The Last Lynching
How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation’s history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims’ bodies displayed, or even cut up and distributed, as trophies.
Then, in 1946, the dead bodies of two men and two women were found near Moore’s Ford Bridge in rural Monroe, Georgia. Their killers were never identified. And although the crime reverberated through the troubled community, the corrupt courts, and eventually the whole world, many details remained unexplored – until now.
In The Last Lynching, Anthony S. Pitch reveals the true story behind the last mass lynching in America in unprecedented detail. Drawing on some 10,000 previously classified documents from the FBI and National Archives, Lynched paints an unflinching picture of the lives of the victims, suspects, and eyewitnesses, and describes the political, judicial, and socioeconomic conditions that stood in the way of justice. Along the way, The Last Lynching sheds light into a dark corner of American history which no one can afford to ignore.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.