Sun should investigate its coverage of lynchings
The Baltimore Sun is committed to making amends for a history of failing Black communities in its coverage and, as part of a public apology, has asked area leaders and scholars to suggest a path forward. We will run the responses as an occasional series.
As public defenders, we hear countless stories from our Black clients about interactions with police. We have watched, listened, and read in horror as they are still targeted and terrorized based on their race. This racial terror has deep roots in our country’s history of oppression. A presentation by Will Schwarz of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project on the lynching of Howard Cooper moved us to take a deeper look into the responsibility of the state’s paper of record at the time.
In 1885, The Baltimore Sun reported extensively about Howard Cooper, a Black youth accused of assaulting a white woman. The Sun’s coverage of the case was inflammatory, assuming guilt within the first week and throughout pre-trial reporting, using biased language to embellish the allegations. The Baltimore Sun made every attempt to make Mr. Cooper, a teenager, seem threatening, initially describing him as nearly 10 years older and 5 inches taller than he actually was, and using words like “stout,” even though he was later described as “slim” by a reporter who met with him.
After Mr. Cooper was convicted in May 1885 — by an all-white jury that never left the jury box to deliberate — The Sun was quick to endorse the guilty verdict and called the allegations “the most shocking crime ever perpetrated in Maryland,” a state that a mere 20 years earlier had allowed slavery within its borders. The paper further suggested that, had Mr. Cooper been lynched “on the first convenient tree in Baltimore County” while awaiting trial, it would have been “deserved.”
‘Encouragement to lynch law’
Within two months of The Sun’s May 1885 endorsement of lynching, Mr. Cooper and Townsend Cook, another Black
man accused of assaulting another white woman, would each be violently seized and hanged. The paper blamed Mr. Cook’s killing on an appeal filed by Mr. Cooper’s attorneys, using funds raised by the Black community, on the basis that the jury had not included any Black men.
“To hold such a case in suspense for an indefinite time for the purpose of merely establishing a theoretical point would, it is natural to suppose, have the effect of lending such encouragement to lynch law in similar cases,” The Sun wrote, finding that Mr. Cook “was hanged because Cooper was not.”
That was in June. By July, Mr. Cooper was dragged from his jail cell and hanged.
The Baltimore Sun essentially goaded lynching by characterizing the appeal as “tricks and subterfuges” that encourage “lawless combinations of men to break down the doors of jails, seize notorious murderers and others guilty of capital offenses and hang them to the nearest tree.”
Once Mr. Cooper was murdered, The Baltimore Sun gave sympathetic voice to those who had carried out the crime, excusing their behavior by essentially saying they had waited patiently and only acted once they could no longer trust the legal process. And, in a move that is all-too familiar in modern instances of race-related violence and killings, The Sun tried to
remove race from the narrative, claiming it didn’t play a role in the lynching, despite referring to Mr. Cooper by his race throughout its coverage. The Sun also protected the anonymity of the lynchers, and allowed the sheriff to regale readers with his romanticized defense of the jail, even though there were warnings of lynching before Mr. Cooper was even arrested.
Take a harder look
In 2018, The Baltimore Sun took the first steps toward reconciling its past through reporting on Maryland’s lynching history and acknowledging faults in its coverage of 20th century lynchings. And last month, The Sun’s editorial board apologized for the paper’s history of prejudice and bigotry. As part of that effort, the board asked for recommendations on how The Sun can make amends and serve the needs of the Black community going forward.
To that end, we ask that The Baltimore Sun take a harder look at not only how they encouraged and were complicit in acts of lynching that took place throughout Maryland, but also how this racial terror impacted the Black community. The reporting in publications like The Baltimore Sun was a warning to the Black community that if they were to step out of racially defined boundaries, they would be punished.
We ask that, given this history, The Sun also takes a hard look at its reporting on the Black community today when the subject matter doesn’t involve sports or allegations of crime. We ask that The Sun diversify reporting on the Black community by regularly assigning Black reporters to write about Black excellence. The paper has made some strides on this recently, but has decades to make up for.
The Baltimore Sun should follow the lead of the Kansas City Star and other media outlets who have taken responsibility for their involvement in history, apologized and implemented a detailed plan for investigating and correcting coverage. In December 2020, Star Editor Mike Fannin apologized for his paper’s harmful past, stating that “through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”
The Star used a team of reporters to investigate not only the Star’s coverage but other local press, including Black newspapers, to reexamine how the paper historically covered Black communities, in an effort to uncover what really happened over the course of more than 100 years of the paper’s existence.
The Star then published a six-part media package with its findings. Finally, the Star made many internal structural changes, including hiring a race and equity officer, launching a two-year journalism project exploring the lack of trust in policing in communities of color, and hosting public events at local libraries.
Follow visionary Black Marylanders
We ask The Baltimore Sun to use its investigative resources to provide a full reporting of Maryland’s history of lynchings, heinous murders that Congress finally deemed federal hate crimes through a bill approved Monday — 122 years after a proposal was first introduced.
In 1885, The Baltimore Sun reported that there had been 252 lynchings between 1881 and 1884 in the United States. In addition to those documented by
The Sun’s Lynching Map, which shows the locations of 44 lynchings in the state, there were likely others during this era whose death by mob was not reported. For example, although the only documented lynching in Charles County was of a white man, The Baltimore Sun’s 1896 account of that event makes it clear that those involved in the lynching were experienced: “The manner of the lynching shows that it was not done by a rabble, but by cool and deliberate men,” the paper said. Additionally, while there is only one reported lynching in St. Mary’s County, there is a tree known as the “hanging tree,” and reference is made to lynchings taking place across from the county courthouse.
We also ask that The Sun work with local historical societies, libraries and organizations to investigate known lynchings. Many local historical societies and libraries have research that could help in these investigations, especially in more remote rural communities. We ask that you work with these communities to find photos of the deceased and identify descendants.
Very simply, we ask that The Baltimore Sun follow the lead of visionary Black Marylanders Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall who have led the nation in marching toward racial equality and justice.