Annual Commemoration of Moore’s Ford Lynchings Scheduled for Saturday

A crowd is again expected to gather in Monroe at noon on Saturday to begin the annual reenactment of the lynchings that happened at Moore’s Ford Bridge 67 years ago.

This will be the ninth year that this reenactment has taken place. It depicts the July 25, 1946 murders of black sharecroppers George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom at Moore’s Ford Bridge on the Walton-Oconee County line. The couples were ambushed after Roger Malcom was bonded out of jail where he’d been held for stabbing a white farmer.

According to the narration of the reenactment, he was the intended target, but when George Dorsey fought to prevent him being taken by the mob, and one of the women recognized someone in the crowd, they were all dragged from the car and murdered. All four were shot multiple times.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, heads up the proceedings each year and has vowed to do so until there is justice in the case. The annual reenactment is intended to keep the focus on the fact that there is still no arrest all these years later.

Brooks, however, brings some controversy to the proceedings since he is under indictment for allegedly misappropriating almost $1 million in charitable funding. Brooks, a long-time Georgia lawmaker, reportedly told WSB that he believes the investigation is in retaliation for his investigation into the Moore's Ford lynching, which remains one of the few unsolved civil rights crimes.

In 2001, former Gov. Roy Barnes commissioned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to re-open the case. In 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation also again became involved and in 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Emmett Till Act allocating funding to help solve crimes such at the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi in 1955 and the Moore's Ford Lynchings.

Saturday’s proceedings begin at noon at the First African Baptist Church, 130 Tyler St., Monroe, which is when the church opens for meditation and prayers. It then moves to the location in Monroe where the old jail was located and eventually to Moore's Ford Road on the Walton-Oconee County Line where the lynchings happened. 

For details visit ga-gabeo.org.