A Morris County lawyer who has been fighting to solve the nation’s last mass lynching said Tuesday he plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, after an appellate panel in Atlanta reversed itself and ruled that grand jury transcripts from the 1946 case must remain sealed.
“I may have suffered a knockdown, but I’m not knocked out,” said attorney Joe Bell, who has been working pro bono for nearly six years seeking to discover who ambushed and murdered two black couples near the Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, GA, 74 years ago.
In an 8-4 decision, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week overturned rulings from 1984 and 2017, as well as a ruling last year by three of its own members, to say that federal judges cannot stray from guidelines for protecting grand jury secrecy.
World War II veteran George W. Dorsey, his friend Roger Malcolm, and their wives, Mae Murray and Dorothy, were dragged from a car by a white mob, beaten, and murdered in a volley of gunfire at close range on July 25, 1946.
The driver, farmer and suspected Klansman J. Loy Harrison, was unharmed. Harrison employed the Dorseys and Malcolms as sharecroppers. He was driving them back from bailing Roger Malcolm from jail after his arrest for stabbing a white farmer during a fight.
President Harry Truman ordered an FBI investigation. More than 100 people reportedly testified before a grand jury. Yet nobody was charged in what is considered America’s last mass lynching.
Anthony Pitch, author of The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town, discovered the transcript in a national archive in 2016.
His friend Bell took on the legal fight for the release of the records.
The Rockaway Township attorney has argued that the Moore’s Ford case, like the cases of the Rosenbergs and President Nixon, has “exceptional historic significance” that outweighs grand jury secrecy concerns.
Pitch died last year at the age of 80. Bell pressed forward on behalf of the author’s family and Laura Wexler, a historian who also has written about the Moore’s Ford lynching.
In his majority opinion, Senior Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote that exceptions are spelled out in great detail, and judges “do not possess the inherent, supervisory power to order the release of grand jury records in instances not covered by the rule.”
The judicial system may need to revisit those rules, according to Judge Adalberto Jordan, who nonetheless concurred with the majority.
In a dissent, Judge Charles Wilson backed the 11th District’s 1984 decision and wrote that the transcript should be released.
More than 30 news organizations had submitted a brief in support of Pitch; the court rejected it without explanation, reported one of those organizations, the Associated Press.
Bell, the former Morris County Clerk, quoted one of his heroes, the late Yogi Berra.
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Bell said, “ Yes, we will be filing a petition for certiorari with the hopes that the (Supreme) Court takes the case.”
