by Ty Seidule
On June 27, Allen boarded another train handcuffed to two deputized sheriffs. This time, Governor Joseph Brown refused to send soldiers to accompany him. Despite the pleading of Allen’s lawyers, the superior court judge in Monroe, C. H. Brand, told the governor that the trial would be orderly, and Allen required no escort for safety. Sheriff W. B. Stark provided the same assurance. Brand and Stark, however, realized that protecting an African American man accused of assaulting a white woman would harm their reelection prospects. Only white people could vote, after all.
Yet everyone knew a lynching was in the making; the newspapers blared their prediction. The Macon Telegraph, seventy-five miles south of Monroe, reported that “excitement is intense and if the negroes are captured a double lynching is almost certain.”29 Allen’s lawyers told the governor that their client would not make it to trial, but the governor refused to act.30
A little after dawn, the train carrying Tom Allen pulled in to the Social Circle station. Allen never made it to Monroe. A lynch mob of two hundred men lay waiting. The mob stormed the train, searching car by car until they found Allen. After wrenching him from the two marshals, the mob carried Allen two miles north of the city and hanged him from a telephone pole with a heavy-duty plow rope. Once the crowd had him in the air, the leader yelled, “Let him have the lead, boys!” The heavily armed mob shot Allen hundreds of times. The volume of fire was so high the rope broke and the corpse fell to the ground. Unwilling to end the violence despite Allen’s death, the men retied the body back to the pole and started firing again. Passersby described the lynch mob as “orderly.”31
Before the violent rabble left, they pinned notes to the body to ensure that it served as a warning to other African Americans in the community. One sign ordered, “Do not take this body down until 12 o’clock tonight!” A second sign warned African Americans that if they touched a white woman, a similar fate would befall them as well. Perhaps a thousand people read those notes as they bore witness to the brutal execution site. With the sign expressly forbidding souvenir hunters, Walton County citizens took pictures and sold them. Framed photos of Allen’s hanging were placed in downtown businesses. Other pictures became postcards, sent all over the country.32
One dead African American proved insufficient for the lynch mob. That afternoon white men “stormed” the downtown courthouse searching for more Black men to send a clear message to the African Americans in Walton County. They found Joe Watts, a Black man held in jail for “loitering” and “acting suspiciously” around the house of Bud Haw, “a prominent citizen with two young daughters.” Someone in the crowd yelled, “Well, that coon ought to be our meat.” The mob dragged Watts out of the jail and hanged him, riddling his body with bullets. Watts was under no indictment because he had committed no crime.33
Monroe’s leaders had known about and perhaps even planned the lynching. Judge Brand could have prevented the violence if he had requested state assistance. The NAACP’s Crisis magazine reported that Brand had previously refused to ask for troops to stop another lynching, saying, “I am in perfect accord with my conscience and my God. I would not imperil the life of one man to save the lives of a hundred Negroes.”34 Brand had to know the lynching was coming; he abetted the extrajudicial killing of multiple men.
Local papers blared the headline “Walton Runs Red with Blood; Lynchings at Dawn and Noon.” Monroe’s leading citizens felt offended. Not by the lynching and gruesome deaths of African Americans. No. Waltonians decried how the coverage of the lynchings made them look bad. They blamed men from outside Walton County for the crime. The Atlanta Constitution agreed. “The people of Monroe and of the entire county have always been known as the state’s best, most conservative and law-abiding citizens.”35
Like Jim Hanson’s family, neither Watts’s nor Allen’s family could bury their loved one properly. The bodies were shipped to a whites-only medical college in Atlanta. There, the med school kept the corpses in a pickling vat until the students’ dissection course.36
As I started researching the lynchings in Walton County, I became more and more angry, angry with my hometown, angry with myself. The history of lynching is no secret. Historians have recorded every aspect of the violent terror that went on in the South. I remember seeing pictures in a textbook of the stark black-and-white flag flown in New York that stated simply, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” The NAACP flew that flag regularly between 1920 and 1938.
Yet it took me decades to actually make an emotional connection with the victims and the effect of lynching on my communities. Once I started reading, I needed to find every lynching in my hometowns. Yet no account in the mainstream newspapers told the lynching stories from the victims’ point of view. In the Black newspaper the Atlanta Daily World and in The Crisis, I finally found other, more accurate voices to describe the murders.
Two years after Allen’s and Watts’s assassinations, a white farmer in Walton County accused an African American man named General Boyd of having entered his house and “taken hold” of the man’s daughter. The farmer fired his shotgun at an intruder but missed. Stories in newspapers about Black-on-white crime require the suspension of reason. The stories make no sense, except as a form of terror to enforce racial control. The authorities found Boyd, and he was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail for entering a white home.37
With one month left on his sentence, the paper reported that he escaped but was recaptured and sentenced to another year in prison. After his release, having served nearly three years, Boyd went home. Less than a month later, a white posse found him and lynched him. The newspaper described the lynch mob as “a quiet crowd.” The lynch mob’s purpose was to ensure racial domination.38
When I was growing up in Virginia and Georgia, no monuments, plaques, textbooks, or history books ever recognized Allen, Watts, Boyd, or any of the victims of racial terror. When I looked at Walton County’s history, I found an eight-hundred-page book written by Anita Sams in 1967 called Wayfarers in Walton. Sams went into excruciating detail on the history of Walton County’s white families, but not one word on lynching. Instead, all the recognition went to the Confederates, including Robert E. Lee.39
In fact, the Robert E. Lee Chapter of Confederate Veterans emplaced the Confederate monument in front of the Walton County Courthouse in 1906, the same year white vigilante mobs massacred dozens of African Americans in Atlanta during two days of racist violence. In Monroe, a different mob took Joe Watts right by the monument on his path to a gruesome death. Any African American that went into the segregated courthouse would pass the monument to honor those who fought to keep them enslaved.
As the historian Karen Cox has noted, a Confederate monument had the same purpose as lynching: enforce white supremacy. It is no coincidence that most Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, the same period that lynching peaked in the South. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African Americans that they were second-class citizens.40
By the 1930s, lynchings were no longer as common. The NAACP and other organizations fought back. Besides, southern court systems could ensure racial control effectively without the need for as many extrajudicial killings. In 1939, The Walton Tribune reported that a Black man named J. D. Vaughn had assaulted two women on the same day. The paper called it the “worst incident in the history of Walton County.” On May 22, Vaughn was tried and convicted by an all-white jury, and the judge sentenced him to die. Fifty lawmen stood outside the Monroe courthouse in case of trouble. And there was trouble.41
Fifteen hundred white men gathered, determined to lynch Vaughn before the state killed him in the electric chair on July 7. As Vaughn was led out of the courthouse for the return trip to Atlanta, the crowd surged, yelling racial epithets and threatening violence. The state troopers hurled four tear gas bombs to prevent the mob from seizing Vaughn. Despite the huge numbers in the crowd, the sheriff E. J. Gordon downplayed the threat, calling the crowd “irresponsible rowdies who didn’t really mean to
lynch anybody.” He was partially right. The crowd didn’t want to lynch just “anybody”; they wanted to lynch Vaughn, and only the presence of fifty armed troopers and tear gas prevented the mob from blood.42
Capital punishment became the new means of enforcing racial control. Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia was majority white. In the 1910 census, Georgia was 53 percent white and the rest African American. In the 1940 census, Georgia was 65 percent white. The years 1935 and 1945 saw more executions than any other, even more than the high lynching years in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. From July 27, 1939, to March 10, 1942, nearly a thousand days, Georgia executed twenty-eight African American men and not one white man.43
The sustained legal campaign of subjugation, called Jim Crow, plus targeted law enforcement, lack of education resources, and limited economic opportunity, resulted in “the Great Migration.” Starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans left the racial violence and poverty of the South for the industrial cities of the North and West. In 1900, Georgia’s Black population was over 47 percent of the total. By 1970, the figure had dropped to just over 25 percent. In the 1910 census, Walton County recorded 25,393 people. The next time it would reach that level was in the 1980 census, the year I graduated from high school. By then, Walton County benefited from its proximity to a booming Atlanta. The racial terror and Jim Crow laws decreased Georgia’s population and retarded its economic potential for generations. Racism isn’t just morally wrong; it’s economically stupid.44
* * *
AFTER WORLD WAR II, only one mass lynching occurred in the United States, and it happened in my adopted hometown. How could I have not known about it? As a high school student, I knew as little of the history of Monroe as I did of Alexandria. I graduated from George Walton Academy in 1980, and my parents moved away from Monroe that same year, but until recently, I had never heard of the infamous Moore’s Ford lynching, often called the last mass lynching in American history.
On July 25, 1946, a posse of Monroe’s white citizens blocked the one-lane Moore’s Ford Bridge, just east of town. A white farmer, Loy Harrison, had driven from the Monroe jail after bailing out Roger Malcom, an African American laborer. The police had arrested Malcom for stabbing his white boss, Barnette Hester, several days earlier. When it became clear that the wounded white man would survive, Harrison picked Malcom up. White landowners often bailed Black laborers out of jail and forced them to work to pay back the money.
On the drive back, Harrison had four people in the car, Roger Malcom and his wife, Dorothy, and two of the Malcoms’ friends. One friend, George Dorsey, had recently returned to Walton County after serving in North Africa and Australia during World War II. Accompanying Dorsey was his wife, Mae.45
As Harrison stopped for the roadblock, a man came up to his window with a shotgun and ordered him, “Put ’em up!” as the rest of the posse surrounded the car. Harrison claimed he asked the men, “What you all up to? You want my money?”
“No, we just want your coons,” replied the leader of the lynch mob.
Several of the lynchers dragged the two Black men out of the Pontiac and tied their hands behind their backs. Then the abductors dragged them down to the banks of the Apalachee River. Harrison later told investigators that Roger Malcom wailed, “My time done come.” The men’s wives screamed and cursed. Dorothy Malcom shouted, “Don’t take him out! You goddamn sons-of-bitches can’t do this to my husband!” Dorothy recognized one of the men and yelled his name. When that happened, the gang’s leaders barked to three of the men, “You, and you, and you, get those bitches!”46
Harrison told a reporter, “I could see the men line ’em up. I could see the negroes four abreast. I could see the back of the men’s heads. I heard the leader of the group say, ‘One, two, three,’ and then boom! He did that three times. There were three volleys.”
When the coroner arrived, he found four bodies laid out parallel to one another. Dorothy had multiple gunshot wounds, including one that tore off part of her face. One killer had fired a large-caliber bullet from the top of her head down toward her chin at point-blank range. A reporter described George Dorsey’s corpse:
Dorsey, who served more than four years in the European and Pacific theaters of war, fighting to protect the hides of the beasts who lynched him, had a part of one of his ears shot off, one of his eyes shot out, and his body was riddled with bullets and shotgun blasts.47
Roger Malcom, who had been accused of stabbing his white boss, had “the worst punishment” of the four, said one observer. His face had absorbed the full force of a shotgun blast. Several more gunshot wounds, some postmortem, had riddled his body. The African American funeral director who prepared his body for burial said Roger “had as many holes in him as a sifter.” Around his neck, the lynchers tied a ten-foot rope. Although they did not hang Malcom, the fact that they brought a rope shows the murderers meant to cow Walton County’s African Americans.48
The Moore’s Ford lynching in my hometown had all the elements of a terror campaign to enforce white supremacy. Punishment of a breach in social etiquette. Paranoia about Black male sexuality. Enforcement of economic servitude. Violence to prevent Black political equality. And finally, no accountability of the lynchers.
The first victim, Roger Malcom, violated three tenets of white supremacy. First, he seriously injured a white man, his boss, Barnette Hester. Second, he screamed to the man he wounded, “That’s Mister Roger Malcom,” refusing to accept the names most white people called him: “boy” or “coon” or “nigger.” Malcom, on the other hand, would have addressed the white men as “mister” or “boss” but never by only a first or last name. By insisting on the name “Mister,” Roger Malcom was subverting the system of white supremacy and the social cues demanded to enforce a racial hierarchy. Third, the white landowning class demanded that Malcom work as a low-paid laborer without complaint and accept physical and verbal abuse.49
George Dorsey, the other male victim, had upset the hierarchy as well by socializing with white women. One informant claimed Dorsey had bragged about dating white women while in the army. Another rumor held that Dorsey had gone out with white women when he lived up north and promised to do the same back in Georgia. One person claimed he overheard Dorsey saying he “was going to get him some good clothes and ride the buses with white girls.” George’s brother Charlie Boy told the FBI that he had seen George dance with a young white woman and that George later told him he had sex with her. Loy Harrison, the driver at the lynching, threatened Dorsey with a visit from the Ku Klux Klan if he continued to see the white woman.50
Making the situation even more complicated, the Black community told investigators that Barnette Hester had been in a relationship with Dorothy, George’s wife. White men having sex with African American women had been a normal part of the slave and Jim Crow era. Black women had little control over their own bodies, and white men used their economic and social power for sexual exploitation.51
While the situation on the Hester farm remained tense, politics exacerbated the racial tension. The lynching occurred only nine days after an ugly gubernatorial Georgia primary. The white posse meant to send a message to the Black community. Don’t vote. Don’t believe you are equal. Stay in your place. Lynching remained a tool for whites to retain political power.52
The eventual winner of the contest, Eugene Talmadge, didn’t hide his feelings about Black voters. Talmadge, a populist, was the only candidate against what he called “nigger voting.” Only he would defend white supremacy against an overreaching federal government and African Americans who didn’t know their place. Talmadge ran advertisements that called him “the white people’s candidate.” His campaign slogan left no doubt about his platform: “Let’s keep Georgia white.”53
A month before the lynching, Talmadge stopped at the Monroe courthouse t
o give a speech. Standing on a wooden platform built for the event next to the Confederate monument, “Ole Gene” gave the white crowd of nearly six hundred exactly what they wanted. He praised the arch-racist Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo for threatening African Americans if they dared vote. Talmadge pledged to ensure “no mixing of the races” if he was elected. He railed against Supreme Court decisions to end segregation that were “gnawing like termites at the foundations of Southern traditions.” Only Eugene Talmadge could prevent a racial apocalypse of equality in Georgia. The crowd repeatedly interrupted Talmadge with the rebel yell.54
On Election Day, July 17, six days after Malcom stabbed Hester, the polls opened, and while there were more African American registered voters than ever, the Talmadge campaign found ways to suppress the Black vote. “Wise Negroes,” threatened Talmadge, “will stay away from the white folks’ ballot boxes.” The Klan played their part threatening Black voters by tacking leaflets to the doors of Black churches that read, “The first nigger who votes in Georgia will be a dead one.”55
The NAACP’s analysis after the election told the story. “Most Negroes in rural districts were either disqualified or heeding Talmadge’s warning to stay away from the polls, failed to register and vote.”56 In Monroe, almost half of the Black registered voters were challenged and upheld on the day of the vote. In rural Walton County, it was even worse: only sixty African Americans voted. Many other ballots were thrown out as improperly marked. As Boyzie Daniels would later tell the journalist Wes Swietek, “They just threw our ballots in the trash.”57
The former governor and candidate Ed Rivers predicted “that if Eugene Talmadge is elected, there is going to be racial trouble. His election will be interpreted as an open invitation to invoke spleen, passion, hatred, and violence.” Talmadge won, and with the lynching of the Malcoms and the Dorseys, Rivers’s prediction came true. The NAACP echoed Rivers after the lynching: “Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge’s Klan-backed exhortations to mob violence against Negroes bore grim fruit last night.”58 The message of white supremacy enforced through violence was nothing new. The reaction, however, was dramatically different.