Governor Ellis Arnall Saturday offered rewards totaling $10,000 for evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of members of the band that murdered four Negroes in Walton County Thursday afternoon. The Governor offered a reward of $500, the limit authorized by law, for each member of the band, said to have been made up of 20 persons.
MONROE — A suggestion that the bloody massacre of four Negroes near here was a “rehearsed affair” came Saturday from the head of the Georgia Bureau of investigation.
Major William E. Spence of the G.B.I., said:
“It looks like it was a rehearsed affair. It looks like it might have been planned since the Negro was first confined to Jail.”
He referred to Roger Malcolm, a 21-year-old Negro who had made bond on a charge of stabbing his employer, a white man. Malcolm, his wife, and George Dorsey and his wife were the mob’s victims.
Although an announcement from Washington said the Federal Bureau of Investigation would investigate the case for the civil rights section of the Justice Department, an assistant district attorney said:
“So far it seems to be a state case.”
Look for U. S. Violations
The attorney, Jack Gautier, of Macon, said he came here to try to determine if there had been any violation of civil rights covered by federal statute.
The only comment on the slayings to come from Eugene Talmadge, recently nominated for a fourth term as Georgia’s governor on a “white supremacy” platform, was that “such incidents are to be regretted.”
Talmadge Is vacationing in Cheyenne, Wyo. He flew there as a guest of Asa Candler Jr., of Atlanta.
(The United Press quoted Mr. Talmadge as saying: “I think it will be many, many years before we can give the Negro equal rights. He’s bucking up against a civilization thousands of years old, and his civilization has been forced upon him by the white man. Nothing can be gained by giving equal rights to someone with an artificial civilization that has been forced upon him only 150 years.”)
(In Washington Representative Marcantonio (American - Labor, New York) asked President Truman for “prompt” federal intervention.
(In a telegram to Truman, Marcantonio said “unless immediate Government action is taken there will be a repetition of lynchings as a result of recent incitement to violence made by Bilbos and Talmadges.”)
The detail of the ghastly multiple murder were related by Loy Harrison, a well-to-do farmer who was held at gun point by the mob. He was taking the four Negroes to his farm to work after getting Malcolm out on bond.
Harrison said the band of 20 armed and unmasked men which waylaid them was led by a “tall, dignified white man” who counted one, two, three” as three volleys were fired into the Negros, lined up abreast.
“The leader looked like a retired businessman,” he said. “He was about 65, wore a brown suit and had on a big broad-brimmed hat. He looked like he had a good Florida suntan.”
The mob, he said, first took the Negro men out of the car and bound their arms behind them.
Then, when one of the women recognized a member of the mob, several mem came and took them too, he said.
“I didn’t have anything by a pocket knife,” Harrison said. “What could I do?”
He made his way to a store about two miles away and called the sheriff. Then the bullet-riddled bodies were found in a clump of bushes beside the side road.
The Negro women were sisters. Dorsey’s mother said he had just been discharged from the Army, and saw overseas duty in North Africa and Australia.
The slayings were the first of their kind in the South in a year. In recent years such incidents have steadily declined almost to the vanishing point. There was only one in l945 and two the year before.
It was the first slaying of its kind in Georgia of more than one person since 1918. In that year, 10 Negroes were slain at one time in Brooks County.
The slaying of the two Negro men and their wives occurred late Thursday, but news of it did not “leak-out” to the outside world until Friday morning.
The murders occurred at a lonely spot about eight miles beyond Monroe.
Klan Not Identified With Slayings, Green Says
Dr. Samuel Green, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, asserted Saturday that the Klan was in no way connected with the slayings of four Negroes near Monroe, Ga.
The Klan does not approve or countenance such an action and every klansman takes an oath never to take the law into his own hands but to respect duly constituted authority,” Green said.
“We have no Klan chapter in the Monroe area. I know that the Klan had nothing to do with these killings, although I expect Governor Ellis Arnall will try to pin it on us – he tries to pin every disgraceful action on us.”
The Atlanta office of the FBI reported Friday that at the request of the attorney general it is investigating the Walton County slayings.
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