Journalist Seeks Grand Jury Transcripts in Notorious 1946 Georgia Lynching

Seven decades ago, members of a Georgiagrand jury heard 16 days of testimony but declared they were unable identify or indict anyone involved in the brazen lynching of two young black couples on a country road. Now a historian is fighting to find out what happened in that grand jury room.

A car carrying the four sharecroppers was stopped by a white mob at Moore's Ford Bridge, overlooking the Apalachee River, in July 1946. They were pulled from the car and shot multiple times along the banks of the river, a little more than 50 miles east of Atlanta.

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

Anthony Pitch, author of a 2016 book on the lynching, wants the transcripts from the grand jury proceedings unsealed. But the federal government argues that grand jury proceedings are secret and the records should remain locked away.