Moore’s Ford Bridge Lynchings: FBI May Have Suspects, 70 Years Later

The FBI is “closing in” on KKK members who tied two black couples to a tree, cut a baby out of a pregnant woman’s stomach, and then shot the men and women to death – 70 years ago. In the summer of 1946, the two married couples were murdered near the Moore’s Ford Bridge in Georgia.

Dorothy Malcom who was seven months’ pregnant when KKK members allegedly cut her unborn baby out of her stomach with a knife. World War II veteran George W. Dorsey, his wife Mae Dorsey, Roger Malcom, and his wife Dorothy were reportedly attacked by a “gang of white men” believed to be Ku Klux Klan members. The couples were shot approximately 60 times.

Then President Harry Truman tasked the FBI to investigate the horrific crime. The FBI agents were reportedly met with a “wall of silence” when reviewing the crime scene and talking to potential witnesses.

A recently launched investigation has reportedly unearthed the names of KKK members suspected of being involved in the slayings. The suspected Ku Klux Klan killers are now reportedly in their eighties and nineties. The Equal Justice Initiative investigation launched earlier this month produced names of potential suspects. Supporters of the new lead have urged the FBI to seek justice for the victims before it is too late to try and incarcerate the suspects.
Loy Harrison, a white farmer, was reportedly driving the two black couples home after they finished sharecropping work on his farm. There were allegedly rumors going around the Georgia town that George Dorsey was having a secret affair with a white woman.

The folks in the town were allegedly angry with Roger Malcolm over a supposed knife fight with a white farmer 11 days earlier. Malcolm was in jail until Loy Harrison paid the $600 bail required to get him out from behind bars. An 86-year-old from Monroe, Georgia has reportedly been questioned about his possible involvement in the Georgia lynchings. He denies both being a KKK member and having anything to do with the quadruple murder.

The FBI believes that when Harrison’s truck neared the crossing by the bridge a “white mob” grabbed the two black couples, dragged them down a nearby trail, and tied them to trees. The alleged KKK members reportedly used rifles, shotguns, and pistols to fire a multitude of bullets into the four Georgia sharecroppers. Their bodies were left, slumped in the dirt and covered in blood.

There were reportedly 3,959 lynchings of black people in the South between 1877 and 1950 – a higher estimate that previously reported via federal agency statistics. The Moore Ford Memorial Committee re-enacts the murder scene every year to keep the attention on the unsolved crime and to honor the victims.

[Image via: Southern Spaces/Georgia State University/Atlanta Journal Constitution 1946]