FBI agents came to Monroe two days after the murders, looking to see whether a federal prosecution might be possible. But they quickly realised that none of the white residents of Walton County wanted to help them – some because they were too scared, others because they were helping with the cover-up. Lamar Howard, a black 19-year-old who had witnessed a conversation between the plotters at the ice house where he worked, was brave enough to come forward and testify. In return, two white men beat him to within an inch of his life.
From the perspective of the killers, the lynching could hardly have been more successful. News of the deed spread almost instantly through the entire county by word of mouth, searing the threat of extrajudicial violence into the consciousness of all who heard about it.
At the same time, its specific details – who, exactly, played what role; who tied the noose; who pulled the triggers; who lied to protect the guilty – were already slipping through the fingers of anyone who tried to grasp them. The killers must have been confident that, as time passed, the story would only grow fainter, and the facts of the crime would be forgotten. Only the fear would remain.
But then something unexpected happened. Two days after the lynching, news of the killings reached Walter F White, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who had spent decades investigating lynchings across the country firsthand. White was black, but could pass as white – something he had used to his advantage over the years while interviewing proud lynchers about their exploits. A canny publicist, he felt that the Monroe lynchers’ decision to kill Dorothy and Mae Murray along with their husbands might mobilise public disgust. (Women were lynched relatively rarely.)
White sent graphic briefings on the case to news outlets across the country. Reporters started flocking to Monroe, bringing America news that lynching – which many white people thought of as a relic of the past – was alive and well.
In cities across the country, people took to the streets in protest. In Atlanta, a teenage Martin Luther King Jr was inspired to write a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (In his letter, King refutes the commonplace argument that lynchings were an attempt to protect white women from the sexual aggression of black men: “It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.”) The Justice Department was flooded with mail expressing shock and frustration that such a crime could go unpunished in 1940s America. At the White House, a deluge of outraged telegrams demanded that President Harry Truman take action.