They are not household names from the Civil Rights movement.
But George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm should not be forgotten, believes a Morris County lawyer, who is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to unseal documents he hopes will reveal who murdered these sharecroppers near the Moore’s Ford Bridge in Georgia in 1946.
Believed to be the last mass lynching in the United States, the crime shocked President Harry Truman into ordering an FBI investigation. More than 2,000 witnesses were interviewed, and 106 were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury — but this was the Jim Crow South. Nobody was charged with the killings.
Attorney Joe Bell of Rockaway thinks answers may be buried in the grand jury transcripts. Stymied by conflicting rulings in lower courts, Bell announced on Friday he has filed a formal request to the Supreme Court to unseal the documents.
“I think history demands a full disclosure of the truth surrounding this important civil rights case,” Bell said after a federal appellate court in Atlanta ruled against the release in April. “There is a clarion call from the American First Amendment Community that the nation’s highest court clarify the significant issues present.”
While acknowledging the importance of grand jury secrecy, Bell cites court-approved disclosures in situations of historical significance. President Richard Nixon, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and Jimmy Hoffa are examples. The Moore’s Ford case should be another, he contends.
Everyone involved in the murders probably is dead. But Bell said he wants to set the record straight about a dark episode of the nation’s history.
“The case forms the backdrop for the modern Civil Rights movement in America,” Bell told Morristown Green.
By accepting the case, he said, “the court would send a message to society that it recognizes the need for openness, transparency and a rational resolution of the timely issues” it raises.
Victories at the district- and appellate levels were reversed this spring by the same appellate court, which ruled the transcripts must remain secret.
Bell, a former Morris County Clerk, has worked pro bono on this case for more than seven years. He got involved through a friend, historian Anthony Pitch, who wrote a book about the lynching and discovered the transcripts in a government archive.
Pitch died last year at the age of 80. Author Laura Wexler has joined the case as an intervenor.
‘THEY KNOW TOO MUCH’
Bell’s Supreme Court request, formally called a writ of certiorari, is a long shot.
More than 8,000 cases are submitted annually for the high court’s consideration, but only about one percent are selected, according to Bell. Traditionally, at least four of nine Justices must express interest.
A writ of certiorari does not seek to re-try facts of a case, but rather, facts of federal law pertaining to the matter. Such petitions may be accepted in cases of national importance, as occurred during the Bush-Gore presidential election.
The Supreme Court also might weigh in when lower court decisions invalidate federal laws, or when split decisions by circuit courts indicate federal laws are being applied unevenly across states, Bell said.
What is known about the events of July 25, 1946:
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 hail of gunfire in Walton County, GA.
They were shot so many times at close range that it was difficult to identify their bodies, according to Bell.
The car’s driver, farmer and suspected Klansman J. Loy Harrison, was not injured. The Dorseys and Malcolms worked as sharecroppers for Harrison, who was driving them back from bailing Roger Malcolm from jail. Malcolm had been his arrested for stabbing a white farmer during a fight. The mob was waiting for them at the Moore’s Ford Bridge.
As Roger Malcolm and George Dorsey were led to a wooded area, one of the women in Harrison’s car started calling out mob members by name.
“Git them women. Bring ‘em over here. They know too much,” said the mob’s leader, by Harrison’s account.
The men’s hands were tied, and nooses were placed around the women’s necks. They were marched down an embankment by the Apalachee River, and shot.
