. Here’s South Carolina. Here’s Georgia. If you don’t want to be in these headlines, you might as well go home, just relax, and we won’t be mad with you because you don’t have to give your life to the movement.’”

Bradford grew up in a culture of self-sacrifice and learned to see civil rights activism as a matter of life-and-death. Civil rights activist Hosea Williams had assigned him to the Moore’s Ford case in 1968. The undertaker who had buried the Malcolms and Dorseys in Monroe, Dan Young, took Bradford into the basement of his funeral home and introduced him to the story of Moore’s Ford through photographs of the families. Young warned Bradford of the dangers of conducting such work in the Deep South.

“[Young] said, ‘You’re in Monroe, Georgia, but you’re in the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Did you drive over here alone?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Don’t you ever drive here by yourself. If they recognize who you are, they will lynch you and you will be just like those people in those photographs.’”

To this day, Bradford still receives threats from people for his activism. “I used to get an awful lot of hate through phone calls to me, my office, hate mail, hard mail,” Bradford said. “Now we get sophisticated emails and social media [messages].”

In addition to threats from people in towns across the South, federal and judicial barriers stand in the way of the movement’s search for justice for the Dorseys and Malcolms. Over the past few decades, the investigations into the people responsible for the murder of the two couples have gone cold. President Harry Truman ordered the FBI to conduct the first investigation in 1946, right after the lynching. The case was reopened in 2000 but closed again after the investigation proved inconclusive. Then at Brooks’s request, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes ordered the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to reopen the investigation in 2017. About a year later, the agency closed the case again on the account that all suspects had died. A 564-page investigative report released by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that investigators made little progress due to the wall of silence that they encountered from the residents of Monroe. 

To this day, many activists involved in the reenactment say that resistance persists in Monroe and other cities of the South. Brown, the actor of Roger Malcolm, said that the Ku Klux Klan appeared in Monroe one year during the reenactment.

“A few people that actually live there told us that [Moore’s Ford] is something that a lot of the residents don’t want to address,” said Benedict, the actress who plays Dorothy Malcolm. “It’s not like here in Atlanta... You still could see that there was still a little friction.”
Greene was hesitant when Brooks approached her with the offer to direct the reenactment because she had an encounter with white supremacists in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Given the South’s persistent problem with discrimination in voter registration and mass incarceration, Greene still decided to tell the story of the young couples, who were avid advocates for the right for black people to vote in a time when white intimidation kept black people out of voting booths.

“Doing the Moore’s Ford lynching is so important to me because voter registration and voter suppression was part of the reason why the Malcolms and the Dorseys were lynched in 1946,” she said into the microphone. “I don’t ever want us to get so comfortable that we believe that we've arrived in this country. And if we look at everything that we’re seeing, we know that we have not arrived. We have not even gotten close to arriving.”

In order for progress to occur in the present, said Gracey, our institutions must acknowledge past wounds. New developments in the Moore’s Ford case have given the movement hope; on Oct. 22, 2019, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear a case to release the Grand Jury trial transcripts from the original 1946 federal investigation. To announce their next plan of action, the Moore’s Ford movement held a roundtable panel at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference a week before the reenactment, on July 20.

Still, the court’s final decision may be long in waiting. The release of the transcripts would take the movement one step closer to addressing the full effects of the history of lynching in the current judicial, social, and political landscape, one step in a centuries-old journey. The current political climate, said many activists, may hinder historical reconciliation and anti-discrimination efforts. On the panel stage, Gracey took the microphone.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to read something and if I cry, forgive me,” she began.

A friend of Gracey’s from Alabama sent her a post from a few days earlier. Her friend’s story seemed relevant; dramatic public lynchings are not as common as they were but the hatred undergirding racial violence, she said, seems as present today as it did the day the two couples were killed by a white mob.

“‘Right now, less than seven miles from my house, and for the next thirty miles, are Trump 2020 flags alongside the [Confederate] Rebel flag being flown on trucks, houses, and businesses,’” Gracey read. “‘The last time the Rebel flags were flown this much, my old school principal canceled prom because my aunt was there with a white guy. He called her a mistake.’”