The Last Lynching by Anthony S. Pitch

Author:Anthony S. Pitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

Sexual Relations

Straining under public pressure to capture the murderers, FBI agents concluded that sexual relations across the contemporary color divisions might have driven unnamed gunmen to snuff out the life of George Dorsey, the World War II veteran. After the handicapped farmhand, Ridden Farmer, saw him flirting with white girls, he cautioned Moena Williams, George’s mother, to tell him that unless he stopped “he is liable to get his neck broken, or they might wake up some morning and find him missing.”1

George had also offended whites by being, in the words of an informant, “uppity and mouthy,” bragging about associating with white girls while in the army.2 Farmer told the FBI that “he had heard it talked” that George and Robert Lee Elder said they had associated with white girls up north and they were going to keep on going with them.3 Someone had overheard it said in his store that George “was going to get him some good clothes and ride the buses with the white girls.” The middle-aged white man with missing teeth added reflectively, “I hope they catch who [sic] killed the negroes. They were negroes, but it was bad.”4

George and his younger brother, Charlie Boy, had been socializing with the white Adams sisters, Ruth, seventeen, Effie Mae, fifteen, and Burice, eleven, and a white girl living with them, one and a half miles from Farmer’s house, on a farm owned by Loy Harrison.5 That year the tearful and homeless stranger was allowed to stay with the family when they saw her at a bus station and she blubbered that she had just buried her mother and her father had abandoned her. Mrs. Adams invited her to live with them on condition she acted like her daughters and did not run around with boys. “If you go as one of my daughters you won’t have to pay no rent, but could help on the farm.”6 It was not long before she began flirting like the other girls. She showed an interest in George, telling the sisters how good looking he was. “I also heard her say she wished George Dorsey was a white boy instead of a nigger,” said one of the sisters.7

The young women had few inhibitions. Even Loy’s nephew claimed that he had sexual intercourse with Ruth Adams on a few occasions, though his contact was short-lived because he considered the family “a sorry lot.”8 But Charlie Boy and George, who had both been arrested earlier that year for drunk and disorderly behavior,9 were not judgmental. They might have agreed that they were opportunists. The girls “got to acting sort of fresh around me and George. They used to say that they did not have no boy friends and that they wished they had some good-looking boys like me and George,” Charlie Boy said. “They told us that they were just like colored women. [Redacted name] told my wife, Ruby, that if she was a colored woman she would take me away from her.”

He told

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