A Mulberry Summer

About the Book

On July 25, 1946, four black citizens, two male and two female, were executed by a mob at Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee river in Walton County, Georgia. Twenty to 25 white men armed with pistols, rifles, shotguns and even a machine gun shot them hundreds of times in broad daylight.

Incredibly, no one was ever charged with the murders. "The best people in town won't talk," said then Major William E. Spence, of the Georgia State Patrol. The murders were never solved, but the current Governor of Georgia has ordered a new investigation.

That tragedy really happened.

A Mulberry Summer did not. A series of articles about the actual killings appeared in the Walton Tribune published in Monroe, Georgia, and they became the inspiration for this tale. The question was how and why such a senseless and brutal incident could ever have occurred. There were no factual answers then, and there are none in this story. There never was a Birdie Lee Johnson, or a Mattie Lou Herndon, or a Judge Spencer Tolliver, or a Billy James Bradley, but you may have known people like them.

About the Author

James Reed Blakeney was born in rural Pickens County, Alabama and grew up during the bleak days of the Great Depression. As a 13-year-old boy, he watched his older brothers leave for Europe to take their places in the ranks of the Allied Forces during World War Two. He came of age in the aftermath of that conflict.

He has been active in the fields of education and industry. He is a published poet and is president of a medical gas and equipment company. He is very much a product of the times and events depicted in A Mulberry Summer.