A Lynch Mob, four deaths, no remorse
Reviewed by Steve Weinberg
1/5/03

In Philip Dray's voluminous 2002 book on the history of lynching in the United States, At the Hands of Persons Unknown (Random House), amid its 528 well-researched, horrifying pages, there's a six-page account of a 1946 quadruple lynching near Monroe, Ga.

Dray placed the lynching of two couples -- Dorothy and Roger Malcolm and Mae Murray and George Dorsey -- in the context of court rulings intended to make sure that Southern blacks could cast their votes.

"The reaction from whites was predictably bellicose," Dray writes, "and contributed to a ghastly racial killing. . . . The July 1946 murders came about as the result of a fight between Roger Malcolm and his employer's son, but occurred in an atmosphere poisoned by the antiblack rhetoric of gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge." The local sheriff had no intention of arresting the lynchers of the two married couples. But less racist Georgians could not look the other way, so they took the case all the way to the White House. President Harry Truman ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Justice Department to make arrests if possible. After interviewing about 2,800 people, the federal agents came up empty, and nobody served time for the multiple murders.

Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, became fascinated by the 1946 murders. While working at the University of Georgia in 1997, Wexler read a historical account about what had occurred that July day in Walton and Oconee counties. Wexler naturally harbored doubts about whether an inexperienced journalist looking into the case more than 50 years after the crime could find anything new.

She overcame those doubts by telling herself that if she failed to turn up new evidence, at least she might gain a deeper understanding of more contemporary racial episodes such as the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial and the 1992 altercation between Los Angeles police and Rodney King.

Wexler traveled to rural Georgia again and again; during a three-year stretch she interviewed more than 100 people who lived through the 1946 ugliness or possessed secondhand information worth pursuing. Some folks wanted to talk. It "seemed as though they'd been waiting for a person to knock on their front door," Wexler writes. Other potential sources turned out to be "apathetic, fearful, distrustful, duplicitous or hostile." In general, blacks wanted to help, whites did not.

When human sources failed to fill in the gaps, Wexler read microfilm until her eyes ached. She unearthed documents from investigatory agencies.

Wexler's portrayal of the four lynched sharecroppers is fascinating because she transports us into a world of fifth-rate education and desperate poverty that is fortunately unknown to many readers. Her portrayal of Barnette Hester, the privileged white man who physically threatened Roger Malcolm and ended up with nearly fatal stab wounds, is fascinating, too, because Wexler takes pains to show him as more than a racist monster.

It would have been a coup for Wexler to solve the mass murder, to name names of the guilty after all these decades. In a way, however, the book tells a more compelling story because the case remains unsolved. Wexler has developed theories about who committed the murders and why those men lost control. She shares at least some of those theories. She doubts, however, that she will ever know the truth. The lack of closure haunts the elderly survivors and clouds the lives of the survivors' descendants.

The daughter of Barnette Hester was 57 years old when Wexler closed the book. Hester not only survived the stabbing but lived 36 more years, until 1982. His daughter, Linda Lemonds, has heard the rumors that Hester was having sexual relations with Dorothy Malcolm, the wife of the stabber. Lemonds wonders whether her wounded father knew who carried out the lynching, whether he asked forgiveness before his death. Lemonds believes the white establishment circa 1946 had no remorse and that belief troubles her deeply.

But no matter how much some whites suffered in the aftermath, black residents suffered more. In a chilling passage, Wexler conveys what the unsolved lynching meant to the black residents of Walton and Oconee counties, in 1946 and for many years after:

"What the black people . . . knew was that the men who had lynched Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, George and Mae Murray Dorsey, continued to live freely while they continued to work for them; to borrow money from and be cheated by them; to step around them on the sidewalks downtown; to be arrested by them; to be beaten by them; to fear them; and to never know for sure who had been in the mob that Thursday afternoon in July."

Steve Weinberg is a freelance investigative journalist in Columbia, Mo.