Strange fruit

The true story of the last mass lynching in America is a chilling whodunit, but the legacy of vigilante attacks on blacks continues beyond the history books.

By Suzy Hansen

Jan 29, 2003 | The grotesque image of a black human figure suspended from a tree might be matched in its horror and inhumanity by only one other vestige of American memory: a horde of ecstatic white faces, usually set against the black of night, gathered beneath the body. Ordinary folks traveled miles to witness a lynching, sometimes posing for keepsake photographs that they might turn into postcards to send to friends. But pictures were the gentlest of souvenirs. Often men, women and children, businessmen, farmers and policemen scrambled for the victim's carved-off genitals or for an ear or a finger. If they'd arrived too late for body parts, some settled for the bough of the lynching tree or a bit of bloodstained rope.

The spectacular reality of lynching and the evidence it offered of white Southerners' thirst for murdering their black neighbors were revelations for a young W.E.B. DuBois living in Georgia in 1899. According to Phillip Dray in his magisterial history "At the Hands of Persons Unknown," "Lynching was simply the most sensational manifestation of an animosity for black people that resided at a deeper level among whites than [DuBois] had previously thought, and was ingrained in all of white society." DuBois had just learned that a man's knuckles were for sale in an Atlanta grocer's window.

And these are the details we know. The Tuskegee Institute, which has maintained lynching archives since 1882, estimates that 3,417 lynchings of blacks and 1,291 lynchings of whites have taken place in the United States. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the first anti-lynching crusader, suggests that as many as 10,000 blacks have been lynched since the Civil War. No one can be sure. It's not as though lynchers across America kept a running tab of their victims.

Just as the act of lynching -- and the display of those grisly trophies -- served as a terrifying public warning to blacks to stay in their place, the collective nature of the ritual acted to obscure individual responsibility for the act. "The coroner's inevitable verdict, 'Death at the hands of persons unknown,'" Dray writes, "affirmed the public's tacit complicity: no persons had committed a crime, because the lynching had been an expression of the community's will." Even though newspaper headlines blared news of lynchings when they occurred, surprisingly few clues remained for law enforcement officials or reporters to investigate. (Sometimes the perpetrators, shadowy regulators of the Southern "code of honor," would simply be referred to in print as "determined men.") The fear generated by such acts of terrorism rendered black witnesses silent and tangled white townspeople in a web of endless lies. Of course, at the turn of the century, no one cared about apprehending the murderers -- and, moreover, the local sheriff was sometimes one of them.

Similar conditions existed as late as 1946, in Walton County, Ga., when four blacks were shot to death at the Moore's Ford bridge. Even with the efforts of Walter White's relatively influential NAACP, a cavalcade of FBI agents, the demand of newspaper editorial pages nationwide and the weight of President Truman's mandate, the "determined men" were not identified immediately. But as Laura Wexler expertly reveals in her new book, "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America," witnesses from this small, rural county slowly emerged -- some stepping forward as late as 1991. That the victims' families came close to getting justice for their loved ones' deaths makes the Moore's Ford tragedy unique. The fact that the truth took over 40 years to surface reaffirms how a lynching -- even in the second half of the 20th century -- could terrorize a community into enduring silence.

The black man at the center of the Walton County lynching was in fact guilty of a crime. A sharecropper named Roger Malcom was arguing with his wife, Dorothy, and threatening her with a knife when Barnette Hester, owner of the land Malcolm worked, intervened. Malcom, drunk and belligerent, also suspected his wife of having an affair with Hester (otherwise, why would he, a white man, defend her, a black woman?). In the end, Malcolm stabbed Hester and went to jail.

As the town waited to see if Hester would survive the attack, the plot to lynch Roger Malcom took form. Hester's health turned the corner. Days later, Malcom received a lesser charge of attempted murder and bail was set. Dorothy Malcom, her brother George Dorsey and his wife, Mae, begged another landowner, Loy Harrison, to pay Roger Malcom's bail in exchange for work. It was on their way back to Harrison's farm that their car was overtaken and the Malcoms and the Dorseys were brutally killed. Harrison's life was spared.

There's much more to the real story behind these lynchings, though, and Wexler's telling has all the elements of a horrific Southern mystery. What makes "Fire in a Canebrake" most compelling, however, is Wexler's detached sensibility. In effect, she reports the details of the lynching with surprisingly little sentimentality, an admirable accomplishment for a writer describing "a murder so extreme that it would become an icon of postwar violence, a symbol of the chasm between the promise of democracy and the reality of life for black people in America in 1946." Wexler, appropriately I think, lets the crime speak for itself.

If Malcom was the one the lynch mob wanted, why did they kill all four blacks in the car? The white crowd's utter disregard for black life might not have been the only reason why. George Dorsey, a handsome soldier who'd just returned from the war, had been seen around town with white women. As Dray explains, "The anxiety over interracial sex was so great, it fostered the related notion that sex with white women was the real objective behind all black aspiration, that money, education, accomplishment of any kind were for black men mere stepping-stones en route to the bedroom and the ultimate nirvana of intimacy with white women."

Next Page: What really happened at Moore's Ford?

• View blog reactions