During the late afternoon of the 25th of July 1946 four African-Americans were shot dead by a lynch mob at Moore's Ford, Walton county, Georgia, about eight miles from the town of Monroe. "The grotesquely sprawled bodies of the victims--the Coroner said at least sixty bullets were pumped into them--were found in a clump of bushes beside a little used side road...The uper parts of the bodies were scarcely recognizable from the mass of bullet holes." The victims were Roger Malcom, aged 24, Dorothy Malcom, aged 20, George Dorsey, a World War II hero, aged 28, and Mae Murray Dorsey, aged 23. Four factors contributed greatly to the Moore's Ford lynching. The first and most important of these was a wide-spread, accepted ideology that members of the white race were better than African-Americans; indeed, that African-Americans were subhuman. The second factor was the threat of competition. In 1846, for the first time, African-Americans could vote in the formerly all-white, Georgia Democratic primary. The third factor was the white racist Eugene Talmadge. His rabid 1946 campaign for governor undoubtedly set the stage for the lynching at Moore's Ford. The fourth factor was the "triggering event"; namely, Roger Malcom's fight with a white man named Barney Hester. And, of course, there were other pernicious forces at work in this case, forces of a more personal nature. Dorothy Malcom's unborn child was also lynched at Moore's Ford.
