Retracing the Moore’s Ford Lynchings and Aftermath, 77 Years Later

In 1946, 20-year-old Dorothy Malcom spent her mornings nannying four-year-old Samuel Hardman and his two sisters. The Hardman family, white residents of Walton County, Georgia, lived on Moore’s Ford Road near Loy Harrison’s farm, where Malcolm and her husband were employed as sharecroppers, along with Malcom’s brother and his wife, George and Mae Dorsey. 

Hardman, now 81, remembers Dorothy’s presence in his life as a little boy. 

“Dorothy was in charge of caring for my two sisters and myself. I was the youngest one. And so she fixed my sisters' hair and she gave us our baths, she dressed us,” says Hardman. “My sister Betty…was nine years old when the lynchings took place. She was very close to Dorothy. She considered Dorothy her friend, and she was.”

On July 25 of that year, Malcom was murdered less than a mile from Hardman’s childhood home alongside her husband and the Dorseys. Along the dirt road leading to Moore's Ford Bridge, the victims were ambushed by a white mob who forcibly removed them from their car. The mob proceeded to beat and shoot the victims multiple times. The coroner’s report estimated over 60 close-range shots were fired, killing the two young Black couples.

Hardman’s great uncle, Riden Farmer, visited early the next morning to tell their mother what had taken place. 

“My sister Marie and I heard Betty, my older sister, crying and asking mother why Dorothy was killed, and so of course we went into the room,” Hardman recalls. “We heard what mother told Betty. She didn't know why Dorothy was killed. And so that was my first memory of the lynching.”

Many of Hardman’s family members were involved in the subsequent investigation, including his great uncle and his father, who was interviewed twice by police but refused to discuss the murders with Hardman. No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes. 

As an adult, Hardman has spent over 60 years researching and publishing information about the Moore’s Ford lynchings. In 2015, Hardman gave all of his files to the Special Collections Library at the University of Georgia. They contain thousands of pages of FBI files Hardman requested and personally pored over, as well his own review of the files written over years. 

His enduring fixation on the case is a matter of proximity.

“I’ve been writing about Moore’s Ford since the 1950s. The point is I was there and I knew all the people involved in the investigation, members of the Klan and all of ‘em. And only Riden Farmer and my family lived on Moore’s Ford Road,” explains Hardman.

For others, proximity to the Moore’s Ford lynchings has made its impact decades later. Dr. E.M. Beck, a Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of Georgia and an expert in lynching, is one of them. 

In 1999, Beck saw in the local paper that a group, called the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, was planning to meet at a local church. Although Dr. Beck had heard of the Moore’s Ford lynchings, he had no direct involvement with the case. 

“I thought, OK, this is related to some of the work that I’m doing, so I want to get involved,” he explained. 

At the meeting, Beck was informed of the group's plan to clear the overgrown cemetery of Mt. Perry Missionary Baptist Church, the historically Black church where Dorothy Malcom and her brother had been buried together after the Moore’s Ford lynchings. Their graves were unmarked, and the group intended to find them. 

“We chopped and we hacked and we came across a lot of unmarked graves. And that started something we were doing every Saturday when the weather was decent,” says Hardman. 

Efforts to locate the graves were complicated by the lack of knowledge about Moore’s Ford among the church’s own congregation. According to Reverend Hall, the church’s pastor, this is not surprising.

“Most of them wouldn’t know anything about it,” he explains. “All those that were there that knew, that was there when that took place, from my understanding, all those dead. They gone.”

Eventually, a member of the group located a local woman who had attended the 1946 funeral as a 14-year-old. She could only vaguely recall the location of the burial, but when the group investigated, they found a gravesite big enough for two. 

Deciding they must have found the burial site of Dorothy Malcom and her brother, George Dorsey, the group funded markers for the graves. Arrangements were made for Dorsey, who returned from World War II just months before his murder, to receive a military marker as well. 

The group went on to help place a historical marker memorializing the lynching victims and fund a scholarship for local students. Many members of the Committee, including former Georgia Representative Bobby Howard, wanted more. 

“I said to Bobby, ‘You keep saying there will be no reconciliation until there’s justice. How can you have justice if they’re dead?’ Beck recalls asking. “And Bobby told me, ‘Well we think one or two of them are still alive...there are still people who are afraid.”

Now, Beck is sure all who were involved are dead and that there will be no prosecution. 

Longtime efforts by the community activists to unseal the grand jury records from the case ended in 2020, when the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta blocked their release. The records contained the testimonies of over 100 individuals involved in the investigation. Now, any new evidence they contain will remain locked away. According to Beck, this was the death blow to any hope the case might one day be solved.

Still, resolution might be found somewhere other than prosecution. 

“The thing that I really got out of it personally was working with those guys on the cemetery. I mean, that became most meaningful to me, that set of relations,” Hardman explains. “That we were from different backgrounds, totally different experiences, and just how important it is when you get involved in a common cause. Especially a cause that involves actual work, not just an intellectual cause, but actually digging, slashing, cutting, getting your hands ripped on barbed wire. How unifying that is.”

The Moore’s Ford lynchings were just four of 531 in Georgia, the state with the second-highest number of recorded lynchings according to the Tuskegee Institute. Still, when they hear the word lynching, the community near Moore’s Ford thinks of the four young sharecroppers killed just around the corner. 

Beck and Hardman both acknowledge that the obsession with the case perseveres in the community with no actionable step forward. Still, the remaining sites and scenes make the Moore’s Ford lynchings difficult for the community to forget. 

“Grandmother said something very precious was broken and that it never could be repaired,” says Hardman. “However, no one will ever know the great suffering that was caused by the Moore’s Ford lynching.”