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Columns::February 3, 2003
Weekly Reader
Book recounts Moore's Ford lynching
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$24
Simon & Schuster Inc. |
On a July evening in 1946, a mob of white men killed two young black men and two young black women near Moore’s Ford Bridge in rural Walton County. Since that summer evening, there have never again been as many victims lynched in a single day in the United States.
Now, more than half a century later, Laura Wexler, a former assistant editor for UGA’s Georgia Magazine, offers the first full account of the Moore’s Ford lynching--murders so brutal they stunned the nation and motivated President Harry Truman to put civil rights at the forefront of his national agenda. Wexler recounts the lynching and the resulting four-month FBI investigation.
Drawing from interviews, archival sources and an uncensored FBI report, Wexler takes readers deep into the landscape of 1946 Georgia, creating unforgettable portraits of sharecroppers, bootleggers, sheriffs, the victims and the men who may have killed them.
Fire in a Canebrake--a phrase local people used to describe the sound of the fatal gunshots--pursues the legacy of the Moore’s Ford lynching into the present, exploring the conflicting memories of Walton County’s black and white citizens and examining the testimony of a white man who claims he was a secret witness to the crime. It is a disturbing snapshot of a divided nation on the brink of the civil rights movement and a haunting meditation on race, history and the struggle for truth.
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