Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Three days after the outbreak, when a measure of calm had returned to Columbia and the troopers and guardsmen had been pulled out, another crisis erupted as local law-enforcement officials were questioning three of the black men in custody. According to the official police account given later, two of the prisoners suddenly grabbed guns from the patrolmen and started shooting. Both men were quickly struck down dead, and a third was seriously injured. The other prisoners firmly believed the men had been murdered in retaliation for the wounding of the white officers.

  The papers were full of all this, not just in Columbia and Nashville (where the blame was put on “outside agitators” and “Communists”), but in New York, Washington, and elsewhere. The U.S. Attorney General called a federal grand jury to investigate, but the all-white panel of Tennesseans concluded that the law-enforcement officials had not violated anyone’s civil rights. The legal maneuvering that followed over the next seven months produced several strange twists: Twenty-five blacks were tried for attempted murder of the Columbia policemen, but an all-white jury in another town where the trial had been moved found twenty-three of them not guilty, and the other two were later freed while seeking a new trial; most of the other defendants, including the Stephensons and a few whites, were never tried; and only one person—a black man accused of shooting at a state trooper—actually served a sentence. Perhaps the most significant message to come out of the Columbia incident was this: Besieged black citizens had stood up and fought back, and lived to tell about it.

  As the long and emotional conflict drew to a close in November 1946, Thurgood Marshall and his fellow attorneys, Looby and Weaver, had one more close call. Driving out of Columbia for the last time, they were trailed by eight policemen in three cars. Twice the lawyers were stopped for alleged violations and then allowed to continue; when they were pulled over a third time, Marshall was accused of drunken driving and arrested. The cops drove away with him—not back toward town, but down a side road. Looby and Weaver followed, fearing the worst. The convoy took a long and circuitous route through the countryside, eventually ending up at a magistrate’s office back in Columbia, where the charges were dropped. The three lawyers then sought help from their friends in Columbia and were escorted safely back to Nashville. Marshall would never know whether his abductors had intended to harass and terrorize the trio—or whether they had lost their nerve and finally decided not to kill him.

  As murderous as the first two months of 1946 were, they would seem almost tame in comparison with a four-week stretch in July and August, when no less than a dozen black men met with violent death in the Deep South. A gang of whites lynched Leon McTatie near Lexington, Mississippi, for stealing a saddle—and then found out after he was dead that someone else had taken it. Maceo Snipes, a veteran, was murdered in Butler, Georgia, soon after he became the first black registered voter in Taylor County. In Eatonton and Gordon, Georgia, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in Bailey, North Carolina, and Elko, South Carolina, white men driven by rage or fear or some other base emotion committed homicide with the slightest provocation, or none at all.

  An epidemic of random murder and mayhem was sweeping like a fever through the region, fueled by white fears that black veterans might become a revolutionary force, and that blacks in general would no longer stay “in their place.” It would be too much to suggest that a massive conspiracy to drive out or eliminate the African-American minority was lurking in the postwar South. No such master plan was necessary; fear and ignorance were enough to loose the vigilante mobs.

  According to the Tuskegee statistics, six lynchings occurred in the South in 1946—but more than four times that many unlawful deaths with racial overtones were widely reported in the newspapers. To these could be added the many unconfirmed racial homicides, the narrowly averted lynchings, the mysterious deaths of men in jails and prisons, and the riot situations where death was somehow dodged (as when forty black draftees were arrested and beaten in Columbus, Georgia, in April, or when a racial fight between a few veterans in Athens, Alabama, in August escalated into an assault on several dozen blacks by a mob of more than two thousand whites). Even some reportedly accidental deaths were of sinister origin: A Ku Klux Klan cell in Atlanta boasted of kidnapping and running over a black cabdriver “to punish him” for picking up a white fare; the man’s death had been reported as a hit-and-run accident.

  Georgia and Alabama were the principal killing fields, each with seven of the confirmed racial murders in 1946. It was no coincidence that they led the nation in the overall number of homicides per 100,000 of population that year—Georgia with 25.3, Alabama with 24.4 (New York, by contrast, had 3.6). Georgia was also the scene of the most shocking racial crime of the summer—the ambush and execution in broad daylight of two young men (one an army veteran) and their common-law wives (one of them pregnant) by a band of about two dozen unmasked white men.

  The two couples, in their twenties, were tenant farmers in the Cotton Belt of Walton County, east of Atlanta. Roger and Dorothy Malcom lived and worked on a farm owned by Bob Hester southeast of Monroe, the county seat; George and Mae Dorsey lived northeast of town and worked for Loy Harrison, one of the largest cotton growers in the area. George Dorsey was Dorothy Malcom’s brother. On Sunday, July 14, an altercation on the Hester property ended badly for Roger Malcom and the farm owner’s son, Barney Hester. Some said Barney was trying to break up a fight between Roger and Dorothy; others claimed Barney had a sexual interest in the young woman, who was expecting a baby in the fall. Whatever the case, Roger and Barney ended up in a scuffle, Barney was stabbed with a pocketknife, and the two men were subsequently taken away, one to the hospital, the other to jail.

  It happened that Georgia Democrats were choosing a candidate for governor the next week, and old warrior Eugene Talmadge was trying to regain the office after losing it to Ellis Arnall four years earlier. Talmadge campaigned in Monroe on the eve of the primary, just two days after the incident. He told a courthouse crowd that even though a federal judge was allowing some colored people to vote, “if I’m your governor, they won’t vote in our white primary the next four years.” Whispers of a lynching party for Roger Malcom were in the air, but Talmadge took no public note of them; before he left town, though, he had a talk with Barney Hester’s father and others upset about the stabbing. (In Walton County the next day, Talmadge squeezed past the Arnall candidate, James Carmichael, by 2,201 to 2,123 votes, and thus claimed total victory there under the notoriously inequitable Georgia “county unit” system; Carmichael won the popular vote statewide, but lost the election—and immediately, political power began to shift away from the reformers and back to the reactionary Talmadge faction.)

  A week passed. Barney Hester was recovering but still in the hospital; Roger Malcom, fearing a lynch mob, was still in jail, unable to make bond. Loy Harrison had been asked by Dorothy Malcom and her parents, who also worked for the planter, to help get Roger out of trouble. On Thursday, July 25, Harrison picked up George and Mae Dorsey and Dorothy Malcom and drove to the jail in Monroe. After talking with the prisoner, he said he was going to put up the bond and get him out. Telling the three tenants he had some business to attend to, Harrison left them outside the jail. As soon as he returned, Roger Malcom was released; the two black couples climbed into Harrison’s car with him, and they started for his farm, twelve miles out the Athens highway, across the Apalachee River in Oconee County.

  It was then five-thirty in the afternoon, and the sun was still high in the summer sky. Near the river, Harrison turned off the highway onto a winding dirt road that went past the Dorseys’ house, across an old wooden bridge at a spot called Moore’s Ford, and eventually on to the Harrison plantation. But he didn’t stop to let the Dorseys out at home; he drove on to the bridge. There on the other side, the men were gathered, waiting.

  In his account to the authorities later on, Harrison spoke as a helpless witness. He said the way was blocked and the men, none of whom he recognized, held him at gunpo
int. They took the two black men out of the car and started for the woods. One of the women, said Harrison, called out to a man she recognized and pleaded for her husband’s life—whereupon the leader of the mob told the others to bring the women too. With awful suddenness, he said, the four young people were lined up and shot—and then the men got back in their cars and drove away. Harrison told how he “got a hold of myself” and went to call the sheriff and report the crime.

  News of the massacre at Moore’s Ford swept like a fire across the state and the nation. Governor Arnall expressed his humiliation and offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to arrests. An outraged President Truman and his attorney general, Tom Clark, promised the full cooperation of the Department of Justice. The NAACP sent its own investigators to Monroe, and so did other groups. “The mark of the beast, the curse of Cain, is upon those men [the killers],” declared Ralph McGill in his column. “And it is on the State as well.” The Walton County sheriff called for help from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI was also asked to assist in the case.

  Local ministers, expressing shock and shame, called the crime “an outrage against humanity.” Even Eugene Talmadge, during whose six years as governor fourteen lynchings had been committed, told the press that “such incidents are to be regretted”—but he added a gratuitous remark about the unfitness of black people for equal rights in Southern society. (Those very rights were demanded in one of the many letters of protest carried by the Atlanta Constitution in the weeks following the lynching; it was signed by a rising junior at Morehouse College, seventeen-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.)

  All through the remainder of 1946, the story stayed in the news. FBI agents swarmed over the county; more than a dozen of them worked out of a hotel in Monroe for six months. A federal grand jury hearing was ordered, and more than a hundred witnesses were called. (One of them, a young black man, was brutally beaten after giving testimony.) At one point, Governor Arnall told the press that investigators had identified fifteen to seventeen members of the lynch mob, but were having difficulty “getting evidence to convict them.” Walter White said the NAACP gave the FBI and the GBI “evidence naming seven ringleaders of the lynching party.”

  Finally, though, no one was ever charged with the crime, and no case was brought against any suspects. “The best people in town won’t talk about this,” complained the head of the GBI. A reign of terror had silenced everyone, white and black; not even rewards that eventually totaled close to $100,000 were enough to bring any witness forward.

  But one person who did see what happened on that terrible day at Moore’s Ford could never shake the memory of it—and in the fullness of time, he would speak up. Clinton Adams was a ten-year-old white boy whose family also farmed for Harrison and lived near George and Mae Dorsey. The boy liked Dorsey, and the ex-GI proved to be a good friend and neighbor to the Adamses, often helping with chores and such. Clinton Adams had a chore of his own that day—to take a cow out to pasture—and he was crossing a field near Moore’s Ford when he heard screams and shouts coming from over near the bridge. He ran to the edge of the woods and then crouched low, crawling closer, to within about a hundred feet of the cars and the shouting, screaming people.

  In hushed fright, the youngster saw the men subdue his friend George Dorsey, tying his hands and hitting him with their guns. Dorsey’s wife and sister were screaming hysterically—Clinton could see them clearly, and recognized both of them. The white men roughly pushed and dragged the four blacks along a path beside the river—and then, Clinton Adams remembered, “these guys just walked up behind them and shot them. There were four shooters initially.” When the victims fell to the ground, most of the men in the mob “just stood over them, shooting into the bodies.” And when it was over, Adams recalled, “they just walked back up to the road, talking and laughing.”

  The traumatized youngster ran home in a fearful trance. A few days later, he confided to a deputy sheriff that he knew who did the killing, but the officer warned him never to speak of it again to anyone. Adams tried to forget, but he couldn’t—and neither could others who knew he had seen the crime. Finally, when he was twenty-one, he moved away from Walton County after being threatened and told that he “made people nervous.”

  Thirty-five more years would pass before the once-youthful witness could bring himself to break his silence. In 1992, Clinton Adams, fifty-six years old and in failing health, would come forward voluntarily to tell his awful secret to the FBI and the Atlanta Constitution, so he could “get it off my conscience.” One of the five automobiles at the murder scene, he said, was a state police car. He named four of the men (all since dead) who took part in the massacre; one of them was Loy Harrison: “Lord knows, I saw him shoot.”

  In 1981, on a return visit to Walton County, Adams had gone to see Loy Harrison and found him willing to talk freely about the crime. The subject of the Dorsey family came up. “I told him I didn’t understand why they had killed George and Dorothy,” Clinton Adams remembered. “They always worked hard. They were good people. And he said, ‘Let me tell you something about them you don’t know. Up until George went in the army, he was a good nigger. But when he came out, they thought they were as good as any white people.’ That’s what Loy told me. It was civil rights that got them killed.”

  The inability of prosecutors—local, state, or federal—to bring racist criminals to justice was a problem that would frustrate reformers and plague the South for many years to come. Two more sensational atrocities—one in Louisiana less than two weeks after the Walton massacre, and the other in South Carolina the following February—increased the pressure on Congress and the states to protect the basic civil liberties of ordinary citizens.

  At Minden, Louisiana, in Webster Parish, thirty miles east of Shreveport, army veteran John C. Jones, twenty-eight, and his seventeen-year-old cousin, Albert Harris, were accused of prowling in the backyard of a white woman. Though the woman would not press charges, the police jailed the two black men anyway. Jones had been tagged as “an uppity nigger” by some local whites after he suggested that unfair advantage was being taken of his grandfather in a land-rental deal. The ex-soldier also had rebuffed a man who coveted a war souvenir Jones had brought back from overseas.

  Jones and Harris were held without charges for several days. Then, on the night of August 8, a jailer unlocked their cell and said they were free to go. Suspicious of an ambush, they refused to leave, whereupon several law officers threw them out. As soon as they landed on the street outside the jail, a band of armed white men grabbed the two prisoners and shoved them into waiting cars. On a seldom-traveled country road a short time later, the mob pistol-whipped Albert Harris and tossed him in a ditch, apparently thinking he was dead. Harris was the lucky one; John Jones was tortured to the point of death, viciously mutilated with a meat cleaver and a blowtorch, and left to die in horrible pain.

  Harris, regaining consciousness after the assailants had gone, heard his cousin’s agonized moans and crawled to him, but Jones was soon dead. The terrified teenager somehow found his way home. His father, on hearing what had happened, drove the boy that same night to medical attention and safety at a relative’s house in Arkansas. Later, after taking a beating for not revealing where his son was, the father went into hiding with the boy. Back home in Webster Parish, meanwhile, the remains of John C. Jones, too badly butchered for his wife and child to gaze upon, were dressed in his corporal’s khakis and placed in a closed, flag-draped casket for burial.

  The federal district attorney for north Louisiana, Malcolm Lafargue, asked the FBI to investigate the incident. In September the Webster Parish grand jury met in Minden, but refused to return any indictments. Nothing more might have been said or done about the torture-lynching of John Jones and the flight of Albert Harris, had not Walter White of the NAACP finally tracked Harris down and persuaded him to tell his story to U.S. Department of Justice investigators. An aide of White’s escorted Harris and his father to N
ew York from Michigan, where they had been hiding, and White continued with them to Washington. “Never before had we been able to locate an eyewitness who could and would give firsthand evidence of what had taken place during a lynching,” said Walter White later.

  Editor Paul C. Corwin of the Minden Herald complained editorially of “false accusations by outside interests that cries were heard in the rear of the jail and a gathering of men seized the two negroes directly after they were released.” He expressed “complete faith in the ability of the local officers” to see that justice was done without help from Washington. But soon thereafter, Albert Harris positively identified five men, including two deputy sheriffs, Charles M. Edwards and Oscar H. Haynes, Jr., as participants in the lynch mob. Lafargue was then able to get a federal grand jury to indict the five men, and in February 1947 he brought them to trial in Shreveport.

  The Minden paper didn’t report on the proceedings, but the Shreveport Times gave extensive coverage. Lafargue, a veteran prosecutor and son of a Louisiana judge, skillfully laid out what he felt was a foolproof case against the defendants, but as the week wore on, he knew instinctively that the jury of twelve white men was not going to return a guilty verdict. Before he left home on Saturday, March 1, Lafargue told his wife that he wanted her and their son to be in the courtroom for the closing arguments later that day.

  A dynamic man in his late thirties, Malcolm Lafargue was a highly respected prosecutor, fair-minded and fearless; in his son’s remembrance years later, he was “an honest, straitlaced, aboveboard man who was not afraid to tangle with anybody.” When he made his presentation to the jury that afternoon, the short, stocky attorney cut to the heart of the matter. The case was in federal court, he said, “because free government and good government were not available in Webster Parish.” The defendants “knew they couldn’t convict the Negroes of a crime—they wanted to beat somebody. … They never intended to give those Negroes a fair trial. Their trial was by ordeal.” The local grand jury had considered the case in September, he declared, “but it didn’t do a cockeyed thing, because it was whitewashed.” Searching the faces of the jurors, Malcolm Lafargue finished: