'The People v. Leo Frank' to Premier

Memorial plaque near the the site of the lynching. Click for larger image.

A television documentary about the lyching of a Jewish businessman after the death of a teenage girl will premiere in the county where he was hanged in 1915.

"The People v. Leo Frank" will premiere April 30 at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, which is just a few miles from where Frank died.

The $100-a-ticket event will benefit the Anti-Defamation League, which is sponsoring the event.

Frank was convicted in the 1913 death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked in the pencil factory Frank managed in downtown Atlanta.

Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life in prison, but he was kidnapped from the state prison in Milledgeville in 1915, taken to Phagan's hometown of Marietta and hanged.

The documentary is scheduled to air on PBS late this year.

(AP)

Watkinsville group wants to find '46 lynching graves

Memorial march across Moore's Ford bridge, May 16, 1998.
(Courtesy MFMC)

A group devoted to remembering the 1946 lynching of two black couples on a bridge by a white mob has turned its attention to a killing four decades earlier.

Members of the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee — named for the bridge where Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey were killed in Monroe — are hoping to find the graves of nine people shot by a Watkinsville mob in 1905. The killings — often called one of the worst racial episodes in the state’s history — allegedly left a mass grave holding eight blacks and one white, author James Allen said during a recent interview on CNN.

With success in finding and restoring the graves of the Moore’s Ford victims, the committee aims to do the same for the victims of the 1905 killings. They plan to scour church, census and county records and talk with relatives of the victims and family members of others alive then.
The story of the mass grave has never been proven other than vague newspaper accounts, said Rich Rusk, a founding member of the Moore’s Ford group.

“We’ve been working on Moore’s Ford since 1997, and we really haven’t done much at all about any of the other lynchings that have occurred in this area,” Rusk told the Savannah Morning News. “But given the national exposure given to the lynching ... we need to find out what the truth is.”

Newspaper accounts describe an angry mob of 50 people who dragged the nine men from their cells in the Watkinsville jail, tied them up and shot them to death on June 30, 1905. At least six of the victims were buried together, while the others were buried separately, according to a story in the Atlanta Constitution.

Watkinsville is about 20 miles from Monroe in northeast Georgia:

View Larger Map
(The Associated Press)

Third re-enactment of decades-old mass lynching today

Civil rights advocates are calling for justice in a mass lynching that occurred in Georgia 61 years ago. The Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials is holding its third annual re-enactment of the crime today.

Organizers have added a scene this year to the re-enactment of the killing of two black couples by a white mob at the Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County. A volunteer dramatizes a racially-provocative speech by Governor Eugene Talmadge. Newly-released F-B-I documents show that Talmadge visited Walton County a day after the incident which triggered the lynchings, in which a black sharecropper stabbed and wounded a white farmer.

The report includes an unconfirmed witness statement that Talmadge incited the violence. Talmadge’s grandson, Herman, says his grandfather had no involvement in the episode.

Despite several state and federal investigations that have identified dozens of suspects, no one has ever been arrested or charged with the four killings.

Talmage added to lynchings re-enactment

A re-enactment of a notorious lynching 60 years ago will feature a new character this year, the late Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge. Organizers say a volunteer depicting Talmadge will deliver a race-baiting stump speech before the annual re-enactment. Every year volunteers depict two black couples being attacked and killed by a white mob at Moore's Ford Bridge in 1946. FBI has investigated claims that Talmadge was involved in the lynching.

New task force for unsolved murders

Today the U.S. House passed a bill to establish a new division focused on cracking unsolved civil rights era murders. Georgia’s unsolved Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching of two black couples in 1946 could be one of the cases. Atlanta Congressman John Lewis says the bill is a big step toward righting wrongs from the past.

Did former governor encourage lynchings?

Newly-released files from the lynching of two black couples more than 60 years ago contain a disturbing revelation: The FBI investigated suspicions that a three-term governor of Georgia sanctioned the murders to sway rural white voters during a tough election campaign. Nearly 4,000 pages obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act do not make conclusions about the still-unsolved killings at Moore's Ford Bridge. But they raise the possibility that Eugene Talmadge's politics may have been a factor when a white mob dragged the four victims from a car, tied them to a tree and opened fire.