Two Black sharecropper couples died in a notoriously gruesome race murder

Federal and state investigators and lawmakers are hoping that, after 62 years, they can bring to justice the dozen or so men who riddled four Black sharecroppers with bullets and cut the unborn baby from one of the victims in the last recorded mass lynching in America. It was July 26, 1945 when a mob, armed with shotguns, rifles and machine guns, took the foursome to the Moore’s Ford Bridge and shot them hundreds of times. One of the men had been accused of killing a White man two weeks earlier. A Klansman bootlegger bailed the suspect out of jail, and drove him, his wife, her brother and her brother’s wife to the bridge, where they were massacred. This week, officials from the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation retrieved boxes of evidence from a home in a rural Georgia community of Walton County. “The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead told CNN. For the past several years, Tyrone Brooks, a member of the Georgia state House, has been pressing for justice in this 1946 case. “We just hope and pray they can bring some of these suspects to the bar of justice before they die, because they’re all getting up in age,” said Brooks, the president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. At the national level, Rep. John Lewis, who represents Georgia in the U.S. House, sponsored a bill that provides $10 million a year over the next decade to investigate lynch cases from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although a lone Oklahoma senator, Tom Coburn, has been blocking the legislation – he almost never supports measures that require federal dollars – but his recently indicated that he might be willing to allow the legislation to go through.