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A federal grand jury in Georgia heard 16 days of testimony but declared itself unable to identify or indict anyone involved in the lynching of two Black couples over seventy years ago. A historian is now fighting to find out what happened in the grand jury deliberation room.

The tragic incident that took place in July 1946 when a car carrying four sharecroppers was stopped by a white mob at Moore’s Ford Bridge, overlooking the Apalachee River. They were pulled out the vehicle and shot multiple times along the banks of the river about 50 miles east of Atlanta, GA.

The lynching garnered national attention and then President Harry Truman sent the FBI to rural Walton County to investigate. Agents investigated for months and identified dozens of possible suspects, however, a grand jury convened in December 1946 failed to indict anyone for the lynching of Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and George and Mae Murray Dorsey.

Anthony Pitch, an author of a book on lynching wants the transcripts from the grand jury proceedings unsealed. The federal government argues that grand jury proceedings are secret and the records should remain locked away. Last year a federal judge granted Pitch’s request to unseal the records, U.S. Department of Justice appealed. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the appeal last week according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

At this point, Pitch hasn’t been able to review the records, but said he knows they are “voluminous.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to find there,” he said. “I hope it’s going to be explosive” Pitch said.

Roger Malcolm, 24, was jailed after stabbing and gravely injuring a white man, Barnett Hester, during an argument. Witnesses told authorities Malcolm suspected Hester was sleeping with his wife.

A white farmer, Loy Harrison paid $600 to bail Malcolm out on July 25, 1946. Then was driving the Malcolm’s and Dorseys home, he told investigators, when he was ambushed by a mob.

Harrison who was unharmed told authorities he didn’t recognize anyone in the mob which the FBI numbered at 20 to 25 people. A FBI report at the time noted Harrison was a former Ku Klux Klansman and well-known bootlegger. The FBI investigation identified many suspects but no one was ever charged.

In the 1990’s new information was revealed and law enforcement revisited the case but investigators still said they couldn’t prosecute. Then Gov. Roy Barnes in June of 2000 ordered the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to reopen the case. That investigation closed this past January, shortly after the FBI concluded its latest review.

Journalists, students, cold case groups and historians have visited the bridge and surrounding towns hoping to find clues or to coax people into talking.

Pitch was working on a book, “The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town,” when he petitioned a federal judge to unseal the grand jury transcripts in January 2014 AJC reported.

U.S. District Judge Marc Treadwell in August 2014 denied Pitch’s request, saying there was no evidence the records existed. Pitch later asked Treadwell again in January 2017 to unseal the transcripts, saying his investigation had determined that the National Archives in Washington has the transcripts.

The appeals court judges grilled lawyers for both sides last week. They asked where lines should be drawn for the release of grand jury records and what potential harm could come from releasing the records. They also wanted to know if binding court precedent that says federal judges have the authority to order grand jury records released should apply.

Joe Bell, Pitch’s lawyer, argued that the historical significance of the case and the possibility that real answers might come out were of such great public interest. Previous rulings in the 11th Circuit and in other circuits have allowed the release of grand jury records for reasons not enumerated in the exceptions provided for by the rules, he argued.

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