Officials Close to Decision on Bringing Charges in Moore's Ford Lynching

Emphasis on Solving Decades Old Civil Rights Cases Paying Off

The federal government's recently accelerated efforts at solving old but as yet unsolved civil rights cases is beginning to show results. Tips and reports recently received have led investigators to specific remote rural areas in Walton County, Georgia to collect new evidence. The case known through out Georgia as the Moore's Ford Lynching remains unsolved after more than fifty years. If solved bringing to justice any of the persons responsible for the grisly murder of 4 adults and one unborn child in rural Georgia is expected to open the door to new leads in other unsolved cases. The Moore's Ford Lynching case is the largest documented lynching in U.S. history.

The case in which new evidence has been collected took place in Walton County Georgia. A mob repeatedly beat and shot, hundreds of times, four black sharecropper farmers. One of the persons murdered was pregnant and her unborn child was cut from her womb. As it turns out, this terrible crime is the last recorded incident of mass murder by a crowd, by definition a lynching, in U.S. history. Solving the crime has gained new impetus as some push congress to pass bills that would allow the establishment of a special cold case unit with in the Department of Justice.

Solving this particular old unsolved case has been especially difficult since it is thought that the vast majority of the men that shot the four farmers repeatedly with rifles, guns and machine guns have gone to their graves. At the time of the lynching the community, which is east of Atlanta approximately 60 miles was extremely tight lipped about the incident. However among residents there have long been rumors about who the ringleaders were. As times have changed the memory of what happened to the unborn child has especially kept alive the stories of what happened at the Moore's Ford lynching.