Integrating Levittown: How One Family Started A Housing Revolution

Daisy Myers pours coffee for her husband, Bill, in their new home in Levittown, Pa.

Photo by Sam Myers/Associated Press/File 1957

August 13, 1957, — Buck County, PA, The American Dream is supposedly to own your own home in the community of your choice and raise your children while having backyard barbeques with the neighbors. On this day in 1957 William and Daisey Meyers decided to try and buy their part of the dream but as African Americans, they faced bitter resentment and threats from some Whites in the community.

The Meyers had been looking for a new home. They wanted some place of peace, quiet with relative safety to raise their children. The post-war housing boom of the late 1940s and the 1950s introduced new terms to the American lexicon, Levittown and Suburb and suburbia. Levittown was because the first mass builder was William Levitt. He built the first of his developments on Long Island, New York in 1947 and was completing his second in Bucks County.

The problem for the Meyers was that Levittowns were segregated communities, expressly built for White people. The reason for this has some historical controversy. Some people insist that Levitt was himself a bigot, although he swore that as a Jew, he knew prejudice and was not himself a bigot. That said he had to block sales due to his contract with the federal government. However, he took the sympathetic racist view that his customer base of Whites would not buy if there were Negros present.

Government contracts did specify that he as the developer could not sell to African Americans. The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration had subsidized the building of these suburban developments with regulations that stated no new homes could be sold to Negroes.

The language was for, “New Homes” The Meyers were able to get around this unreasonable law by agreeing to purchase the home from Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx. The Wechslers were civil rights activists who saw an opportunity to upend the quiet racism of the federal government and William Levitt. So, on this day the papers were signed to buy the home.

The Meyers began to move in on August 19^th and were met with shock by their new neighbors. Some of whom stood around outside the home and shouted, “Nigger Get Out.” A couple of days later a mailman asked who owned the house and Daisy Meyers told him she did and this was the correct address he started running down the street yelling, “It's true, It's true the Niggers are here!”

Over the next few weeks, the harassment escalated. Stones were thrown through windows. Mobs stood outside shouting insults and demanding the Meyers leave. The mob also targeted the Wechslers for selling the Meyers house. Soon many of the Whites in the community got together and formed the “Levittown Betterment Committee” to organize the threatening phone calls and other protests. They rented a home on the same street which was renamed the “Confederate House.” At this location the Confederate flag was flown and “Dixie” was played on loudspeakers.

When these somewhat subdued threats didn’t force the Meyers out some locals stepped it up and defaced the house with spray paint. One neighbor painted, “Not OKKK,” on the side of his home. Another walked by nightly with his black dog, whom he had named “Nigger” and yelled often. Soon crosses were burned outside the Meyers and Wechsler’s homes.

These overt measures were against a court order that no more than three people were allowed to congregate. Finally, after two weeks outside pressure forced the local and state police to intervene to stop the near riot activity that was happening every evening. Thanks to allies like the Quakers, the American Jewish Congress, and the William Penn Center as well as friendly and supportive White neighbors word had spread throughout the nation of the treatment of this family.

After three months in their new home, Pennsylvania Attorney General Thomas McBride filed a complaint against the Levittown Betterment Committee and the Confederate House. The complaint read that the Confederate House and Betterment Committee had, “entered into an unlawful, malicious and evil conspiracy . . . to force the said Myers family to leave Levittown: to harass, annoy, intimidate, silence and deprive of their rights to peaceable enjoyment of their property.” With the help of local and state police patrols what had so quickly blown up seemed to blow over.

The Meyers lived in their Levittown home for four years and a second African American family the Mosby’s moved into the Bucks County Levittown a year after the Meyers. This was the beginning of legal change challenges to the historic racism in housing. After the Meyers made national news. Broad enforcement of President Truman’s Housing Act of 1949 started with the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration refusing to subsidize William Levitt’s next developments. He sued and the case went to the New Jersey Supreme Court where Levitt lost and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Until he died William Levitt swore that his segregation policy was entirely economic even with the court loss and several boycotts and protests led by the NAACP and other civil rights groups.

Bill Meyers died in 1987 at the age of 65. Daisey Meyers became known as the “Rosa Parks of the North.” And wrote a biography, Sticks'N Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown, published in 2005. She spent 30 years teaching for the New York City School District. All her life she was active in multiple community groups. Daisy Meyers died in 2011 at age 86  Bea Wechsler also died in 2011 at age 91 and Lew Wechsler is still living at age 105, he wrote his own memoir in 2005 The First Stone: A Memoir of the Racial Integration of Levittown, Pennsylvania

Sources:

https://jewishcurrents.org/remembering-the-battle-to-integrate-levittown

https://www.witnessingyork.com/mapping-meaning/daisy-myers-sticks-n-stones-but-words-will-never-harm-you/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-02/how-the-federal-government-built-white-suburbia

https://web.archive.org/web/20160412090421/http://www.nosue.org/civil-rights/integrating-levittown-1957/

 

Failed Lynching Leads To Creation Of Ultimate Sundown Town

The Tribune — Seymour, Indiana — Aug. 15, 1903

August 12, 1903, ~ Whitesboro, Texas. This East Texas cotton farming town has a history of terrible treatment of its Black residents. Beginning with the birth of the city itself. A Black man named Robert Diamond settled the area in the early 1800s and the settlement of “Wolfpath” but this is ignored by most historians. A hotel in the settlement and the Butterfield Overland Mail route called this route, the Diamond Route. This changed in 1848 when Captain Ambrose B. White and his family settled in Wolfpath. White had been in the army in the frontier Indian wars in Illinois. White had come from Illinois with a few other families and Wolfpath changed first to White’s Colony. The area remained fairly isolated due to the heavy forests of the area until the Civil War, although White had built the Westview Inn as a stage stop and supplied horses to the Butterfield line.

In 1860 a formal post office was built and the town was incorporated as Whitesborough and was primarily a Texas frontier town. In the next few years, the city grew as a farming and timber community and in 1879 was added to a train line running to the county seat of Dennison Texas, at that time the town was renamed Whitesboro. Like all areas of Texas and the South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow lynching was an agreed-upon way of dealing with African Americans that the White citizens found troublesome. Whitesboro was no different in, 1885 in the nearby town of Bells, Texas a Black man named John Martin was hung. In 1901 a man named Abe Wilder was brutally lynched and burned to death in Sherman. Today, Whitesboro, Bells, Sherman, and Dennison are included in the same metropolitan area.

Racial tensions were always running high in Grayson County and in 1903 someone tried to ignite a race war by placing notes in very public spots in Whitesboro and Sherman that stated the “Anti-White Mans Club” was going to kill a white girl to avenge Wilder and poison several of the wells owned or used by Whites. The person who posted the notes was never found, and while it is believed to be a sign of things to come there was barely in mention of this in the local papers.

On Aug 12th a Black man named Jonas Brown was arrested for an assault on a “Mrs. Hart”. There was no reporting on what this assault was if it was a rape or robbery or what. Other reports say he hadn’t touched her but frightened her near a barn and she ran screaming. Regardless, by 8:30 pm that night though a mob of several hundred men had come to the jail and broke Brown out and beat him and then took him to hang from a local elm tree.

After this, the mob left the scene and the sheriff and his deputies came to collect the body. Amazingly Brown had survived, the sheriff quickly cut him down and they rushed him to the jail in Sherman. During the evening the mob remained busy though and posted warnings to all Blacks in Whitesboro to leave town or die. Soon the rumors that Brown survived and had been taken by the sheriff and the violence began. White men broke into Black homes forcing out residents and burning the house down. By morning Blacks had begun fleeing town by taking the train or running into the wilderness, then north or west. For the next four days, armed White men patrolled the streets looking for Black residents. Those they found were tied to a hitching post. On the morning of Aug 15, White men savagely whipped 17 men for ignoring the order to leave town. All Black residents in Whitesboro and the immediate vicinity had fled, there were none left.

The sheriff and county attorney had requested aid to restore order and U.S. Marshalls and officers from Sherman and Dennison headed to Whitesboro to restore legal order. However, this did not mean any former Black resident felt safe to return.

The creation of one of the ultimate Sundown Towns had taken place in the four days since the attempted murder of Jonas Brown. No one was ever arrested for that attempted murder, and no one was arrested for the whippings of the 17 other men or the burning of Black homes. Angry Whites in town had successfully removed the Negro from their environment.

This remained the case for decades in the census. In 2020 of the 4,074 residents of Whitesboro only 33 were African American, or less than 1 percent of the population. 

Sources:

The Lynching That Led To Billie Holiday's Iconic Song "Strange Fruit"

 

Photo By Lawrence Beitler, 1930. Fair Use Image

August 7, 1930, Marion Indiana ─ A White mob attacked the Grant County Courthouse tonight intent on murder. They were reacting to the arrests of three Black teens for the alleged shooting of White man Claude Deeter and raping his fiancée Mary Ball the night before. Deeter died at the hospital from his gunshot wounds early this morning.

Grant County Sheriff Jacob Campbell had arrested the three African American men that afternoon and had them in jail. By evening word of both the murder of Deeter and the Rape of Ball had spread throughout the county and surrounding communities and White men started coming into town. Many of them had worked with Deeter in the neighboring town of Fairmount. By late evening there appeared to be 1,000 people on the courthouse lawn, and they were in a frenzy.

Although Indiana was a northern state it was no better than most Southern states during the Jim Crow era. There were some 250 “Sundown Towns” in Indiana a reflection of deep-seated racism. In fact, just a few years earlier the state was the power base for the Ku Klux Klan, In 1925 the Klan held most of the political power in the state and had 250,000 members. Although by 1930 the Klan had lost much of that power it wasn’t due to an epiphany by the population regarding their Negro neighbors but a reaction to being affiliated with Grand Dragon David Curtis Stephenson. Stephenson had been convicted of the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a state education official in 1925.

The Sundown Towns then were just a natural outcome of the persistent prejudice in Indiana. The Sundown Town designation was a community where law enforcement and town government agreed on laws to remove anyone who was black (and in many cases Jews Greeks and other Eastern or Southern Europeans) from the town. The core of this White mob seemed to come from the factory town of Fairmount where they had supposedly worked with Deeter, Fairmount was a Sundown Town. The Fairmount crowd was full of White Supremacists.

The lynching of Blacks wasn’t unusual in Indiana either with 21 previous lynchings in the state, so there was fertile ground for racial violence by the night of August 7, 1930.

Word had spread to Indianapolis and Fort Wayne that there would be a hanging that night and apparently, people wanted to be there for the spectacle. By 8:30 that night, the crowd on the lawn was estimated to be more than 5,000 people.

Realizing the intent of some in the crown Sheriff Campbell and all his men stayed at the jail to protect the three Black men in lock up. The crowd did not know that Ball had recanted when asked to identify the men. While the rape of a White woman was probably an even greater reason for a lynching than murder by this time it wouldn’t have mattered the mob was heated and looking for blood.

At 8:30 pm about 20 White men rushed the jail and attempted to break out the men. The sheriff and his men repelled them with tear gas and warning shots.  Word then went out and soon crowbars and sledgehammers were shared, and 200 men attacked the jail breaking down the wall. Thomas Shipp was then pulled free and passed to the mob. Shipp started screaming his innocence as the mob beat him and dragged him to a tree where they strung him up. Abram Smith was taken out of jail the same way. Smith fought back and at one point was able to remove the noose but the crowd further beat him and broke both his arms. 

Then, the mob pulled James Cameron out and took him to the same offending tree, however, someone in the crowd called out, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing.” And stunningly the mob released Cameron to the sheriff.

It is believed that both Shipp and Smith were already dead from the savage beating when the mob strung them up from the tree. Some members of the crowd still had not gotten their fill of blood and murder and tried to rally the full crowd to invade the Negro section of Marion and force out the population and burn it to the ground. The arrival of additional police from Indianapolis, Muncie, and Fort Wayne put that idea to rest, as well as the National Guard having been ordered by the governor.

On Aug. 9^th a press conference was held, and it was announced that the Sheriff and the Marion Police Chief, two assistant state attorney generals, and Grant County prosecutor would be opening an inquiry to try and find individuals responsible. Also, Flossie Bailey, local NAACP director in Marion, and Indiana Attorney General James M. Ogden worked to gain indictments, but they soon found a conspiracy of silence. The grand jury refused to examine the testimony and brought no charges. 

Survivor James Cameron did go on trial and was convicted for participating in the killing of Claude Deeter and spent four years in prison. At twenty-one, He left prison determined, "to pick up the loose threads of my life, weave them into something beautiful, worthwhile and God-like.” He went on to become an important Civil Rights activist in Indiana. He founded four NAACP chapters and worked for voting rights. His memoir, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story” was published in 1982. Then in 1988, he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum. He was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1991 for his participation in the Deeter murder.

James Cameron’s life was not the only legacy of these murders. Lawrence Beitler's iconic photograph of the two swaying bodies sold several 1,000 times in the next week until the police stopped the sale. Beitle's photograph inspired Abel Meeropol, pseudonym Lewis Allan, to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” which he later put to music and renamed “Strange Fruit” which became the signature song of Billie Holiday and has been covered by Nina Simone, UB40, Annie Lennox and others. Strange Fruit became the anthem for the anti-lynching movement and an important part of the Civil Rights movement.

 

Sources:

https://www.abhmuseum.org/an-iconic-lynching-in-the-north/

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/lynching-thomas-shipp-abram-smith-1930/

https://www.abhmuseum.org/about/dr-cameron-founder-lynching-survivor/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/marion-indiana-lynching-1930/

https://justice.tougaloo.edu/location/indiana/

Interracial Relationships Creates Fear In Louisville Kentucky and The South

Page 12, Louisville The Courier-Journal, July 29, 1916

July 28, 1916 – Louisville, Kentucky: After three arrests in 24 hours Chief of Police H. Watson Lindsey of Louisville announced that his department would spare no effort to enforce and keep Kentucky’s miscegenation laws upheld.

Miscegenation is the legal term for interracial marriage or even just sex. The term was first used in a political pamphlet by David G. Croly, managing editor of the New York World, and one of his reporters George Wakeman. The pamphlet titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” Was attributed to an anonymous abolitionist and anatomist. Published in 1863 this pamphlet was intended to slander Republicans and President Lincoln, as supporters of the intermixing, something that many people feared not only in the South. One of the core beliefs of Jim Crow was that Black men were sexual animals and White women needed constant protection from them.

Kentucky’s first miscegenation laws were passed right after the Civil War in 1866, these laws were expanded in 1893, 1894, and 1908. If convicted a person engaged in an interracial relationship could face up to a year in prison at hard labor and a $5,000 fine. Chief Lindsey was also on the city’s vice commission and so this was something of a concern for him and he placed one of his most decorated men, Corporal John Sullivan in charge of dealing with this.

First arrested was a Black man named Harry Jenkins, a 34-year-old man who was charged with violating the 1908 miscegenation laws. Arrested at the same time was Alice Shumaker, a 30-year-old woman who self-identified as Negro, but who was forced to take a blood test to prove she wasn’t white. The laws in Kentucky called miscegenation anyone who was dubbed a quadroon for having one-quarter African American blood.

Also arrested by the same officers at a different location was 16-year-old George Eaton, his was for possession of three White girls photos. The photos were taken from Eaton and Lindsey ordered his men to find out who the girls were.

The fears around miscegenation had been increased with the conviction of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. Johnson faced multiple charges of violating the Mann Act for taking white women across state lines. Johnson was a very proud Black man who because of his pride was considered “Uppity” and stepping out of line.

Other than Johnson there was the case of Buchanan v. Warley that was before the Supreme Court in 1916. This case was regarding the segregation laws in Louisville. Charles Buchanan, a White property owner had sold a home to William Warley a Black journalist and an attorney for the NAACP, the home was in what Louisville had zoned as a “White” section. When Warley backed out of the sale due to the laws Buchanan sued him, and in front of the court argued all men had a right to live anywhere.

While newspapers of the time tried hard to say the court would rule in favor of the segregation laws, it was far from certain. For Whites in the Jim Crow era, any threat to the racist status quo was considered an open threat to their way of life.

While miscegenation and segregation were huge concerns for both Whites and Blacks in Louisville, there is no historical record of what happened to the three Blacks arrested on July 28, 1916. H. Watson Lindsey left his position 18 months later. He later became the director of safety in Louisville. He died Feb 7, 1941. There is no record of the lives of Harry Jenkins, Alice Shumaker, or George Eaton. While the Supreme Court ruled  criminalizing interracial marriage unconstitutional in 1967, Kentucky did not repeal its anti-miscegenation statute until 1974.

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/119072904/?match=1&terms=%22Harry%20Jenkins%22

https://americansall.org/legacy-story-group/jim-crow-laws-kansas-and-kentucky

https://web.archive.org/web/20090821193144/http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_miscegenation_hoax/

https://mixedracestudies.org/wp/?tag=david-goodman-croly

 

Page 12, Louisville The Courier-Journal, July 29, 1916

Andrew Jackson Orders Destruction Of "Negro Fort" To Satisfy Slave Owners In Georgia

 

"Attack on Apalachicola River" by Jackson Walker, Museum of Florida Art.

July 27, 1816 - Apalachicola River, Florida: Built by the British Military as a southern advance point against the United States in the War of 1812 the “Negro Fort” stood like a thumb in the eye to the United States, or at least many in the south, particularly in Georgia.

Built-in 1814 by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nichols, His Majesty's Marines. The intention was to convince the Seminole people to align themselves with the British. This plan did not work and was abandoned by the Marines in 1815.

The fort was built on Prospect Bluff overlooking the Apalachicola River, around a territorial store built in 1783. The area was minimally settled by a variety of indigenous people and escaped slaves and their descendants. Many of these were Colonial Marines, free Africans who were trained by the British Marines to help in the war. The fort became the center of a farming community created by a diverse people, who used native and West African knowledge to clear land and cultivate.

However, this success and the community’s ability to defend themselves with English weapons was considered an insult to the United States, in fact, some people claimed it was a place of evil from where bandits and outlaws made raids. Georgian plantation owners sent letters to the U.S. government demanding that action be taken to destroy the autonomous free black community. Less than 60 miles from the Georgia frontier some in the government felt that the fort was, “a beacon of light to restless and rebellious slaves," or so said well-known bigot Major General Andrew Jackson. As the commanding officer of the army on the frontier Jackson had basically the power to decide the fate of thousands of people. With slave owners in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina living in fear of slave rebellion, it did not take long for a decision to be made to destroy the community by destroying the fort.

By that July nearly 1,000 people lived in and around the fort, 300 in the fort itself. All of them were either escaped slaves or a mixture of the indigenous people and the free Africans. These people were slowly becoming the ethnic Seminoles. Such a large community was quickly becoming a threat to the institution of slavery itself which is why even though they were living in peace the existence of the community could not continue in the eyes of most government and military leaders of the South.

When ordering the fort's destruction U.S. Secretary of War William H. Crawford stated, “If the Spanish governor refused to ‘put an end to an evil of so serious nature,’ the U.S. government would promptly take measures to.” He ordered Jackson to send his message, ordering the Spanish governor to “destroy or remove from our frontier these banditti, put an end to an evil of so serious a nature, and return to our citizens and friendly Indians inhabiting our territory those negroes now in the said fort, and which have been stolen and enticed from them.” 

Unmentioned in this demand was the fact that many of these families had been free for generations. Their ancestors had fled from their colonial masters to Spanish Florida many decades ago.  

The truth was that Crawford and Jackson had already planned for the fort’s destruction and ordered General Edmund Gaines to do so. The first step was to build Fort Scott out of Camp Crawford 16 at the junction of the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers, where they joined to form the Apalachicola. The next step is one of the questions of history, factual what happened was that two gunboats coming upriver with supply boats were attacked near Fort Gadsden by the Black militia that occupied the fort and their crews killed. For generations though there has been speculation that Jackson arranged it. The attack became known as the Watering Party Massacre since the gunboats had stopped to refill their canteens.

Whether Jackson had somehow preplanned this or not has never been proven, what is easily proved is that Crawford and Jackson used the event to show the Spanish officials that they needed to destroy the fort to protect, “National Interests.” Also, Jackson had been hiring members of the Creek Nation to go into Florida to capture Blacks as runaway slaves. In the days leading to the full assault on what was now known as the “Negro Fort” these Creek had joined with troops under the command of Colonel Duncan Clinch. Clinch himself was a slave owner in Georgia and had no compassion for freed Africans.

From July 24 to July 27 the warriors at the fort defended themselves fairly well, they had the munitions and were committed to defending their community. Gunboats arrived on the river on the 27^th and began lobbing heated shells into the fort, one of these hit the fort’s gunpowder magazine and the explosion leveled the fort and killed at least 270 of the men protecting their community. Clinch reported the horrific destruction: back to Gaines and Jackson, “The explosion was awful, and the scene horrible beyond description,” Clinch said. He gave a “divine justification” for the massacre in the official report. 

Regardless of this all happening on Spanish territory Gaines gave orders for all negro survivors to be collected and any negro to be taken into custody to be returned to their owners, even if they were descended from former slaves. Several runaway slaves who lived and farmed on the river scattered about to safety. Most fled to the protection of the Africans and Seminoles at the Suwannee and others left to a free black community just south of what is now Tampa Bay. 

The attack led to the Seminole wars, which was something Jackson had desired. He was a firm believer in “Manifest Destiny,” and felt it was obvious for the United States to take over Florida. This happened rather quickly. Spain protested the violation of its soil, but it lacked the martial power to do more. Jackson ordered the construction of a new fort, which became Fort Gadsden after Lieutenant James Gadsden led the construction of the new fort. The trading post of John Forbes and Company, with storekeeper Edward Doyle, was reestablished following the fort's destruction. Jackson used the Seminole wars as justification for a full invasion of Florida. This helped lead to the territory being ceded by Spain to America in the Treaty of Adams-Onis in 1819 and the Transcontinental Treaty in 1821. Jackson became the first territorial governor in 1821.

Sources:

https://arthurashe.ucla.edu/2016/07/27/massacre-unveiled-remembering-the-negro-fort/

https://libcom.org/article/negro-fort-massacre

https://aaregistry.org/story/the-negro-fort-florida-a-story/

Historical Markers in Florida

Newspapers Treat Lynching As Normal and Necessary

 

A flag flown from an upper-story window of the NAACP headquarters on 69 Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1936, 

July 26, 1909 – Eastman, Georgia: At one point in American history lynching of Black men was so common it was barely reported in the newspapers and when it was the basics were almost always the same.

For example, today’s case from 1909. An African American man named King Green was accused by two white girls, daughters of a prominent citizen, of trying to steal their horse. Their screams frightened him, so he ran off.

The basic outline of nearly every lynching story is right there, a White girl, a prominent citizen, and a negro man. In this case, the story identified him as a “Fiend” which was pretty common, other common adjectives were brute or beast. This was done to remove the basic humanity of the lynching victim.

In this case, the sheriff and his deputies got dogs from a nearby prison camp and chased King about 20 miles to Gum Swamp, Georgia where they finally captured him. As they headed back to Eastman a mob of at least 175 White men intercepted them and demanded the Black prisoner. Which the sheriff and his deputies just turned over.

There is an accusation by two White girls against one negro. The newspaper just reports the accusation as a proven fact. Was it King Green? Had they been approached by a negro man? Was the negro taken into custody the same man? The newspapers just reported it as facts with no supporting evidence.

Law enforcement just turned the prisoner over. This is never questioned either, at least in this darkest time of Jim Crow white supremacy. The mob is considered the way to get justice and not the law. No lawman is going to risk his life to protect a Black prisoner.

The mob then takes the prisoner. What’s slightly unusual in the King Green lynching is that there is no mention of getting the girls to identify the “Fiend”. There is also no report of the Black man admitting his guilt which is also a bit unusual in reporting. For most of the lynchings between 1880 and 1920, both of these were mentioned in approximately 90 percent of stories. Another way to assuage the guilt of anyone in the community who might have a conscious.

The mob took Green to the nearest tree that would support his weight and hung him. It isn’t reported whether they also shot his body up or set him afire, so it was a bit more civilized. Then the crown “peacefully” disbanded and went on their way. This is how most lynchings in this period ended. Basically, the mob was doling out justice that a regular trial might not.

Lynching was just a necessary part or rather the reporters and editors of the newspapers seemed to think since the outline of every story was as fixed as the standard classified ad.

Source: The Manning Times. (July 28, 1909). King Green 1. Newspapers.com. Retrieved July 26, 2024, from https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-manning-times-king-green-1/152067180/ning-times-king-green-1/152067180/

Moore's Ford Lynching: National Outrage Does Not Equal Justice

Mae and George Dorsey, Roger, and Dorothy Malcolm. Two married couples were killed on this day in 1946 at the hands of “persons unknown” 

July 25, 1946 - Walton County, Georgia, Four negroes were apparently slaughtered today near Moore’s Ford. Two men, Roger Malcolm and George Dorsey and their wives Dorthy Malcolm and Mae Murry Dorsey. Dorthy Malcolm was also George Dorsey’s sister. George Dorsey was a veteran of World War Two and fought in North Africa and the Pacific. Roger Malcolm had a two-year-old son who was taken in by family members in Toledo, Ohio after his father’s murder

Dorsey had been working on the farm of Loy Harrison as a sharecropper Malcolm was a sharecropper as well but had been working shares on the farm of Barnett Hester near Madison Georgia previously but on the 11th of July Malcolm was arrested for assaulting Hester, stabbing him with an ice pick. Hester later told a grand jury that the stabbing was accidental and occurred when he was trying to stop Malcolm from assaulting his wife. Hester told the grand jury he did not resent the man. On the 25^th Malcolm had been released on bond put up by Harrison after agreeing to work shares on his farm.

After posting bond Harrison was driving the two couples back to his property on the back road outside Monroe, Georgia near the Moore’s Ford Bridge when they were intercepted by a mob of 20 armed White men. It’s questionable why Harrison took this route and did not take the direct and shortest route back to his farm. The Moore’s Ford Bridge between Walton and Oconee Counties was out of his way. Many people also questioned why he put up the bond, for a man he didn’t know who was likely to be convicted of attempted murder soon. While he was suspected of setting up at least Malcolm for lynching Harrison insisted he was innocent of any participation for the rest of his life.  In his own account Harrison states when the mob called to pull Dorsey from the car, they called him ‘Charlie” and Harrison tried then to interfere telling the mob they had the wrong man, but the mob leaders threatened to shoot him too.

Harrison also stated that at first, the mob looked like they were going to leave the women alone until Mrs. Malcolm called out some of the men by name since they were not masked. It was then that the apparent leader of the mob ordered the two women to be brought over to the trees and tied there with their husbands. 

The mob then began firing their guns at the four, hitting them at least 60 times each. Moore’s Ford Bridge spanned the Apalachee River 60 miles east of Atlanta, and it was at the end of a dirt cut-off that Harrison later led law enforcement to the bodies. Later speculation though was that law enforcement might have been involved given the unusually low bail or Malcolm.

Funerals were held on July 28 Dorothy Dorsey Malcom and her brother, George Dorsey had services and were buried in the cemetery of Mount Perry Baptist Church in Bishop, Georgia. Mae Murry Dorsey's funeral was at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Monroe, and she was buried in Zion Hill Cemetery in Morgan County; Roger Malcom is believed to be buried at the Chestnut Grove Church Cemetery in Monroe. 

By the time of the funerals news of the killings had gone nationwide gaining the attention of  Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall who offered a reward of $10,000 for information on the killers that led to a conviction. The lynching also outraged President Harry Truman who ordered the Justice Department and FBI to investigate. President Truman also issued an executive order in December 1946 establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which issued a host of recommendations including federal anti-lynching legislation. All attempts to introduce this legislation were stymied by the block of Southern states. 

Arnell called for justice and better civil rights but was careful of how he phrased it as he was in a heated primary against former Governor, also a Democrat, Eugene Talmadge who was a White Supremacist who fought against voting rights, and when Arnall called for equal rights Talmadge shot back that there was no valid reason to give equal rights and that nothing could be gained by doing so. Talmadge also tried to convince people he was against lynching and that none had occurred in his previous terms. This was an outright lie as there had been 14 lynchings of Blacks in the years he had previously been governor. Arnell lost the election to Talmadge, who then stated that the lynching was regrettable and that he would do everything in his power to, “keep such atrocities at a minimum”.

The FBI interviewed some 3000 people. Even so, they could turn up witnesses. They also investigated reports that Talmadge had been in Walton County talking with Barnett Hester’s brother. Agents sent information to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. What was concluded was that the Whites of the two counties were, “Clannish and silent and communicated to each other to stay quiet, the Negroes were fearful and wouldn’t talk either.”

While there were numerous questions about Loy Harrison and his decisions, Talmadge being in the area, and the sheriff and arresting deputies not investigating the deaths, no one ever went on record with testimony or allegations. A federal grand jury was still empaneled in Athens, Georgia but failed to produce an indictment, deciding that the Malcolms and the Dorseys were shot multiple times, “at the hands of person’s unknown”

Several times the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI have reopened the case because of public protests or witnesses coming forward. There has never been even as much as a posthumous accusation on record. In 1999 a marker was placed erected by the Georgia Historical Society and the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee at the site of the murders.

Sources:

https://www.georgiahistory.com/ghmi_marker_updated/moores-ford-lynching/

https://www.waltontribune.com/article_d00f7dc4-91d9-11e9-9fbc-67dc09a0c13f.html

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-atlanta-constitution/123444535/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4359004-GBI-Moore-s-Ford-File.html#document/p327/a400968

https://www.wgauradio.com/news/local/moore-ford-bullet-points-from-gbi-report/uN6DdUd7DkX4wPKSbiWsjJ/

https://www.libs.uga.edu/news/moores-ford

https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/the-moore-ford-lynching-1946/r8bGQrWUH8YRCD1KKUMvRM/