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MARTIN REMEMBERED, ACTIVIST SEEK JUSTICE FOR GEORGIA MURDERS: Family, friends commemorate hate crimes.

(April 4, 2005)

Hundreds of peopled gathered in Ebenezer Baptist Church Saturday to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Excerpts of several of his speeches were broadcast in the church where King preached from 1960 to 1968, including his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech he delivered in Memphis, TN just hours before his death on April 4, 1968 when he was gunned down on a hotel balcony.

King was 39 when he was shot and killed by James Earl Ray who was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray died in 1998. Organizer’s of the memorial event urged the audience to “remember King’s life as well as his death, and to celebrate his enduring legacy,” the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, activists protested on behalf of four sharecroppers who were dragged from their car and down a trail to be shot to death in 1946. Joining activists were politicians, and the victim’s families, who are pressing prosecutors to seek indictments against the few surviving suspects of the 57 year-old deaths of Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey.

"This was the most heinous collective crime ever perpetuated against African-Americans in this state" state Rep. Tyron Brooks of Atlanta, the AP reported. Brooks is an honorary member of what has come to be known as the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee, which first came together in 1997 to commemorate the two slain couples. The group gathered support with a rally Friday night at the courthouse and a march — led by Brooks — across the bridge, where the murder took place.

According to the FBI report, Roger Malcom assaulted a white man 11 days before the lynching and subsequently a mob of whites devised a plan to bail Malcolm out of jail and presumably lynch him, police told the FBI. Malcom was bailed from jail by a white farmer named Loy Harrison, in exchange for labor. Malcom recruited his wife and the Dorseys for the job, but in route to the farm, Harrison’s car was suspiciously “hijacked” by the mob. Harrison, who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, said he could not recognize any of the men.

At least two of the named suspects in the FBI files are still alive, of which activists hope will be prosecuted. However District Attorney Ken Wynne, who said he will not seek indictment unless new evidence is presented, has not been swayed. In the FBI files, some of the 55 suspects listed were named only as relatives, friends or neighbors of those involved in the case or simply could not account for their whereabouts.

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