Activists march to raise awareness about unsolved 1946 lynchings

By The Associated Press

Posted 9:45AM on Saturday, April 2, 2005

Activists marching Saturday across the Moore's Ford bridge near where four black sharecroppers were killed hope the lynching will join the list of civil rights-era cases now being prosecuted.In 1946, a white mob pulled the four from a car near the banks of the Apalachee River about 40 east of Atlanta, dragged them down a wagon trail and shot them to death. Six decades later, no one has been convicted of the killings.It is difficult to prosecute these crimes when so much time has passed since they were committed, said Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees."The biggest problem with the cases is the evidence is gone, and most of the witnesses are dead," Dees said. "You've got to have a decent case."Dees is convinced that if the Moore's Ford case could just reach the inside of a courtroom, there may be a chance for justice."Juries now are more persuaded to find guilt with less proof, and I'm speaking as a criminal defense lawyer now," he said. "The political climate has swung around so far the other way it makes the convictions possible."Prosecutor Ken Wynne, who the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee is petitioning to seek indictments in the case, is skeptical. A 2001 mandate by then-Gov. Roy Barnes to reopen the case has yielded no new information from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, he said.Still, he isn't ruling out a future conviction."It's possible. They've successfully prosecuted old, old homicide cases when new evidence develops," the prosecutor said. "If there is anyone with knowledge of what happened or who did it, we would welcome them coming forward."Saturday's march, which brought out about 50 people, was meant to raise awareness and prompt someone with a crucial piece of information to go to the authorities, said Rich Rusk, Moore's Ford Memorial Committee secretary.If the committee is successful in persuading the prosecutor to seek indictments in the case, it will follow a trend in the last decade of trying civil rights-era murder cases.Convictions began in these cases as early as the '70s. Most notably in 1977, ex-Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.But it was the 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith _ charged with the 1963 sniper murder of Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers _ that planted the seeds of hope among modern-day justice seekers, said attorney Andy Sheldon, who was involved with the Evers case and a half dozen others."You could feel the dam break with Beckwith," Sheldon said.In 1998, former Klan leader Sam Bowers was convicted for the 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr. Two others were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial and another had his indictment dismissed.The convictions of Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Cherry came next in 2001 and 2002, respectively, as the pair were found guilty of the Birmingham church bombing. In 2003, Earnest Avants was convicted of killing 67-year-old handyman Ben Chester White, purportedly in an attempt to lure the Rev. Martin Luther King to Natchez, Miss.Sheldon was a jury consultant in all four cases.Most recently, Edgar Ray Killen was charged in January with the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss."I think it has a lot to do with a change of politics in the South," said Dees, who represented Evers' widow during the Bowers trial. "Nobody back then would come forward and say anything against the white power structure, so these people just kept their mouths shut."Many are trying to capitalize on this change, including Southern Truth and Reconciliation. Inspired by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu's brief stint as a religion professor at Atlanta's Emory University, the group began as a spinoff of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Tutu chaired.As the South African group was established to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid system of white-minority rule, Southern Truth and Reconciliation seeks justice for victims who suffered in the Southern United States.The group's director, Thee Smith, an associate religion professor at Emory, remembers Tutu saying, "If South Africa can do this, imagine what you can do with the resources of a democratic society."The group works with several grassroots organizations, including the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee and the Rosewood Heritage Foundation. The latter wants justice for a 1923 incident in which a white mob burned down a black enclave in Florida and killed some of its residents _ the basis for the 1997 movie, "Rosewood.""These organizations have all along needed public attention, public support. They've needed networking among themselves because they have so much in common," Smith said. "This is not necessarily about prosecuting individuals and compensating victims, but about the restoration and repair of the fabric of society."___On the Net:HASH(0x2867fc4)HASH(0x1ab74f0)