The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town

Pitch (The Burning of Washington) makes good use of almost 10,000 official documents from the FBI and the National Archives to reconstruct the tragic events that led to the 1946 murders of four African-Americans on a bridge in rural Georgia. At the time of the murders, one of the victims, a man named Roger Malcolm, was returning from prison after being arrested for stabbing a white a man a few days earlier. His employer, a white farmer named Loy Harrison, paid the bail and picked up Roger up, accompanied by Roger’s wife, Dorothy, and her brother and sister-in-law George and Mae Dorsey. On the ride home, the four victims were pulled from Harrison’s car and gunned to death. Harrison is soon suspected of orchestrating the murders on the bridge that day, but the investigation is hampered by the lead role of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Pitch successfully makes the argument that agency did not have the resources, experience, or commitment to justice needed to close the case. The history of the push for federal anti-lynching laws, the racist opposition to such legislation in Congress, and current attempts to commemorate the tragedy, place the narrative of the probe in a broader context of racism as it exists in small-town communities today. (Mar.)[em] [/em]