During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt developed New Deal programs to hire unemployed men to work on public works projects. In the South, New Deal jobs typically provided higher wages than those in the private sector and under those programs black men were paid the same wage as white men.
Wealthy white land-owning families in Georgia complained that their sharecroppers would rather work on better-paying New Deal projects. They asked Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, a virulent racist and white supremacist who admired Adolph Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, to intercede with Roosevelt.
Allegedly, in 1933 a sharecropper wrote to Talmadge: “I wound’t plow nobody’s mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH.” Talmadge sent the letter to Roosevelt, who wrote back: “Somehow I cannot get into my head that wages on such a scale [as those of sharecroppers] make possible a reasonable American standard of living.”
At the time, as today, the South had the lowest wages in the nation. Today the Georgia state minimum is $5.15, although that is overridden by the federal minimum for most workers, which has been $7.25 for 15 years, since July 2009. (Louisiana and Mississippi have no minimum wage laws.)
Although Roosevelt did not introduce any civil rights measures during his time as President, Talmadge opposed policies favorable to black people, especially farm and relief-work programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. He claimed these programs encouraged people to be lazy. “The way to handle a relief program was like how Mussolini was handling it in Italy, namely to line these people up and take the troops and make them work,” he told a reporter.
In 1936 Talmadge made a futile attempt to challenge FDR for the presidency. Among his most vocal supporters was Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Dixon’s novel opposed equal rights for black people by romanticizing white supremacy, promoting the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and glorifying the Klan as morally superior vigilantes.
(The novel was the basis for the 1915 D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, a film which reignited the Klan and contributed to the Red Summer of 1919, during which white supremacist terrorism spread across the United States and there were some three dozen race riots.)
In August of 1936, a United Press (UP) article in the Atlanta Constitution titled “Gene Selects Hitler as Favorite ‘Author’,” reported that Talmadge told a reporter that although he didn’t read many books, he had read Mein Kampf seven times. The Nazi publication Die Bewegung praised Talmadge by saying “Governor Eugene Talmadge, of Georgia, is obviously a very intelligent man.”
Handily defeated in his run at the presidency early in the 1936 campaign season, Talmadge become increasingly right-wing. At one rally, he said: “We in the South love the Negro in his place – but his place is at the back door.”
As a leader of Georgia’s racists and segregationists, Talmadge was elected Governor again in 1940. During this time he actively promoted segregation and white supremacy, including advocating for racism in the University System of Georgia, especially during the Cocking Affair when he declared support for integration in the university system elitist and accused administrators of being “foreigners” (non-Georgians) and communists, leading to several firings.
Charged by his opponents of acting like the dictators he admired, Talmadge said: “I’m what you call a minor dictator. But did you ever see anybody that was much good who didn’t have a little dictator in him?”
Talmadge, a heavy drinker who would die of hepatitis complicated by cirrhosis of the liver, became increasingly outraged and unhinged in the years leading to the Second World War. Claiming FDR had purposely gotten the United States into the war to end white supremacy, he engaged in long tirades against Roosevelt, the New Deal, World War II and black Americans.
A newspaper Talmadge’ founded, The Statesman printed his editorials railing against Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. During the 1944 election the paper ran the headline “Election of Roosevelt Means Promoting Negroes in Georgia.”
Returning from World War Two, African-American veterans resented being treated as second-class citizens and began to press for civil rights, including the right to vote. The number of lynchings rose dramatically, but after the Supreme Court of the United States’ Smith v. Allwright decision, which ruled that whites only primaries were unconstitutional, some black people in Georgia still prepared to vote in the July primary. This legal change is believed to have contributed to the lynchings which were used to suppress black voters.
In 1946, then three-time former governor Talmadge was running again, he said, to combat the Smith v. Allwright decision. With the Republican Party all but non-existent in the South since the end of Reconstruction, winning the Democratic primary meant winning the general election.
Talmadge’s struggling primary campaign was noted for its violent racist rhetoric, including his boasting about assaulting and whipping black sharecroppers working for his family when he was a young man and his claim to have chased a black man with an ax for sitting next to a white woman.
While campaigning in Walton County, Georgia, Talmadge held a rally attended by, among about 600 others, two local white farmers: Barnette Hester and J. Loy Harrison. Both men spoke afterward to Talmadge at a campaign barbecue. Harrison was a long-time supporter of Talmadge who had named his second son after the governor.
Harrison employed two young African-American couples as sharecroppers on his nearby farm: George W. Dorsey was a veteran of World War II who had only returned from the service less than nine months before, after having served almost five years in the Pacific. His wife was Mae (Murray) Dorsey. The other couple was Roger Malcom and his wife Dorothy (Dorsey) Malcom, who was pregnant at the time.
It was alleged that on July 11th, Roger Malcom stabbed Barnette Hester. He was arrested and held in the county jail. According to an FBI investigation, the next day Talmadge returned to Walton County – just five days before the primary on July 17.
According to an FBI investigation, a witness saw Talmadge talking to George Hester, the brother of Barnette Hester, in front of the Walton County courthouse and offering to “take care of the Negro” that had stabbed his brother, in exchange for the Hester family using their influence to help win Walton County.
On July 25, Harrison drove Malcom’s wife Dorothy and the Dorseys to the county seat in Monroe, where he posted the $600 bail for Roger Malcolm. On their return, they were stopped near the Moore’s Ford Bridge by about 20-25 armed white men.
Harrison watched as the mob took both couples to a large oak tree, tied the women beside their husbands, and by the coroner’s estimate fired about 60 shots into them at close range. They then allegedly mutilated their corpses, a common practice during lynchings in the South. Harrison later claimed he couldn’t identify anyone in the mob.
The case attracted national attention and large protests were held, including in Washington, DC and New York City.
The FBI investigated for four months in 1946, the first time it had been ordered to investigate a civil rights case. A reward of $12,500 was offered for information leading to a conviction. A grand jury did not return any indictments, and the killers were never held accountable.
That December, President Harry Truman created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. His administration also introduced anti-lynching legislation in Congress, but could not get it past that body’s white-supremacists.
In the 1990s publicity about the case led to a new investigation. According to the Equal Justice Initiative:
“The FBI recently reopened its investigation into the lynching, only to encounter continued silence and obstruction at the highest levels. In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that ‘until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.'”
In recent years, the lynching at the Moore’s Ford Bridge has led to more activism including an annual memorial march and legal efforts to gain access to the sealed grand jury transcripts. The Georgia Historical Society erected a historical marker near the murder site in 1999, on the 53rd anniversary of the killings.
In 2020, US Department of Justice under President Donald Trump’s Attorney General, New York City native William Barr, sought and received a federal court ruling to keep the grand jury records in the case sealed.
When Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge died before taking office later in 1946, his coffin laid in state at the Georgia capitol, decorated with a wreath reading KKKK (Knights of the Ku Klux Klan).
The Talmadge Memorial Bridge crossing the Savannah River remains named in his honor and a statue of Talmadge remains standing on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol. Created by Steffen Thomas near Stone Mountain (where the modern KKK was revived in 1915), Talmadge’s likeness has six fingers on his right hand.
Illustrations, from above: President Roosevelt visiting CCC Camp Meriwether in Georgia; actors costumed in Ku Klux Klan garb with a white actor in blackface in a still from The Birth of a Nation (1915); student protesters burning an effigy of Governor Talmadge in response to the Cocking Affair (UGA University Archive); Eugene Talmadge speaking at a rally in 1946 (Georgia State University); NAACP activists march in front of the White House to protest the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching, July 30, 1946; and the flag-draped casket of George Dorsey with that of his sister Dorothy Dorsey Malcom at their funeral.
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