In the summer of 1960 in Monroe, Louisiana, Marshall Alfred Johnson, a 19-year-old Black male, worked a demanding job cleaning septic tanks for a white man named Zennie William Fuller. Fuller, who was 40 at the time and also known as Robert, had a reputation for mistreating and cheating his employees out of their wages. That July, Johnson and four of his young, Black co-workers, Earnest McFarland, Charlie Willis, and brothers Albert and David Pitts, were all owed back pay by Fuller.
On
the evening of July 13, 1960, Fuller invited the five young men to his home with the promise of finally settling his debts with them. However, the encounter turned deadly. Fuller, armed with a shotgun, opened fire on the group. Johnson and the Pitts brothers were killed at the scene. Earnest McFarland was gravely wounded and died the next day at a local hospital. Charlie Willis was the only one to survive the initial onslaught. An FBI witness later stated that two or three of the victims were still alive after the first shots and that Fuller's son helped "finish them off" with a pistol.
In the immediate aftermath, Fuller claimed he had acted in self-defense, alleging the young men were armed and had come to harm him. He was taken into custody on an "open charge" but was soon released on a $25,000 bond. Despite the multiple fatalities, a grand jury never indicted Fuller for the killings. In a stark turn of justice, the lone survivor, Charlie Willis, was charged with attempting to murder Fuller and ultimately served time in prison. The case grew cold, and Zennie William Fuller, who would later become a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, was never held accountable for the deaths of Marshall Alfred Johnson and his co-workers.
