I am folded up like a pretzel in the back seat of a big, black SUV, speeding at 90 mph to one of the most nondescript patches of dirt in Georgia. At the wheel is Tyrone Brooks, a Georgia legislator. He's talking as fast as he's driving. It's a story of horror, torture, murder and guilty men who have escaped justice.
Riding shotgun is Ben Chaney. His brother, James, was one of three civil rights workers kidnapped and murdered in June 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss.
Three months ago, the Klan mastermind of the murders was finally tried and convicted — after four decades of Mississippi officials turning a blind eye to the crime.
Chaney has devoted his life to solving the many unsolved murders in the South that occurred during the civil rights era. "It's all that I do," he told me. "I had to see this bridge."
He's speaking of the Moore's Ford Bridge near Monroe, Ga., which on a hot evening in July 1946 was the scene of the last mass public lynching in the South. No one was ever prosecuted.
Although there is a historic marker about two miles from the bridge, nothing at the site memorializes the murders — nothing except a roughly scrawled "KKK" on a bridge piling.
Two young couples — Roger and Dorothy Malcom, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey — were waylaid by the Klan on the bridge. The couples were viciously beaten and shot. The horror didn't end with death. Dorothy Malcom was seven months pregnant, and the Klansmen cut the baby from her stomach.
The story has been known for decades — and not known. "The old people around here, they're afraid," said Jerry Ansley, a cousin to Mae Dorsey. "I just heard the real story a year or so ago. It was real brutal, what those men did."
Fifty-nine years is a long time, but several of the Klan mob are still alive. Two live close to the bridge. Yet the local district attorney claims he can't make a case. Brooks says the real reason is that the perps' families are still powerful in Monroe.
Prosecutions have been successful in other Klan terrorism cases. It's the first step in race reconciliation. It's called justice. It needs to happen in Monroe, Ga.
Senior Editor John Sugg is heading out on another of his junkets — to Alabama, Mississippi, New Orleans and wherever else the news takes him. Send him ideas or tell him good riddance at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com. His travels will be recorded on his blog at www.johnsugg.com.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.