Family legacies

Tina Johnson, an African-American arts administrator and mother of three in Princess Anne, was 12 years old on the day in 1998 when word came that a male cousin had been arrested after a public argument with his white girlfriend.

The reaction of her soft-spoken grandmother left her head spinning.

“Our men have to learn to stop messing around with white women,” Mary Armwood told her granddaughter. “It’s a good way to get killed.”

And Mary, then in her 70s, told Tina a story she had never heard — one that would shape the direction of her life.

Mary was about 10 on the day in October 1933 when her own cousin, an excitable and possibly developmentally disabled 22-year-old named George Armwood, came racing into the house.

George “belonged” to a white family across town — a common setup in Southern states long after the end of slavery — and had worked since boyhood in their lumber yard.

He blurted out that he was about to be accused of “having sex” with an elderly white woman, that “those white boys” actually did it — and that a crowd of police and angry whites was on its way.

He raced off and hid in the woods near his white family’s house. But they gave him up under pressure from the baying mob.

“They beat him really bad; they hung him; they killed him,” Armwood told her granddaughter, her eyes wide and voice shaking.

For years, Johnson figured it was just an odd family story. But years later, as an undergraduate design major at Salisbury University, she came across a brief account of the incident in a textbook on Maryland history.

She had two reactions: shock upon realizing this was the incident her late grandmother had told her about, and anger that it had merited only three paragraphs.

“I’m thinking, ‘We have to learn all these things about history, and this book covered a range of white Marylanders, but when it came to black Marylanders it was just a blip,’” she says, still sounding surprised.

“There were a lot of people lynched in the state of Maryland, and the only thing you do is give the last person who was lynched a brief mention, and