On July 25, 1946 near Monroe, Georgia, a white mob killed four Black people: World War II veteran George W. Dorsey, his wife Mae Murray Dorsey and their friends Roger and Dorothy Malcom. Dorothy Malcolm was seven months pregnant. No one was ever charged in the lynching.
That July day, a Black nine-year-old was riding with a Coca Cola delivery man. The boy, who grew up to be my father, was determined to help his family after the death of his father. He had a job helping carry cases of bottles into shops. When he and the driver reached Monroe from my father’s home town of Commerce, about 40 miles northeast, the driver saw the commotion and pushed my father to the floor of the truck. The driver wanted to protect a little boy from a horrific sight.
Once he got back to Commerce, my father saw the fear his mother and her neighbors tried to hide from the children. Years later, my father would learn the details. Two weeks before the lynching, sheriff’s deputies had arrested Roger Malcom, who was accused of stabbing and injuring a white farmer. Another white farmer for whom the two couples sharecropped posted Malcom’s bail, then drove Malcolm, his wife and their friends to the spot where the mob pulled the Black men from the car, bound their hands and dragged them to the roadside. After one of the wives recognized and called out the name of an assailant, the mob grabbed the women as well. The couples were beaten and repeatedly shot.
Blacks in the area were convinced whites were particularly enraged because Roger Malcom had returned from fighting for his country with the idea that he should be treated like a citizen. Blacks believed the whites wanted to make an example of Malcom, a warning to other Black veterans.
On July 19, 1935 Rubin Stacy was lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. According to court records, the young Black husband and father had knocked on the door of a white woman, Marion Jones, to ask for a drink. She later accused him of attempting to assault her. He was arrested and taken to the county jail. Deputies drove him from the jail amid rumors that Jones had been raped. A mob dragged him from the car. According to one witness, the sheriff himself grabbed a clothesline and threw it over a limb of a tree. One end was tightened around Stacy's neck and he was raised slowly from the ground. Then he was shot 17 times. No one was ever charged in the lynching.
A photograph of the aftermath shows white children smiling as they look at Stacy’s body hanging from the tree.
Stacy was my uncle’s great uncle. I had not heard of his murder before last month, when my aunt – my mother’s sister – texted to tell me that she and my uncle had gone from their home in Tampa to Fort Lauderdale for a Feb. 8 memorial service during which the stretch of road where the lynching took place was renamed for Stacy. My aunt sent a clipping from the local paper in which Anne Naves, a niece of Stacy who was 8 years old when he was killed, recalled the impact on her family.
"My mother's beautiful laugh stopped. My father's teasing stopped," Naves said. "We didn't have a funeral. The body was just dumped at the funeral parlor and they were told to bury him. We never had a chance to have a funeral.”
The renaming of a street seems like a small gesture, an acknowledgment - without accountability - decades after a brutal injustice that had been erased from official histories. Still, it was an opportunity for a family that had never forgotten to come together to mourn and to pay respect.
My uncle owned his own insurance business and my aunt was a high school English teacher, both graduates of Florida A&M. They raised two sons in their home state of Florida. My father left the South and joined the Army after graduating from West Virginia State University. My father went on to be an industrial hygienist who worked for the military. He and my mother, a nurse, raised my sister and me in southern California.
As a young girl, I often heard my father discussing the Monroe lynching with other Blacks he met in California who had migrated from the South. They would share stories of lynchings they had witnessed.
My parents wanted my sister and me to have all the opportunities America offers, and to feel we had as much right to them as any citizen. But, sometimes, I could feel my father’s fear. This is how he would put it to me: “Don’t go where you are not welcome.”
As a little boy, crouched on the floor of a Coca Cola delivery truck, did my father feel welcome anywhere? And the white Americans of his generation, did they grow up to spurn their Black neighbors and pass that antipathy to their own daughters and sons after being taken as children to celebrate lynchings?
If stories such as those of the Dorseys, the Malcolms and Stacy have heroes, they are the survivors - Stacy’s niece, my aunt and uncle, my parents. By their mere existence, the survivors challenged an unwelcoming country to live up to its promise of freedom, equality and justice for all. They did not just survive. With quiet strength, they built lives for themselves and their children.