Rev. Jeremiah Wright set for Macon revival

President-elect Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is expected to preach at a Macon revival this coming week.

Wright will preach Monday through Wednesday at St. Paul AME Church. It will be his second visit to the Georgia city. Wright also spoke at St. Paul last year.

The Chicago minister drew headlines in the presidential campaign for remarks on racial injustice, conduct of the American government and U.S. foreign policy.

Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ during the campaign after inflammatory comments by Wright from the pulpit became a campaign issue.

St. Paul's pastor, the Rev. Ronald Slaughter, defends Wright, pointing to his longtime community activism.
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Information from: The Macon Telegraph,
http://www.macontelegraph.com

(AP)

Click here for more GPB News coverage about Rev. Wright.

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:

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(The Associated Press)