Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa denounced the hypocrisy of the democratic nations that doggedly reasserted sovereignty over them, and in a similar spirit America’s Negro soldiers demanded that they be given at home the rights they had fought for overseas. Whites resisted these demands, especially in the South, with a ferocity that put lynchings back into the headlines. Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer. In Georgia’s first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four of them up in front of a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullet holes in one of the four corpses. In the aftermath, state investigators in Monroe complained that “the best people in town won’t talk about this,” but they and the FBI would compile enough evidence to take before a grand jury, which declined to return an indictment.