Seventy years after four black people were slaughtered near the Apalachee River in Walton County, the sound of gunfire will again echo through the landscape.
In symbolic deaths, four actors will collapse to a hail of gun-powder blanks. But it was lead that pierced the bodies of those four people who died July 25, 1946, in what has become known as the Moore's Ford lynchings. A wood bridge crossed the river at the site in 1946. Today it is concrete. In the far past it was a simply a shallow ford for wagons and horses.
The Moore's Ford Movement, which was born out of an interest in identifying the killers, will host this 12th annual reenactment of the lynchings. This portrayal of the murders is part of a nearly day-long event that begins in Monroe at 10 a.m. at First African Baptist Church in Monroe, then continues with a motorcade that ends with travelers reaching the Moore's Ford bridge.
The unsolved killings attracted a renewed interest by the media in the mid-1990s. The case has now birthed a second book chronicling the crime.
Earlier this year, author Anthony S. Pitch of Potomac, Md., released the book, "The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town." In 2004, Laura Wexler of Baltimore, Md., released the book "Fire In a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America."
Over the past few years, the reenactment has been perceived as unnecessary by some people.
In a lecture at the National Archives in Washington D.C., Pitch spoke about his book and told a gathering that he went to Georgia and observed the reenactment of the killings.
"I don't approve of it," he said in a lecture broadcast on CSPAN.
But Hattie Lawson, a resident of Hull who is coordinator of the Moore's Ford Movement, believes otherwise.
"I think it is necessary because we sometimes don't like to face reality," she said. "It is so realistic, so emotional, but sometimes we have to have those heart wrenching things to prick our souls."
"They say to us that because these are African-Americans lives that were lost, that we need to let it go," she said.
But she compares what was happening in America in the 1940s to what happened in Europe during the same time span when the Nazis in Germany were bent on destroying the Jewish people.
"As a Jewish person they don't let it go. Every year there are Nazis getting arrested (for Holocaust crimes), but no one is after them to let it go," Lawson said.
And because those Nazis are still living, she believes some of the Moore's Ford killers are still alive in Walton County.
"I believe that because they are still alive we can't get anybody to speak up," Lawson said.
Lawson has already spoken to a newspaper writer from Germany who plans to attend the reenactment along with another writer from Chicago, who also plans to attend. About a month ago she was interviewed by a group from Virginia who were filming a documentary on lynchings across the South.
"It's really something people are interested in," she said.
The actual reenactment is directed by Cassandra Green of Atlanta, who is in her eighth year directing what amounts to an outdoor play. The most difficult aspect of the production, according to Green, is getting white people to help as actors portraying the killers, who were believed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.
"The fact we don't have a large white participation concerns me because it's about reconciliation and bringing people together," she said.
The reenactment begins at First African Baptist Church in Monroe, where attendees will hear music and speeches. A motorcade then departs and travels through Hestertown, a place where a white man lived that was stabbed by one of the black people killed in the lynchings. That attack is what most people believe motivated the lynching that took the lives of Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Murray Dorsey.
The route takes the motorcade past the graveyards where the lynching victims are buried then to the courthouse and the county's old jail. A rendition of a speech once given by segregationist Gov. Eugene Talmadge is presented before the group travels to the location where the killings occurred.
Green has sought to make the killing scene appear and sound real. The white characters are played by some of Green's friends in the Atlanta area, who are actors.
"This happened," Green said. "Those people died and we can't get around that. We are still seeing that type of racism, even now. If we don't fix our past we will have what we are having right now, a resurgence of the klan-type mentality when it comes to African-American people."
As does Lawson, she believes some of the killers and some people who just stood by and watched are still alive.
Green made a remark directed at those people.
"Why would you not say something," she asked. "Why wouldn't they want to clear it before they die."
2016 Commemoration and Reenactment of the Moore's Ford lynchings
•10 a.m. First African Baptist Church, 130 Tyler St., Monroe.
•1 p.m. Motorcade leaves for various points in Monroe including graves of victims and the old jail.
•4 p.m. Motorcade arrives at Moore's Ford bridge at Mount Carmel Church Road.
For more information call (706) 207-9010.