AP: FBI Reviews 1946 Public Lynching Case

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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LYNCHING_JUSTICE?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=HOME



Loy Harrison, left, is shown in this file photo taken July 26, 1946, with Sheriff J.M. Bond, center, of Oconee County and Coroner W.T. Brown of Walton County, where four blacks were slain near Monroe, Ga., a day earlier. Bond is holding a rope which had allegedly been used to bind the hands of two of the victims. On July 25, 1946, George Dorsey, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcom and Dorothy Malcom were lynched by a mob on the old bridge that spanned the Apalachee River some 60 miles from Atlanta. No one has ever been charged in the murders. (AP Photo/File)



ATLANTA (AP) -- Nearly 60 years after a white mob lynched two black couples on a summer afternoon and got away with it, the FBI is taking another look at the case.

FBI agent Stephen Emmett said the case is being reviewed "to insure that any recent technology or techniques could be used to enhance the prior investigation." He would not elaborate and said a decision on whether to actually reopen the investigation has not yet been made.

The bureau refused to say why it had taken a renewed interest in the 1946 case.

Civil rights activists have pressed witnesses to come forward and break the silence, which they say is the nation's last unsolved public lynching.

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1. Another sad chapter in our history

and the facts that it took years before any anti-lynching legislation was passed (as if we actually needed a law to say that lynching is a crime). Also Jim Crow made sure that when rare cases did get to court the good old boy white jurors nearly always let the white defendants off.