A haunting history
If anyone can be called the catalyst of the reconciliation movement, it’s Stevenson. His work has driven the conversation about lynching across the country since 2010, culminating in the debut of the $20 million museum in Montgomery, and its effects are taking root in communities across the United States, including in Maryland.
The Harvard-trained attorney wasn’t born here, but it was close. He grew up in the 1960s in southern Delaware, just a modest drive from where Williams and Armwood were lynched three decades earlier.
In his youth, the schools and neighborhoods remained segregated, in fact if not by law. Stevenson, who is African-American, remembers seeing Confederate flags in the former Union state, but little discussion around what they represented.
Stevenson, 59, founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1994 as a foundation to combat what he has long seen as entrenched bias against minorities and the poor in the criminal justice system. Further study convinced him that lynching was a direct progenitor to an American justice system in which blacks are still incarcerated more frequently for minor crimes and sentenced to death more frequently for major ones than any other group.
When Stevenson and his small staff set forth in 2010 to research the nation’s lynching legacy, they quickly saw how the practice had been used to intimidate the black public. The observation became central to their landmark 2015 study, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” and the museum itself.
But the team was surprised to see how few signs of lynching were visible on a landscape that had been so deeply affected by the practice.
“Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy, and historical events in which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners,” Stevenson says. “Yet in all of our subject states, we observed that there is an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching.”
That certainly proved true in Maryland, where the first memorial for a lynching victim was a plaque the City of Annapolis dedicated to the memory of Henry Davis — and to nine other men lynched between 1891 and 1906.
The city dedicated the plaque in 2001 in Brewer Hill Cemetery, where Davis lies in an unmarked grave in a section once reserved for smallpox victims, as part of a ceremony of apology.
The Old Carroll Jail, the building from which the mob hauled Cook in 1885, still stands in downtown Westminster, where it houses part of the county sheriff ’s office. The precise location of the farm where he died is unknown.
And Baltimore County historian John McGrain says hundreds of cars roar over the Towson
hanging site daily. By his reckoning, the lawn in question lies under busy Bosley Avenue. There’s no sign of Cooper, or his horrific death there.
Ifill points out that the county courthouses in Salisbury and Princess Anne look much as they did when large crowds lynched Williams and Armwood. Yet few of the citizens who use those buildings know what their forebears did there, and within living memory.
The silence around these atrocities, she says, only drives the lingering sense of shame underground, where it lurks in the collective unconscious like a ghost waiting to be released from this world to the next.
“The mere fact that lynching is not visible in the landscape doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have power,” Ifill says. “And the fact that it’s not talked about — the silence was always a big part of lynching.
“For me, the point of my book is that I feel very strongly that the residue of these events lives in the local communities where they happened.”
Stevenson says he has made a close study of Maryland’s lynching history. He believes the state’s relatively modest numbers are a poor indication of the significance of the practice here.
Unlike the Southern states, he says, Maryland is close enough to the nation’s capital that one would expect its inhabitants to be on better behavior. In his view, the fact that it happened here at all suggests a level of fanaticism that even Alabama, Louisiana or Texas might not have been able to claim.
Stevenson points out that many Southern blacks probably migrated to Maryland — a state that boasted an unusually large population of free blacks prior to the Civil War — in hopes of finding refuge. He says the expectation likely gave the lynchings that did happen an especially cruel edge.
One theory he floats: Because Lincoln exempted Maryland from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, as a sop to those who might have supported secession, expectations in the slaveholding precincts were probably high that black Americans would remain under white control.
So when perceived violations occurred, the anger was strong.
Creary unearthed other insights as he led a graduate research project on Maryland lynchings at Bowie State two years ago.
First, where the Equal Justice Initiative found that 25 percent of lynching cases nationwide involved allegations of sexual misconduct, nearly always against a white woman, the percentage in Maryland was three times that high.
Michael J. Pfeifer, a professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who has written several books on lynching, says that might be a statistical anomaly. But it might be that the number of free blacks in the state, particularly west of the Chesapeake, simply meant more opportunity for interaction across racial lines.
That meant more opportunity for everything from mixed signals between black and white acquaintances to clandestine interracial relationships and criminal sexual conduct, Pfeifer says.
Creary isn’t buying that so many black men “forced themselves” on white women. He subscribes to the theory shared by anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells as early as the 1890s: that charges of rape were white society’s means of dealing with the horror when consensual interracial relationships came to light.
“Read the [newspaper] accounts,” Creary says. “Time after time, the underlying ‘crime’ happened when the accused was visiting the white woman while her husband was ‘in Baltimore on business’ or ‘out working in the fields.’
“We know it’s necessary to read between the lines.”
Creary’s work challenged another widespread perception — that most of the state’s lynchings took place on the Eastern Shore, a region The New York Times described in 1931 as “lamentably backward,” that Sun columnist H.L. Mencken derided as “the Lynching Shore.”
The 15 that happened there is a sizable number for the sparsely populated region. But Creary points out that more than twice that many were perpetrated on this side of the bay.
“There’s this ongoing discussion around whether Maryland is in the South, the North or somewhere in between,” Creary says. “I think this puts that to rest. Maryland is a Southern state.” it’s not even an honorable mention? “Why is this still being censored?” The experience inspired Johnson to do what others have done: dive into old newspaper accounts and dredge up the truth.
She’s now an expert on Armwood’s killing, the Maryland case that drew more press coverage than any other, including voluminous and graphically detailed coverage in the Afro-American and other black news outlets.
The coverage sparked so much outrage locally, nationally and around the world that it helped plant the seeds for the end of lynching as it had long been known.
Johnson says she might have been less interested in the details she learned — how the white mob had beaten her relative, stabbed him with ice picks, dragged him through the streets behind a car, hanged him not once but twice in the center of town and set his body on fire — than in the near-total absence of conversation about the incident in her hometown.
Her own grandmother never mentioned it again, she says, but Johnson believes the incident stayed with her — a woman who rarely left the house and seemed “frightened of white people” — for the rest of her life. She died at age 88 in 2010. Kirkland Hall, 67, can relate. The longtime physical education professor, coach and community activist, a lifetime resident of Princess Anne, learned as an adult that he’s a distant cousin to George Armwood.
Hall made the Armwood case the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, a process that included hosting a consortium of authors about the incident at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2011.
Nearly a hundred people attended, he says, but only two or three were from Princess Anne — a reflection, Hall believes, of the attitude the town has always had toward the incident.
He interviewed dozens of local AfricanAmerican residents as part of his research, including several who were children at the time of the lynching. Some were still afraid to discuss it.
“Their parents said, ‘Don’t talk about it — and whatever you do say, say it in private,’ ” he says. He doesn’t recall hearing anything about the lynching in elementary school, high school or college.
Hall sees the silence around such trauma as a factor in what he calls his home county’s striking lack of cultural and economic progress.
Somerset County, of which Princess Anne is the seat, didn’t integrate its school system until 1969, for instance, making it one of the last in the United States to do so, and didn’t elect its first black county commissioner — Hall’s longtime friend the Rev. Craig Mathies — until 2010.
Hall believes that breaking the logjam will require bringing long-buried wounds into the open for all to see, discuss and understand.
“Better to take an honest look at history, no matter how painful it might be, than suppress it,” he says. “That’s the only way we’ll be able to understand where each other is coming from, feel like a community, and make progress.”
It’s a message Hall hopes to spread to a wider audience after November. He’s running to become the first African-American state delegate from Somerset County.
He believes he has a good chance. History would suggest otherwise.
“We still have a lot of healing to do,” he says.