In 1946, couples Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey died at the hands of a white lynch mob in Monroe.

Dorothy Malcom was seven months pregnant when, at the Moore's Ford Bridge, the four were dragged from their car, tied to trees and shot. The Malcoms' unborn child was buried along with them.

RIC FELD/Associated Press / 2005 photo (ENLARGE)

In 2005, Rosa Ingram (right), an aunt of Roger Malcom, and Annie Smith, a cousin of George Dorsey, visited Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County – the site of their relatives' lynching.

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On Friday's 62nd anniversary of the slayings, a Georgia lawmaker wants to give the lynching's youngest victim a name: Justice Malcom.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) plans to make the name part of Friday's observance, which also will include the fourth annual re-enactment. He'll make the suggestion to a Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials' committee staging the event.

Naming the Malcoms' unborn child symbolizes efforts to prosecute the culprits in one of the last remaining unsolved lynching cases of the civil rights era, Brooks said. Then-Gov. Roy Barnes ordered the case reopened in 2000, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been working with the FBI to solve the murders.

The couples may have been targeted in retaliation. Sharecropper Roger Malcom allegedly fought and stabbed a white farmer and Dorsey, an Army veteran, was rumored to have dated a white woman.

"It's appropriate to give [the unborn child] a name," said Brooks, GABEO's president. "This really reflects what the movement is all about. The movement is about justice. I'm going to recommend that we name the baby Justice Malcolm. I hope committee members who are going to gather on Friday will agree."

The idea already has won favor with a distant relative of Roger Malcom in metro Atlanta. "Since it was deprived of the opportunity to be born naturally, it's time for it to be born spiritually," Dorothy Malcom Woods, 58, said Wednesday.

Brooks said he has been haunted by the deaths since a funeral director and businessman, Dan Young, introduced him to the case in 1968 by showing him photos of the victims' bodies. Young had picked up the bodies and prepared them for burial. He also called the case to the attention of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Albernathy.

"When Mr. Young showed me those photographs, it was devastating," said Brooks, then a Southern Christian Leadership Conference field organizer assigned to Walton County. "I was just a 20-year-old rookie. I'd never seen anything like that."

The re-enactment uses a time line developed from FBI files, Brooks said. It begins at 4:30 p.m. at the farmhouse where the fight happened, moves to the jail where Malcolm was briefly incarcerated, then to the bridge where the lynchings unfolded. Before the re-enactment, a rally is scheduled for 2 p.m. at First African Baptist Church in Monroe.

Brooks believes the killers are still alive, perhaps living not far from the crime scene. Last spring, state and federal investigators seized several items from a Michael Road farmhouse in Walton County.

GABEO is offering a $35,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of the killers.