One of the more gruesome chapters in the history of civil rights in Georgia was brought to life today, when activists staged a re-enactment of the 1946 Moore's Ford murders of four black people by a mob of white people on the banks of the Apalachee River in Walton County near Monroe. The dramatization, on the 59th anniversary of the killings, is an effort by a group led by state Rep. Tyrone Brooks of Atlanta to publicize the crime and put pressure on authorities to solve a case that has stymied local police, the GBI and the FBI for almost six decades.

Brooks believes the conviction last month of former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in connection with the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., will give impetus to prosecution of the Georgia case. Last week, a U.S. attorney in Mississippi reopened two more old racially motivated murder cases in that state: the 1964 killings of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in Franklin County and the 1967 slaying of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez.

"I think the Philadelphia influence has reawakened interest in reopening the case," Brooks said last week. Brooks said he has been pressing law enforcement officials to reinvestigate the Moore's Ford case since the late 1960s. In 1999, the GBI reopened its probe at the request of then-Gov. Roy Barnes.

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