"TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS"- The NY Daily News Has the Pics

A few weeks ago we submitted to the "Spade In The Dark Loam" Page section of this blog an item we filed under Harry S. Truman's greatest Hits - An intro to the Report- To Secure These Rights - he commissioned on the current state of civil rights in the country ( the America of December, 1946). We thought it pertinent and timely anent the current state of affairs in the America of 2015. A reminder of how far we have (not) come. The report included the horror story that was reported online today - Feb. 17, 2015 -in the New York Daily News about a young Black man named Roger Malcolm- The News spells it Malcom- who had been arrested for allegedly stabbing a white farmer- who in the Commission's report is described as Malcolm's employer but is not in the News story. 

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FBI questions elderly Georgia man in connection with unsolved 1946 lynching at Moore’s Ford Bridge Charlie Peppers, 86, claims federal agents grilled him about the long-unsolved killing of four black sharecroppers in Georgia, the Guardian reported. 

BY DOYLE MURPHY  

 

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

 

Published: Monday, February 16, 2015, 5:43 PM

Updated: Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 7:50 AM

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 Anyway, a guy named Loy Harrison, another white farmer and is described in the News story as Mr. Malcolm's employer, posted bond on July 20, 1946, for his release from the Monroe, GA jail. Not only that but this Mr. Harrison offered to drive Mr. Malcolm and his wife, Dorothy, and his brother-in-law, a war veteran named George Dorsey and his wife, Mary, Roger's sister- in the News story she is Mae Murray,  home. Outside of Monroe, at a place called Moore's Ford Bridge a mob stopped the car. The News- in need of better editors- mis- led with four young men being lynched but of course in the body of the story we learn that it was two couples who were slaughtered. The center of the News story is an 86 year-old who is currently being questioned by the FBI about this incident and of course he is denying everything and thinks the FBI is persecuting him. Boy, if I had a nickel, eh? But what we found of interest is how the President's Commission reported the atrocity:

"At a bridge along the way a large group of unmasked white men, armed with pistols and shotguns was waiting.They stopped Harrison's car and removed Malcolm and Dorsey. As they were leading the two away, Harrison later stated, one of the women called out the name of a member of the mob. Thereupon the lynchers returned and removed the two women from the car. Three volleys of shots were fired as if by a squad of professional executioners. The coroner's report said that at least sixty bullets were found in the scarcely recognizable bodies. Harrison consistently denied that he could identify any of the unmasked murderers. State and federal grand juries reviewed the evidence in the case, but no person has yet been indicted for the crime."

We learn in the Daily News story that the FBI has been working on this case for some time. But what I find so disheartening - if thats the word- is : didn't anyone back then ask whose name it was that one of the women called out? Harrison says he didn't recognize any of the unmasked white men- but he must have heard the name being called out. 

This is one of those unsolved horror stories that will continue to arise from time to time as well it should as America too slowly and hesitantly confronts its past and for what its worth- its present. This very story was once featured on NPR who interviewed the author of a book on this very subject.  Laura Wexler's Fire in a Canebrake, is about the lynching at Moore's Ford Bridge. It was published about 12 years ago and although the author doesn't solve the case the revelations she does uncover are more about us than we probably want to know. In her interview (online, of course) with NPR she is asked:

Q: How disappointed were you, at the end of these years of investigating this, that you weren't able to solve it?

Well, I knew that it wasn't probable, but I knew it was possible. Several years into my research when I had the small miracle of getting a portion of the FBI's original investigative report, uncensored, I thought, This is it; these are the names of the suspects that have never been made public. I literally took that report and put it next to the local phone directory and looked for the names. At first I was so delighted because I found a lot of the names of the suspects. I went to the houses only to realize that the widows were continuing to list their phone number as their husband's name. Their wives were still living in the very same places where they were in 1946.

I did find two men who were suspects in 1946 that were still living and I was able to interview them, to confront them, to basically ask them the same questions that the FBI had asked fifty years before.

Q: And?

And they said almost word for word the very same things they said in 1946. It was remarkable to me and then I thought, in a way, it's a script. This was their story and they were sticking to it. That's one of the remarkable things about this lynching. Fifty-seven years later, the silence still holds. Nobody's cracked. To me, that demonstrates the power of racism. The power of racism to distort and to destroy a community's and individual's ability to tell the truth.

Make that 69 years and counting.

The Spade In The Dark Loam

Jan. 25, 2015

Once upon another time:

(From Harry S. Truman's Greatest Hits)

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Assignment from the President
MR. PRESIDENT:
This is the report which we have prepared in accordance with the instructions which you gave to us in your statement and Executive Order on December 5, 1946:

Freedom From Fear is more fully realized in our country than in any other on the face of the earth. Yet all parts of our population are not equally free from fear. And from time to time, and in some places, this freedom has been gravely threatened. It was so after the last war, when organized groups fanned hatred and intolerance, until, at times, mob action struck fear into the hearts of men and women because of their racial origin or religious beliefs.