ABSTRACT
July 25, 2015, saw two competing events on the roads of northeast Georgia. Civil rights activists marked the 69th anniversary of the Moore’s Ford lynching, the killing of four young African Americans near Monroe, Georgia, on July 25, 1946. Car ownership represented enormous pride and expanded opportunity for many African Americans, but roads remained associated with racist danger from law enforcement and vigilante groups. Roadways remained dangerous spaces throughout the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, about 350 pickup trucks, cars, and motorcycles, most of them sporting the Confederate battle flag, participated in a Confederate Flag Rally, along the highways of Walton, Newton, and Rockdale counties. One specific mise-en-scene at the 2015 lynching reenactment encapsulates the linked, if contrasting, formations of “biopower” at stake in the overlapping events. Confederate battle flags have been closely associated with automobiles since the flag’s mass revival in the 1950s.
