November 9, 1999

 Mr. Thurbert E. Baker

Georgia Attorney General

State Capital Building

Atlanta, Georgia 30334

  Sir:

Haunting racial killings face new scrutiny, a New York Times article written by Emily Yellin talks about a change in attitudes across the South and a new breed of prosecutors looking into unsolved hate crimes. In particular, they are examining racial killings, lynchings, assassinations and attacks of terror, the tools of white intimidation. Convictions of notorious hate mongers, like J. B. Stoner and Robert Shelton, for bombing a church, and Byron De La Beckwith, for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, have reduced witnesses' fears of retaliation.

In the past, prosecutors brought charges against only those obviously guilty, like Klan leader Robert Chambliss, who bombed First Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four little girls. Today, U.S. Attorney Doug Jones is pursuing indictments in the thirty-six years old case against two co-conspirators. Though long overdue, these new breed prosecutors in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama are reopening many decades-old murder cases in an effort to being closure to painful injustices.

About fifty miles from Atlanta, Georgia such an outrage haunts the past. In Walton County about fifty years ago, Roger Malcolm, his pregnant wife Dorothy, WWII hero George Dorsey and his spouse, May Murray, were lynched. A sharecropper on Barney Hester's land, Malcolm was jailed for stabbing Hester, who raped Dorothy at will. The afternoon of the lynching, Loy Harrison bailed Roger Malcolm out of jail. Accompanied by Dorothy, George and May, Harrison led the group to a rendezvous on the bridge at Moore's Ford, where a mob of about thirty (30) white men shot them repeatedly.

Sir, on that afternoon, the Constitution ran red with blood that suffocated its spirit. Tyranny lurks in such dark places, like a boogieman caging all that avoid the light of truth. This is a story of "murder most foul." Its irony is a hero, who survived the hellish terror of war defending America, returns home and is lynched by those he fought to protect. This is an indictment of those Americans who stood quietly by, like good Germans, while Nazis killed six million Jews. This is the story of all African American women. It exemplifies the strength and beauty of Walton County women. Holding their heads high, their courage masked the pain. They held their families together, while facing white women who knew their husbands raped them at will, but said and did nothing.

The shame of Walton County, Georgia is the shame of America. For just as the wives of Walton County knew everyone knows America's legacy of atrocities against African Americans. Honorable sir, if you would please apply the same dogged determination and quest for justice with which you are pursuing former Senators Ralph David Abernathy Jr. and Diana Harvey Johnson, you will bring closure to this painful tragedy. I anxiously await your timely prosecution of the guilty in this matter. For more on the story of the Woman Of Walton County, logon The DISH at http://home.att.net/~yicim. Click on the Genocide Chronicles, then go to the "Women of Walton County."

I await your timely response to this problem. If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact me. I am at your service.

Respectfully,

John Burl Smith

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