The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation’s history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims’ bodies displayed, or even cut up and distributed, as trophies.

Then, in 1946, the dead bodies of two men and two women were found near Moore’s Ford B...