Six decades after lynching, witnesses still silenced by fear

MONROE, Georgia The dirt road that led to Moore's Ford bridge is paved now, and the creaky wooden bridge has been replaced with a sleek concrete span. But the black letters "KKK" sprayed on the new bridge's face offer an eerie reminder of the terrible events that happened here 60 years ago.

Bobby Howard brushes back a leafy tree branch, revealing a half-dozen more racist scribblings. He sniffs his disgust, but he is not surprised. He has long forsaken his personal safety to fight the culture of fear that has suppressed the truth of what took place on the bridge. He still hopes that truth may come out -- in a courtroom.

The horror unfolded July 25, 1946.

Ruby Butler, who was bunching cotton on a dusty road when she saw cars lined up bumper-to-bumper rattling toward the bridge, recalls: "I thought they were having a party down there. They were having a killing party."

Across town, white farmer Loy Harrison was driving home two black couples, Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, who was seven months pregnant.

There were whisperings around town that George Dorsey, who had fought in the Army during the war, had secretly been dating a white woman, a taboo in the segregated South. And there was no love lost between the townsfolk and Roger Malcom, who had stabbed a white farmer during a knife fight 11 days earlier.