Lynchings in Maryland
lynchings were during the slavery era.
Before the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, researchers say, the killing of enslaved people would have drawn little attention. Slaveholders would have been destroying their own “property.”
And there’s the more contemporary belief that lynching never fully disappeared; it simply morphed into less obvious forms of state-backed violence against minorities.
When it comes to lynching as most define it — the extrajudicial killing of blacks by white mobs in post-Civil War America — we can track certain trends. More occurred from 1880 to 1910 than in any other three decades, for example, in Maryland and nationwide.
The figures fell gradually over the next 30 to 40 years under pressure from the black and international press, progressive groups including the NAACP, and Quaker-led resistance coalitions, among other forces. Many facts remain elusive. Among the documents that survive are death certificates and coroner’s reports on the victims. But they're rife with the sort of obfuscation that surrounded most lynchings: participants who declined to name each other, witnesses who refused to talk, police and newspapers who accepted cover stories at face value, and judges and others who made token efforts, at best, to find the perpetrators.
Time and time again, the documents reached the same conclusion in nearly identical words: The victim died at the hands of persons unknown.
“Members of these communities were there, as observers or participants, taking part in these kinds of public festivals. And when they didn't tell what they knew, or follow up afterward, that was complicity," Ifill says. “It’s like what we see today in police departments, where everyone covers up for a few bad apples.”
That leaves newspapers of the era as the go-to source — but the view they offer is also distorted. Haley and others say the bulk of what they know comes from press accounts, but they must read those accounts with a skeptical eye.
“It was just like today,” Haley says. “Media outlets catered to their own audiences, and their accounts were slanted to appease or attract that audience.”
In covering a lynching, the smaller local papers — the Worcester Democrat, the Salisbury Advertiser — often assumed the guilt of the accused rather than presenting both sides. They used incendiary racist language (“the black fiend,” “the ravisher”) and implied or said outright that the victim deserved his fate.
In 1885, the Baltimore County Union, a Towson weekly, quoted a member of the mob that killed Howard Cooper.
Cooper stood accused of sexually assaulting Katie Gray, the 16-year-old daughter of a prominent white family in Towson. An all-white jury took less than a minute to convict him; his lawyers were working on an appeal when he was taken from his cell.
The lyncher, who was allowed to speak anonymously, described the killing as a moral act.
“The men were mostly substantial farmers, and all of them good citizens,” the man said. “There was not a rough character among us. Every man was actuated by the thought that in avenging Miss Gray he was protecting his own wife, sweetheart or children.
“We were very particular not to begin work before midnight, so as to avoid doing the lynching on a Sunday.”
The reporter presented no countervailing viewpoint.
Metro papers such as The Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Evening Star, with their white staffs and readerships, typically decried lynching as a practice, but in many ways did little better in their coverage.
They, too, embraced what Creary calls “the brute Negro narrative.” They quoted lynchers without pressing for names, declined to interview or mention members of the black community, misspelled or omitted the victims’ names, and generally registered little of the outrage the crimes warranted.
The Evening Capital blamed the lynching of Henry Davis on a justice system that acted too slowly — and voiced relief that his accuser would not have to face him in court. The Sun seemed as interested in the feelings and reputation of a powerful white politician as the brutality of the murder.
“Much regret has been expressed that the lynching took place within a quarter of a mile of the home of Governor [Edwin] Warfield, who a At least 44 people, most of them black men, were killed in lynchings across Maryland from 1854 to 1933, according to research conducted by the Maryland State Archives, the Equal Justice Initiative and Bowie State University. few months ago took such great precaution to have a negro [executed by hanging] on Smith’s Island, in Chesapeake bay, to avoid a possible lynching,” the account read.
It wasn't until the emergence of black-owned newspapers around the turn of the century — the Baltimore Afro-American in 1892, the Pittsburgh Courier in 1907 — that readers were treated to fully rounded accounts that included the reactions of those affected most directly.
In the aftermath of the Matthew Williams lynching, the Afro-American placed a photo of Williams’ distraught sister on the front page. An article quoted one of his co-workers describing Williams as a reliable, well-liked man who never caused a quarrel at the Elliott Box and Crate Factory.
“He had good common sense and [often] advised the young fellows who worked with him to save their money,” Delaware Street told reporter Holland Walters.
The paper’s editors dubbed the issue the “Maryland Shame Edition” and used the dateline “SALISBURY (Lynch-town), Md.” for every story.
Ifill says she relied far more heavily on the black press than on any other source. Creary is one of many who say The Sun and other white-owned outlets only exacerbated the conditions that made lynching possible.
Over time, though, a picture of lynching in Maryland emerged with some clarity. It reflected a state still struggling to reconcile its reputation for racial progressiveness with its continuing embrace of racist traditions.