Friday, July 27, 2007

What the hell?

MONROE, Georgia (CNN) -- The police were only about 50 yards down the road when the gun-wielding white mob stopped the car and dragged the two black men out, shoving them face first into the dirt.

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A local woman playing Dorothy Malcom has an unborn baby cut from her womb during the re-enactment.

The two women were next to be yanked from the burgundy Buick into the thick, sultry air of a Southern summer, one of them thrashing and flailing as she screamed and pleaded with the mob to spare her and her unborn child.

The lynch mob dragged the sharecroppers through the pine trees down a wagon trail to the Apalachee River and, on their leader's command, unleashed three torrents of gunfire.

As the four hit the ground, a man stepped from the woods and shot two streams of ketchup onto the victims for effect.

Wednesday's graphic re-enactment of Georgia's last mass lynching is the organizers' way of drawing attention to the still-unsolved murders. See and hear scenes from the re-enactment »

The investigation into the atrocities at Moore's Ford is one of scores from the civil rights era that have or could be reopened under a cold-case initiative by the FBI.

Decades-old cases can and have been solved. In 2005, former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of killing three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Earlier this year, another former Klansman, James Ford Seale, was found guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of two black teens in Mississippi.

Congress is considering a bill, currently stalled in the Senate, that would create a special unit in the Justice Department and provide $100 million over the next decade for the FBI to investigate these types of slayings.

Getting answers remains critical to some communities, even 40, 50 or 60 years on, local leaders say.



---Is this an over the top way for the justice system to waste money?---

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