before the lynchings, Harrison drove to the house of Dorothy Malcom’s parents, who had begged with him to get Roger Malcom out of jail since the stabbing occurred. Harrison refused to pick him up at first, but suddenly changed his mind. Harrison took along with him Dorothy Malcom , who was pregnant at the time, and George Mae Murray Dorsey to Monroe. Their Harrison signed a $600 bond to bail Roger Malcom out of jail. Harrison, with the two black couples in his car, left the county jail at about 5:30 p.m. on July 25, 1946, and headed back along the Athens Highway toward his farm. Authorities said the route he chose was the longest way home, along a winding dirt road (Suggs,C4). According to Harrison, when he reached the bridge at Moore’s Ford, a car blocked his way (Rivers,1). A mob of twenty to twenty-five unmasked men stopped him at gunpoint (Suggs, C1). Then they took the two couples into the woods, tied them to the trees and shot them. They were so savagely beaten and overwhelmed with bullets that their bodies were ripped to shreds. “ The only way to tell the bodies apart was by their lips.” Investigator Bobby Howard said. When questioning Harrison he told the local authorities and the FBI he could not identify any members of the Hunter 3mob or explain how they knew which way he was coming home. No one was ever prosecuted for the slayings of the African Americans and why it happened is left too much conjecture (Rivers, 1).The six month investigation following the incident that came to be known as the Moore‘s Ford lynching garnered sensational headlines that horrified the nation, but yielded nothing (Ford,1). FBI agents eventually left the county unable to break the code of silence that protected the killers. A state official was quoted as saying at the time that the county’s residents were hampering the investigation by refusing to reveal what they knew (Suggs,C1). Over one hundred...
