Postwar white mobs lynched black veterans with community silence

Evidence

During the hot summer days of July 1946 black women from across the country picketed the White House. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) had recently denounced the brutal lynching of Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and George Dorsey, a World War II veteran, and his wife Mae Murray Dorsey in Walton County, Georgia. A white mob had lined up like a firing squad and riddled their bodies with bullets in the fields of Moore’s Ford, so much so that “the upper parts of the bodies were scarcely recognizable.” One of the women was seven months pregnant. She was shot more than sixty times. The other had her hands crushed and spine shattered by the firing squad. People heard the screams, but no one in Walton County would talk. As Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, noted, “A reign of terror and fear swept over Walton County and effectively shut the mouths of both whites and Negroes.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 442