Movement seeks to heal old wounds
was far from unique in Maryland. Mobs in the Old Line State committed dozens of the terror killings in the decades following the Civil War.
While the gruesome practice of lynching is most closely associated with the Southern states of the former Confederacy, hundreds were committed elsewhere in the country — including at least 44 in Maryland.
More than a third of those were perpetrated within what is now a 45-minute drive of Baltimore. Lynchings have been recorded in 18 of the state’s 24 counties.
The most recent such attack — the hanging and mutilation of 22-year-old farm laborer George Armwood in Princess Anne in 1933 — was carried out in front of about 2,000 people, and within the lifespans of tens of thousands of living Marylanders.
“People tend to think something as terrible as lynching must have happened long ago and far away,” says Nicholas Creary, a history professor at Bowie State University who studies the subject. “But it took place right here, in communities we know and drive past every day.
“The fact that we forget about it doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”
Creary is one of a growing group of scholars, activists and private citizens trying to help America recover and remember this chapter of its history in the hope of finally transcending it. A movement is underway to acknowledge and reconcile the country’s lynching past, and it’s gaining momentum in Maryland.
A museum focusing on lynching and its victims opened in Montgomery, Ala., in April and has drawn thousands of visitors. Books and studies on the phenomenon are emerging. And in Maryland, activists are building databases, planning films and working to organize a conference on the state’s lynching legacy.
The symposium, the first of its kind here, is set to draw scholars, activists and descendants of victims to Baltimore next month.
Backers say the goal is not to assign blame, inflict guilt or stir up buried animosities. It’s to create opportunities for healing wounds that still afflict American society.
“To understand the problems we’re facing with the legal system — the police shootings of African-Americans we keep seeing, or the disproportionate incarceration rates among black Americans — we need to go back a hundred years, to see how those attitudes developed and in what ways they’re still at work,” Creary says.
Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer, scholar and author who founded the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, says it will indeed be difficult to address the forms of racial injustice that plague the culture without first hauling this chapter of our past into the light.
“Lynching is American history, and for us to recover from that violence and terror, we all have to know that history, and we all have to talk about it,” says Stevenson, who founded and leads the Equal Justice Initiative. “I believe that will compel us to think differently about what we need to do to confront the past, to address the past and to make a better future.” him and set his body on fire.
An onlooker cut off his toes and gave them to friends.
The lynchings of Cook, Cooper and Williams, which spanned nearly half a century, were in many ways typical of the racial killings that terrorized the black community nationwide from the Civil War era through the mid-20th century.
They involved a white crowd overpowering a young African-American and treating him more savagely than even killing him would have required.
The underlying complaints against the victim were often-flimsy allegations, ranging from the “crime” of speaking out of turn to a white person to frequently spurious claims of theft, sexual assault or murder.
And there was the frequent carnival atmosphere, the certainty the victim would never enjoy his right to due process, and the expectation that the justice system would hold no perpetrators to account.
Over time, in Maryland and elsewhere, the understanding took shape that lynchings were more than brutal acts of vigilante justice meted out on a case-by-case basis. They were a form of domestic terrorism aimed at a newly liberated black public.
Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn A. Ifill, the author of the 2007 book “On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century,” was one of the first to explore Maryland’s lynching history.
One misconception around lynchings, she says, is that they were mostly the work of marginalized or disaffected individuals. In fact, widely respected citizens — teachers, ministers, housewives, police officers — regularly took part.
Their participation promoted the impression that the crime bore the backing of the entire white community, including its most powerful members.
“A lynching is more than a murder; it’s a message crime,” Ifill says. “It’s a message to the African-American community about the boundaries of citizenship: ‘This is what you can do and this is what you can’t do. These will be the consequences if you cross these lines. These are the narrow confines of the ways in which you will be permitted to exercise citizenship.’
“It’s a powerful and very public message of white supremacy.”
It was shared most often and most forcefully in the Deep South.
The Equal Justice Initiative, the research and legal foundation behind the Montgomery museum, has documented more than 4,400 lynchings of black Americans by whites in 12 former states of the Confederacy from 1877 to 1950. That was about three-fourths of all lynchings nationwide during those years.
More than 300 of the attacks were committed in border and Midwestern states, including Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois and West Virginia. Maryland’s total — the initiative has verified 29 — places it in the middle of that second-bloodiest tier.
Historians at the Maryland State Archives have documented 38 lynchings in the state between 1865 and 1935.
The disparity in the numbers reflects the many factors that complicate any study of lynching — variations in how the term is defined, differences in the years studied, differences in the standards of proof employed.
The Equal Justice Initiative, for example, focuses on blacks known to have been killed by whites, while the archives list includes the lynching of an African-American by a black mob, the lynching of two white men, four lynchings corroborated by just one source, and a lynching that was reported in two newspapers that later retracted their accounts.
Creary has recently added the lynchings of two more white men to his list.
Together the researchers identify 44 lynchings in the state, all but five of them of black men at the hands of whites.
The figures are modest compared to those of states such as Mississippi, which the Equal Justice Initiative found to be America's cruelest state, with 654 lynchings, or Georgia, second with 589.
But that means little to descendants of Cook, Cooper, Davis, Williams and Armwood, and Maryland’s African-American communities across the generations. Nor does anyone believe that historians have been able to document every lynching.
Members of the reconciliation movement say acknowledgement of the victims' lives and sufferings is long overdue.
Christopher Haley is research director of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland, the state archives program that gathers information on lynching. He's also a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the Gambian-born man who was brought to Annapolis as a slave in 1767 and memorialized in “Roots,” the 1976 bestseller by Haley’s uncle Alex. To Haley, the research is a form of restoration. “These victims were human beings who deserved the same dignity anyone should get, whether it’s the president of the United States or the person who comes to change the tire on your car,” he says. “Learning about them and naming them helps speak to their significance as persons who lived in the U.S.A.”