Late in the afternoon of 23 July, four white men walked into the middle of a quiet road on the outskirts of Monroe, Georgia, blocking the path of a bright yellow Chevrolet sedan. The leader of the group – a white-haired, pot-bellied man in his 60s – approached the car and peered through the front window. Contorting his face into the most menacing grimace he could manage, he surveyed the people inside: a white driver, two black men and two black women.

“We want that nigger Roger!” he shouted, straining to make himself heard over the rain pelting the asphalt road.

“Get him out of the car,” he barked. His accomplices approached the Chevy, yanked open its doors, and pulled out one of the black men, then the other, a skinny twentysomething in a pale yellow, short-sleeved shirt. “That’s him,” said one of the white henchmen, grabbing him by the arm.

The leader of the gang approached, leering. “Stab a white man, will you boy?” He had a cigarette in his mouth, and he blew smoke straight in his quarry’s face. “You’re gonna die, nigger. Billie John, get that rope on him. Take him to that tree down there. We’ll show him what we do with uppity niggers.”

One of the accomplices – also white-haired, also pot-bellied – put a noose around the black man’s neck. Because the white man was the shorter of the two, he had to stretch upward for a moment, standing almost on tiptoes. He was trying to look bloodthirsty, but instead he looked nervous, maybe even a little queasy.

By the side of the road, about 100 people, most of them black, watched from under umbrellas. Many were filming the scene with phones or tablets.

Then one of the black women leaned out of the car. “Hey!” she shouted, pointing at one of the white men. “I know you. I’ve seen you before. I know you!”

The crowd let out a low moan – a collective acknowledgment of both disbelief and despair at the woman’s boldness in the presence of white aggressors. (“I mean, how could she?” one crowd member asked me later. “What was she thinking?”) Inside the car, the other black woman shriek-sobbed in terror.

“Oh, so you know him? Do you now?” said the leader.

For a moment, his accomplices conferred. “Four dead niggers is better than one,” one remarked loudly, triggering another round of screams from inside the Chevy.

The leader concurred. “Get ’em all out of the car!”

The white men pulled the two women from the car and started pushing all four of their captives down a short, steep path that led through a line of trees to the bank of the Apalachee River.

The onlookers followed. More phones and tablets came out. A cameraman from a German television station positioned himself by the tree line, making sure he got the perfect close-up of the group coming down from the road, the white men jeering and yelling, the black couples sobbing, calling each other’s names and praying.

Down on the riverbank, the white men steered the two black men and two black women on to a panel of fake green turf, where they bound them together with a length of rope.

The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching reenactment. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

Some of the onlookers had a good idea what was coming next; they’d seen it before, or read about it. Others had a hazy sense of what they were about to witness. All they knew was that we were gathered to see a lynching re-enacted at the exact spot where it had taken place 70 years earlier.

Seven decades is a long time. But later, more than one person would tell me that, as the scene’s climax approached, they felt the distance between now and then contracting. After all, a handful of people in the audience had been alive on 25 July 1946, when these murders were committed. Some of them had been living just a few miles away from where we were now standing in the pouring rain, feeling the heavy presence of a violent history, and bracing for the brutal end.

In the century after the end of the American civil war, lynching became a fixture of life in the United States, especially in the south. Though often remembered as acts of vigilante justice carried out by extremists, these acts of terror were widely tolerated by state and federal officials – and often attended by large crowds that included prominent local citizens and their elected representatives, all eager to see newly liberated black southerners reminded that white people could kill them with impunity.

The exact number of murders will never be tallied, but the most comprehensive recent study has identified at least 4,075 killings between 1877 and 1950. There has been no prominent public memorial or monument to the thousands of black lives taken by white terrorism in America. Plans to build the first such memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, were announced only a few months ago.

But for the last 12 years, there has been one unique and extraordinary effort to commemorate a single lynching: the infamous 1946 killing of two black men and their wives in Monroe – a crime that would shock the nation and help spark major changes in the law, even as its perpetrators went unidentified and unpunished.

On 14 July 1946, a 24-year-old black farm worker named Roger Malcolm drove a knife into the stomach of his boss and landlord, a prominent white farm owner named Barnette Hester. Malcolm and Hester had both grown up in Monroe, a major cotton-farming town in Walton County, 40 miles east of Atlanta. As children, they had even played together on the Hester family farm. But now they were separated by a vast gulf: Hester was white and owned land, from which he profited handsomely; Malcolm was black and worked the land, from which he eked out a living. Like many black citizens of Georgia, Malcolm was determined to leave soon and head north to Chicago in search of better employment and social mobility.

Malcolm, a notoriously short-tempered man, had come to believe that his common-law wife, Dorothy, was having sex with Hester. Drunk and furious, Malcolm confronted Hester in front of his house. In the scuffle that ensued, Malcolm took out a knife and stabbed him. The fight was witnessed by several other members of the Hester family, who were inclined to kill Malcolm on the spot. But they demurred. “You would have to serve time,” counselled Ida Hester, Barnette’s mother, according to one account. “You let the others do it.”

Hester was sent to a local hospital. Malcolm was locked in the local jail. Eleven days later, when it was clear that Hester would survive his wounds, a white cotton farmer named Loy Harrison came downtown to secure Malcolm’s release, notionally bailing him out in exchange for future labour. Such arrangements were widespread in the south. In Monroe, especially during the cotton harvest, it was common for local sheriffs and police to spend Saturdays making sure the jail was stocked with cheap workers for the week to come.

Dorothy Malcolm had a brother, George Dorsey, a veteran of the second world war who lived and worked on Harrison’s farm with his wife, Mae Murray Dorsey. Together, Dorothy, George and Mae Murray had lobbied Harrison to post Malcolm’s bail. He would be safer, they thought, as a source of white profit than as a black man sitting in a poorly guarded jail in the centre of town. Dorothy, George, and Mae accompanied Harrison on the journey to pick up Malcolm.

Shortly after he had collected Malcolm from jail and driven out of downtown Monroe with both Malcolms and both Dorseys in his car, Harrison came to a stop just before the wooden slat bridge that crossed the Apalachee River. Up ahead, there was a group of white men blocking the road. They had guns. A few minutes later, the Malcolms and Dorseys were dead, each of their bodies shot multiple times with pistols and shotguns at point-blank range. Either before or after the shooting started, someone tied a noose around Roger’s neck, but he was not hanged.

The lynching of black citizens had been common ever since the emancipation of slaves, and the failure of the post-war Reconstruction programme designed to enforce racial equality in the former Confederacy. But the nature of these murders had evolved over the years.

Loy Harrison (right), Coroner WT Brown (center) and Sheriff JM Bond (left) at Moore’s Ford Bridge in Georgia on 26 July 1946, a day four black people were killed there by a lynch mob. Photograph: RF/AP

The 1880s and 90s were characterised by “spectacle lynchings”, as historians came to call them: public events at which white people gathered by the hundreds to watch victims, typically black men, get tortured, set on fire, hanged, castrated and/or dismembered on their way to death. (Often, spectators would get caught up in the frenzy of the moment and join in the violence.) In the early 20th century, as activists and journalists drew attention to the persistence of racist mob justice across the south, national outrage grew. But lynchings did not stop: they decreased in number, and they went underground. Now the murders were carried out quickly and quietly by small groups on lonely back roads, where no one could see. The style was different, but since lynchings were never prosecuted, the message was the same: watch what we can do.

The men who lynched the Malcolms and Dorseys in 1946 did not advertise ahead of time in local newspapers, as their predecessors did, or encourage their neighbours to attend with families and picnic baskets in tow. No one cheered or took pictures while it happened. No photographs appeared on the front page of newspapers the following day. Like so many others, they were confident that the protective shield of the white power structure would keep them safe so long as they weren’t too ostentatious.

This confidence was more than warranted. Local police did not even launch an investigation into the murder of the Malcolms and Dorseys. On all four death certificates, the coroner wrote the bureaucratic phrase that, for years, had been listed as the cause of death for victims of lynchings across the country: “At the hands of persons unknown”.

FBI agents came to Monroe two days after the murders, looking to see whether a federal prosecution might be possible. But they quickly realised that none of the white residents of Walton County wanted to help them – some because they were too scared, others because they were helping with the cover-up. Lamar Howard, a black 19-year-old who had witnessed a conversation between the plotters at the ice house where he worked, was brave enough to come forward and testify. In return, two white men beat him to within an inch of his life.

From the perspective of the killers, the lynching could hardly have been more successful. News of the deed spread almost instantly through the entire county by word of mouth, searing the threat of extrajudicial violence into the consciousness of all who heard about it.

At the same time, its specific details – who, exactly, played what role; who tied the noose; who pulled the triggers; who lied to protect the guilty – were already slipping through the fingers of anyone who tried to grasp them. The killers must have been confident that, as time passed, the story would only grow fainter, and the facts of the crime would be forgotten. Only the fear would remain.

* * *

But then something unexpected happened. Two days after the lynching, news of the killings reached Walter F White, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who had spent decades investigating lynchings across the country firsthand. White was black, but could pass as white – something he had used to his advantage over the years while interviewing proud lynchers about their exploits. A canny publicist, he felt that the Monroe lynchers’ decision to kill Dorothy and Mae Murray along with their husbands might mobilise public disgust. (Women were lynched relatively rarely.)

White sent graphic briefings on the case to news outlets across the country. Reporters started flocking to Monroe, bringing America news that lynching – which many white people thought of as a relic of the past – was alive and well.

In cities across the country, people took to the streets in protest. In Atlanta, a teenage Martin Luther King Jr was inspired to write a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (In his letter, King refutes the commonplace argument that lynchings were an attempt to protect white women from the sexual aggression of black men: “It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.”) The Justice Department was flooded with mail expressing shock and frustration that such a crime could go unpunished in 1940s America. At the White House, a deluge of outraged telegrams demanded that President Harry Truman take action.

Truman had never displayed much concern for racial justice. But like many other observers of the Monroe lynching, he was particularly disturbed that one of the victims, George Dorsey, had spent more than two years of the second world war fighting for the US in the South Pacific – risking his life for his country, only to be gunned down by white supremacists at home. In September, Truman invited White to Washington to give a talk on the state of racial violence nationwide, including the case in Monroe. When the presentation was over, the president’s face was pale. “My God,” he said. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that.” Three months later, he created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which played a key role in ending the racial segregation of the federal workforce and the US military.

The grave site of George and Dorothy Dorsey, who were killed in the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

But back in Monroe, the murders stayed in the shadows. “If anyone would be fool enough to talk about the lynching, they would also be killed,” one white man told the FBI. Others proudly declared that, even if they did know something, they wouldn’t say so. A grand jury of white citizens, many from Walton County, failed to approve charges against a single suspect. Decades passed. The suspects began to age and die. For as long as he lived, Loy Harrison – the farmer who had secured Roger Malcolm’s release from jail – insisted, increasingly implausibly, that he had not been part of the lynching plot, and that he had not recognised any of the killers. “Why, I’m as mad as anybody, the way they killed my niggers,” he told the FBI during their original investigation. “I need all the nigger hands I can get.”

The FBI investigation closed. The reporters went home. In Walton County, people – white and black – talked about the lynching behind closed doors or not at all, and those who remembered that it had happened started to die and move away. Some told their children the story, but many preferred to avoid the subject. (Roger Malcolm’s own son from an earlier marriage, who was spirited out of town on the night of the murders, only learned the full story of his father’s killing decades later.)

Then, after 45 years of silence, a witness came forward. In 1991, a 55-year-old white man named Clinton Adams walked into the FBI field office in Panama City, Florida. When he was 10, he said, he had witnessed the lynching by the Apalachee River from a nearby field. He had seen some of the lynchers’ faces, he said, and knew who they were. Adams claimed to have been intimidated into silence by a decades-long campaign of harassment that had followed him from state to state. His dramatic story unleashed a wave of media interest, including newspaper stories, television reports, an interview with Oprah Winfrey, and an eventual book.

Had Adams not come forward, the case might have fallen even further into obscurity. Instead, it became a symbol of the scars that racial violence had left on the American psyche – and the ways that rigorously enforced white silence, both past and present, had been integral to distorting and sanitising the history of that violence. The FBI, which had recently reopened a spate of cold cases from the civil rights era, added the Monroe lynching to the pile.

The excitement of Adams’s revelations did not last long: the FBI had lost much of the original evidence, and his testimony was riddled with contradictions and chronological errors that made it practically useless. But, whatever his motivations, he had successfully brought the story back to life.

A few years later, in 1997, a small group of activists in Georgia, both black and white, began searching for ways to engrave the memory of the lynching on to the history of Walton County. Calling themselves the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee (after the bridge that crosses the Apalachee River by the site of the lynching), they began to hold community forums in which people could share their memories of the lynchings, and their experiences of racial violence. (For many decades after the end of Reconstruction, the county had been among the worst places in the country to be a free black American.)

The historical marker sign at the roadside near the site of the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

The activists pushed the state of Georgia to erect an official roadside sign to mark the site of the killings, which was put up in 1999. They combed through abandoned cemeteries until they found the victims’ graves. That same year, they held an approximation of the military funeral George Dorsey had never received. (Lamar Howard, who had been beaten after daring to testify against the lynchers 53 years earlier, attended the service.) The activists received a steady trickle of death threats and hate mail, but they also slowly won local allies, including some white people.

In 2005, Tyrone Brooks, a veteran of the southern civil rights movement who had become a Georgia state legislator, approached the activists in Monroe with a quixotic idea: a re-enactment. Just think, he urged the group, of how much media attention that would bring to the case – of the pressure it would put on the FBI.

In the south, re-enactments are used primarily to commemorate the battles of the civil war. They are often imbued, to varying degrees, with nostalgia for the “lost cause” of the slaveholding Confederacy. So the suggestion that the activists might perform a lynching instead was “a very mischievous idea”, said Mark Auslander, an anthropologist who studies memorial rituals and has attended the Monroe event several times. “Re-enactments are, in many ways, the prime currency of memorialisation in the south.” But “they don’t mention slavery, they don’t mention Jim Crow, they don’t mention lynchings”. On the surface, each traditional re-enactment is an exercise in remembering; taken together, they represent a collective forgetting, in which the Confederacy is defined by nothing but the brave spirit of its soldiers.

The idea of performing the lynching tore the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee apart, a split that was particularly painful because it occurred largely along racial lines. Many black members of the group (though certainly not all) found themselves drawn to the re-enactment. Most white members found the idea viscerally repellent: a confrontational spectacle unlikely to serve the cause of reconciliation. “We thought it was a step too far,” Richard Rusk, one of committee’s founding members, told me. “Many steps too far. Totally inappropriate, too divisive. I mean, can you name one other place in the world where people get together to act out a horrible, disgusting piece of racial violence with absolutely no element of uplift? Can you?”

The first re-enactment took place in July 2005, an improvised and emotional performance for an audience that included a reporter for the New York Times and civil rights luminaries such as Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery, Martin Luther King’s successor as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It has been staged every year since.

* * *

Among the many logistical challenges of re-enacting a lynching, the greatest might be recruiting white cast members. Based on the available evidence, there were at least a dozen white men involved in the original crime. In recent years, the organisers have been lucky to get five or six. “Most white people just refuse,” Cassandra Greene, a 57-year-old Atlanta minister who has directed the re-enactment for the last eight years, told me. (She is black.) “I ask everyone. I ask my white friends. They all say no. They all say: ‘Oh, I could never do that.’” In the first year of the re-enactment, the four white men who had volunteered to portray the killers backed out at the last minute; the lynch mob was played by young black men wearing white plastic masks.

Casting the black roles is only slightly easier, Greene told me. Some people she approaches act enthusiastic, then never show up for rehearsal. Some rehearse, but then back out before the actual performance. Some perform for a year or two, then drop out. “I mean, I get it,” she told me. “It hurts. It fills your mind with hurt. I haven’t been on a date in years, and why not? Because I’m thinking about all this instead.”

Cassandra Greene, director of the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching reenactment. Working on it ‘fills your mind with hurt’, she says. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

“It changes you,” said Bobbie Paul, the white director who preceded Greene. “It uses you up. It used me up.”

Two nights before this year’s re-enactment, most of the cast gathered to rehearse at Sights and Sounds, a single-room museum of black American cultural artefacts – from fugitive slave posters to Jackson 5 records – housed in a moribund shopping mall in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta about an hour’s drive from Monroe. In its early incarnations, the cast was drawn mostly from Monroe – today a town of about 13,000 – and Walton County. But over the years, local participation has steadily declined. This year, every member of the all-volunteer cast was an Atlanta resident.

The Malcolms and Dorseys were played by young actors trying to break into professional film and theatre. Only one had participated in the re-enactment before, and none had heard of the Moore’s Ford lynching until Greene contacted them asking for their help. Darrius Bradshaw, who played Roger Malcolm, told me that during rehearsals – which, he reminded me, consisted largely of older white men calling him “nigger,” tying a noose around his neck, and pretending to shoot him repeatedly – he sometimes sank into depression, and sometimes flared into sudden fury. “Then,” he said, “later, out in the real world, I’d find myself back in those feelings, not even realising at first where they came from.”

For the actors and the audience alike, it was impossible to ignore the charged significance of re-enacting the state-sanctioned murder of innocent black men and women at a moment when one candidate for president was running a campaign of undisguised racism – and police across the country were still killing unarmed black men with numbing regularity.

“It’s even sadder this year,” said Lisa Searcy, who played Mae Murray in 2015 and Dorothy this July. “You read the script, you rehearse, then you go home and turn on the news and you can’t stop the tears.” She did not mean to suggest, she quickly added, that 2016 was the same as 1946. “But the history really weighs on you hard.”

At last year’s re-enactment, Searcy met a woman who introduced herself as a descendant of a man named Maceo Snipes. Five days before the lynching in Monroe, Snipes had been murdered in Taylor County, 100 miles to the south – for the offence of exercising his right to vote. (The winner of that election, Governor Eugene Talmadge, campaigned on a promise to ensure that Georgia’s black population, then the largest in the nation, would never have access to the ballot box.)

Later that night, when Searcy mentioned the story to her parents – who had family roots in Taylor County – they suddenly went silent. It turned out that she, too, was related to Snipes; her parents had never told her. At the time, Searcy told me, she couldn’t understand their reticence. “But the more I thought about it, the more I got it,” she said – especially once this year’s rehearsals started. “It’s sad, but I can understand now. I can feel this part of myself that would maybe turn away and not say anything. It’s just too terrible. You don’t want to touch it.”

Actor Darrius Bradshaw, who played the role of Roger in the reenactment this year. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

Most of the white cast members were not actors at all. One longtime participant, Bob Caine, is a descendant of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Atlanta in 1915, after being sentenced to life in prison for a crime he likely did not commit. Unhappy that Frank had not received the death penalty, a group of prominent white people (including a former governor of Georgia) broke into the prison where he was being held, abducted him and hung him from a tree.

Wade Marbaugh, a 67-year-old journalist who for years has played the lynching crew’s ringleader (and whose wife and daughters have also participated), smiled ruefully as he recalled his efforts to recruit his white neighbours and coworkers for the lynch mob. “At this point, they just ignore me. If it’s email, they don’t respond. If it’s conversation, they cut it just as short as they can. These are people I’ve known for years.”

This was frustrating, he said, but not impossible to understand. “It’s not easy. It’s not a TV show where the bad guys are the bad guys, and they’re on the screen and you’re in your chair.” While preparing for his first performance, he drove out to Monroe and made his way to the site of the lynching. “It was just staggering,” he said. “It knocked me down. I wept and wept.”

A crucial feature of the re-enactment is that, by the standards commonly used to judge realist drama, it isn’t particularly accomplished. The actors are either amateurs or apprentices still finding their way to whatever dramatic powers they might possess. It is hard for them to all get together to rehearse, especially because people drop out so frequently. Often, secondary members will have joined the production just a few days before the re-enactment.

The budget hovers reliably around zero dollars, occasionally supplemented by infusions from Greene or other supporters. This means lots of 21st-century touches in the costumes; it means guns that look and sound like the plastic toys they are. The yellow Chevy – which is more 1950s than 1946 – is only rented for the day of the performance, so the cast doesn’t get to use it in rehearsals. As a result, the key scene where the Malcolms and Dorseys are pulled from the car is marked by pauses in which the cast tries to pretend it isn’t pausing to figure out who needs to reposition themselves where in order to keep the action moving.

In stage plays and films, imperfections such as these can break the carefully cultivated spell of realism, or stop it from being cast in the first place. But as I watched the Malcolms and Dorseys get pulled from the yellow Chevy, I felt a claustrophobic flush of fear and shame more intense than any film could elicit. In the weeks leading up to the performance, I had heard stories of audience members crying, sobbing and calling out in pain. Even fierce critics of the re-enactment had admitted to me that, after attending out of curiosity, they had found it unexpectedly moving.

‘As I watched them get pulled from the yellow Chevy, I felt a claustrophobic flush of fear and shame’ … the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching re-enactment. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

In conversation after conversation, the same phrases kept popping up: like a dream; like a nightmare; slow-motion; unreal; super-real. And still I was shocked by the ragged intensity of my reaction. The scene in front of me wasn’t a careful or tasteful copy of the past: it was a live, messy attempt to drag a heavy memory up into the light of day. Not so it could be changed or fixed – the moment was trapped in terrible amber; the Malcolms and Dorseys would not be saved – but simply to insist it could not be denied.

The audience was almost entirely black, with a sprinkling of white people (myself included). Some of those present were old enough to remember the reign of the lynch mobs, and a small handful had actually been in Monroe on the day of the murders. Joseph Hunter, an 81-year-old black man who was visiting relatives near Monroe in the summer of 1946, approached me at a gathering held at Monroe’s First Baptist Church before the re-enactment. What he remembered, he told me, was being suddenly yanked inside by his aunt when she got the news. “She closed the shades, she locked the door, and she said: ‘Stay.’” His mother was in Connecticut, more than 800 miles away. As soon as she heard what had happened, she got in the car and drove continuously until she reached Hunter and his siblings the next day. “She had to have us close,” he said.

He has attended the re-enactment every year since it started, he said. But he couldn’t always watch the whole thing: “It’s too easy for me to imagine black people getting shot.” The first few years, as the climax approached, he reflexively turned his back on the scene and walked away. “I know it’s not real,” he told me. “I know. But … ” He didn’t finish the sentence.

As the crowd followed the re-enactors off the road for the final scene, I watched Hunter pause and stare at the ground. After a few seconds, he lifted his head and slowly walked toward the river.

The final moments of the re-enactment took barely a minute to play out, but they were were its slowest and most excruciating.

The lynching crew tied their victims together and forced them onto the patch of fake turf. They stepped back, raised their plastic toy guns, and aimed. The ringleader counted down – three, two, one – and then the white men squeezed their triggers. In some past years, people have set off fireworks in the woods to simulate the gun shots; in others, the shooters have yelled “Pow! Pow!” This year, there was no sound at all. The victims fell on to the patch of fake turf that had been laid out for this purpose. (In the past, actors who fell directly on the ground were painfully bitten by red ants in the grass.) As they collapsed, they burst bags of fake blood secreted in their shirts.

For a moment, everyone – the shooters, the victims, the audience – was completely still. The victims, still bound by the ropes that had been tied around them, were pressed together on the ground.

In 2005, when the re-enactment began, this was the moment where it concluded. But in the years since, more scenes have been added. Most of the new scenes take place earlier in the day, before the lynching itself, in spots around Walton County. The audience sees Roger Malcolm stab Barnette Hester, listens to gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge froth at the mouth about the disgrace of black suffrage, and visits the victims’ graves. But one addition has been tacked on after the shooting.

Spectators and camera crew at the final scene of the re-enactment. Photograph: Ben Rollins/The Guardian

Bob Caine, the white re-enactor descended from Leo Frank, walked over to the dead bodies, and, after peering at them for a moment, bent down over Lisa Searcy and pressed his hands into her abdomen, as if he were cutting her open. When he stood up, he was clutching a plastic doll of a black baby, dripping with syrupy fake blood. A woman in the audience shrieked, and the rest watched – or kept filming – as Caine held up the baby for all to see, trying his best to look triumphant instead of sickened.

There is no firm evidence that Dorothy Malcolm was pregnant when she was murdered (and strong evidence to suggest that she wasn’t). But the rumour has always lurked around the edges of the story, and similar acts of foeticide have been documented in other lynchings. To many regular participants in the re-enactment, the unborn Malcolm baby has become a rich, central symbol: of the severity of racial violence, of the futures it made (and still makes) impossible, of the particular ways it did and does target black women. To others, though, the role of the unborn child is distasteful, even sickening. Several years ago, a group of white feminists involved in the re-enactment – including the previous director – left after failing to convince their castmates that the child should be removed from the script.

“The re-enactment has a very complex relationship to what scholars call historical veracity,” said Mark Auslander. “On one hand, it appears to be about honouring and remembering exactly what happened in this particular spot in this particular day. On the other hand, it’s about the creation of resonant myths and rituals. Re-enactors might say that they’re doing it to educate, or to push the FBI to prosecute. That’s not untrue, but it’s a partial explanation.”

“We summon up the spirit and presence of the dead for all kinds of reasons,” Auslander continued. “We do it to get to know the dead, to spend time with them, to continue life in the face of death. That’s what gives the re-enactment its force, its aliveness, and that’s what makes it so draining for everyone who touches it.”

Racism in America has always been a matter of power – to enslave, to kill without consequence, to oppress, to segregate, to silence. But it has also been about the power to determine which memories the country sanctifies and which it discards. White America’s preference – the preference of power, that is – has been for stories of progress and redemption, of national injury stitched up and healed over. The re-enactment in Monroe is a different type of story: an open wound that has festered for 70 years of repression and neglect. This what makes it necessary for some people, and unbearable for others.

Technically, the case remains open. In 2008, local newspapers reported that FBI agents were digging up land in Monroe to look for guns used in the lynching. As recently as last year, federal agents were conducting interviews in the area. But even the most impassioned activists admit that no charges are likely to materialise.

Every year, the re-enactment concludes with a song, performed while the victims lie motionless on the ground. This year, an Atlanta jazz singer, Ja’Naan, sang Strange Fruit, the haunting protest song about lynchings made famous by Billie Holliday. Two days earlier, at the final rehearsal, I watched her deliver the song with practised poise. Now, her voice cracked and her body shook. The victims tried their best to remain completely still. Cassandra Greene, the director, watched from the sidelines, sobbing.

On 25 July 1946, just hours after the Malcolms and Dorseys were murdered, white people from Monroe and the surrounding towns started driving to Moore’s Ford Bridge. They had heard through the local rumour mill about what had just happened, and now they wanted souvenirs, like the spectators of lynchings past. Policemen had already snatched up most of the bullets and rope for their own personal collections, but there were still some scraps of clothing at the scene. One college student found a tooth, which he gave to a female friend, who put it on her charm bracelet. Many people took pictures, posing with bloodstains or bullet holes in the trees nearby.

When the singing came to a stop, the audience did not turn away. They moved closer, walking toward the victims, holding their phones and tablets aloft, to claim these images as their own.

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