Show on old racial killings to feature ‘46 Georgia case

The 1946 murders at Moore’s Ford bridge near Monroe will be front and center as part of a new TV series airing Sunday night.

The first episode of the four-part “Murder in Black and White,” a documentary about civil rights-era cold cases that have been reopened by federal investigators, premieres at 10 p.m. on TV One [Comcast channel 71].

Creator Keith Beauchamp said he hopes the shows strike an emotional chord with viewers.

“I want people to react and come to action,” Beauchamp said.

Sunday’s episode focuses on the lynching of two black couples on the Walton County bridge, about 60 miles east of Atlanta. Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey were shot more than 60 times during the day of July 25, 1946, by a number of unmasked men.

Through interviews with eyewitnesses, relatives and historians — all cobbled together with the help of the FBI investigators working the cases — the shows piece together how the crimes happened and point to what clues may remain to bring suspects who are still living to justice. At the end of each show, viewers are asked to help.

“This is an outreach program. We’ll have a tip line where people can give information to the FBI,” Beauchamp said.

Beauchamp is the New York City filmmaker whose 2005 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” helped persuade the FBI in 2004 to reopen investigations of the Chicago teenager’s lynching in 1955.

Till’s gruesome death in Money, Miss., was an important spark to the modern civil rights movement and remains unsolved. Beauchamp’s work with the FBI on the Till case provided a chance to work with other cases.

“While I was working with the Emmett Till [case] with the FBI, they kept telling me about other cases that were lingering,” he said.

With the inception of a cold case unit in the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI presented the cases that were being investigated.

“They’re hoping there’s some way they can bring forward witnesses to bring some kind of justice,” Beauchamp said.

Three other episodes will air Monday through Wednesday, at 10 p.m., featuring similar cases in Alabama and Mississippi:

• Willie Edwards, a 24-year-old Montgomery truck driver, husband and father of two, whom Ku Klux Klansmen allegedly forced to jump to his death from a bridge.

• The Rev. George Lee, the first black registered voter in Belzoni, Miss., who investigators believe was shot in the face by a passing white driver.

• Lamar Smith, a black World War I veteran who was helping a black couple in Brookhaven, Miss., to vote. He was beaten and shot before witnesses in front of the city’s courthouse.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist, will host the shows.