Q & A with Laura Wexler, author of
Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in Amercia


1. What drew you, a 30-year-old white woman from the North, to write about a quadruple lynching that occurred in 1946?

I was drawn to the story at the outset by the possibility of uncovering information and evidence that would solve the crime. Because there is no statute of limitations on murder, and because I suspected some of the lynchers were still alive, I really believed getting justice was possible.


2. After four years of investigating the lynching, you weren't able to solve the crime. Do you believe your efforts to get justice were in vain?

When I started investigating the lynching, I fantasized about stumbling across one of the murder weapons, or knocking on one of the lynchers' doors at just the moment he was looking to unburden his conscience. I still dream about that stuff. But I've also realized that there are different kinds of justice, and that publishing a complete and truthful account about a brutal event that had been buried by a "careful forgetting" is a kind of justice. Now there's a public and concrete record. Names have been named. Not to be grandiose, but after I let go of the hope of solving the crime, I started to see myself less as Nancy Drew, and more as a one-person Truth and Reconciliation Committee.


3. You said that some of the lynchers are probably still alive. Were you ever threatened?

Some folks were clearly not pleased to open their front door and see me on their doorstep, and they said so. One white man told me, "This lynching is like a pile of dog crap. The best thing to do is bury it and go on." Another man accused me of being an undercover FBI agent. I did confront two men whom the FBI named as suspects in the lynching in 1946. It was eerie talking with them, but not frightening.


4. How were you able to track down suspects from the 1946 investigation?

Through a miracle known as an uncensored copy of the FBI's investigative report from the lynching. The report names all of the suspects in the lynching. I looked the suspects' names up in the current phone directories for Walton and Oconee counties, and then went to their houses. All but two of the suspects had died-I ended up talking with a lot of widows.

Almost as important as the suspects' names, the FBI report contains innumerable details--ages, physical descriptions, dialogue-that allowed me to write Fire in a Canebrake novelistically. The Moore's Ford lynching is a historical event, but it's also an exciting and moving story about flesh and blood people, and I wanted the book to be an emotional as well as cerebral experience.


5. What incited the lynching on July 25, 1946?

The most obvious "reason" for the lynching was to "punish" one of the victims, Roger Malcom, who had stabbed and seriously wounded a white man eleven days earlier. It was generally agreed that Roger Malcom was the mob's target-the other three victims were simply "in the wrong place at the wrong time." However, based on information gained from the FBI report and my extensive interviews, I uncovered a reason for the lynching that's remained largely hidden until now.


6. The four victims of the Moore's Ford lynching were shot to death. Weren't lynchings always hangings?

A lynching is a murder committed by a mob without legal sanction. While the most powerful images of lynching in the American mind are those in which the victims were hung and tortured before a massive crowd, twentieth-century lynchings were more often private affairs in which a group of white men shot or beat to death black people from the same community, then threw the bodies in a river or creek. Though exact statistics on lynching are unavailable, it's fair to say that at least 3,000 black Americans have died at the hands of lynch mobs. After July 25, 1946, the day of the Moore's Ford lynching, there have never been as many victims lynched in America on a single day.


6. Why did the Moore's Ford lynching receive so much attention in 1946?

The fact that two of the victims were women, and one was a WWII veteran who'd returned from overseas duty only ten months before he was lynched, fueled outrage nationwide. But it was also the brutality of the murder-the sheer number of gunshots each victim suffered-that generated the sustained public outcry. In the early days after the lynching, telegrams arrived at the White House at the rate of one every two minutes. President Truman was so horrified by the murders-and the fact that they remained unsolved even after a four-month FBI investigation-that in late 1946 he appointed the President's Committee on Civil Rights, taking an important step toward creating a national civil rights platform.


7. Twenty FBI agents worked the case in 1946. Why weren't they able to solve it?

The FBI faced three major challenges in trying to solve the Moore's Ford lynching: there was almost no physical evidence, almost no cooperation from witnesses, and not a single confession. It's been more than a half-century since the crime, and still no one involved in it has cracked. The secrecy is powerful.


8. After the FBI's failure to solve the crime, what happened in the community where the lynching occurred?

Immediately after the FBI left, the white people in the area set about to erase the lynching, omitting it from the official county histories and hoping it wouldn't be "brought back up." Most black people also resolved never to talk about the lynching in public or with white people-since one didn't know who was in the mob, talking to any white person about the lynching was risky. But, among themselves, black people continued to tell their stories of the lynching. And in this way, they kept it from being erased. Every time a story about the lynching was told, it was a statement of the fact that four young black people had been murdered by a mob of white men at Moore's Ford.


9. In 1991, a white man named Clinton Adams came forward claiming he'd witnessed the lynching as a child. I understand your book raises doubts about the accuracy of his account.

Clinton Adams offered closure to a story that had never had a satisfying ending, and I suspect that's why so many people accepted his account without rigorously investigating it-he was on Oprah and Dateline, and was commended by the Georgia General Assembly. In comparing his account with the FBI report, however, I discovered several key inconsistencies. And when I interviewed Adams in person, he made statements that contradicted his earlier statements about the number of men in the lynch mob, as well as the number of men he himself had recognized. I can't say for sure that Clinton Adams didn't witness the lynching. My goal in the book was to make the point that, as a society, we must be wary of accepting stories simply because they tie up difficult matters neatly and allow us to move on. An event like the Moore's Ford lynching-a brutal act of collective violence-is not meant to be tied up neatly.


10. What does Fire in a Canebrake teach us about current race relations in the United States?

Fire in a Canebrake shows us that, long before the divisive reactions to the Rodney King beating and the O.J. Simpson trial, race had destroyed our ability to tell a common truth. It suggests that in order for blacks and whites to live together peacefully in America, we must acknowledge that destruction and begin to build a common truth. I wrote this book in that spirit.