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September 4 - November 27, 2018
It was the participation or presence of average whites—law students, businessmen, waiters, shopkeepers, laborers, police officers, and most of the Wicomico High School football team—that blacks remembered. For many blacks on the Shore, this was the lesson of lynching passed down from generation to generation: ordinary whites were not to be trusted.
But where blacks had often identified a family member—grandfather, uncle, or other relative—who heard the lynching, saw the body the next day, or knew the lynched man, whites consistently professed to know very little about the lynchings. In my interviews there were disturbingly few exceptions. And almost to a person, nearly every white person insisted that the lynchers were from “out of town.”
The terror visited upon African American communities on the Eastern Shore in the 1930s has not just disappeared into thin air. It lives in the deep wells of distrust between blacks and whites, in the sense that blacks still must keep their place and that both blacks and whites must remain silent about this history of lynching.
The courthouse lawn, therefore, was a very deliberate choice of venue for lynching. Lynch mobs used the location to assert what they regarded as a legitimate and necessary rebellion against the elitist trappings of the formal legal system. The hanging and charred black body on display outside the courthouse symbolized to the lynch mob and their supporters the independence of the local white community from the dictates of Annapolis and Baltimore.
Much of white supremacy is about the semiotics of place. In fact, “staying in one’s place” was, for decades, a kind of mannerly way of describing the crude requirements of white supremacy.
But the connection between white supremacy and “place” is not just metaphysical. In the contemporary physical landscape, continued white control of the terms in which public space in multiracial communities is defined and developed is a vestige of white supremacist notions of racial place.
These actions by black residents to obtain better working conditions and access to education were exceptions to the prevailing reality for blacks on the Shore in the 1930s. The rule was a rigid system of Jim Crow, in which whites effectively maintained rigid control of the parameters of black economic, political, and educational progress.
In perhaps a crude foreshadowing of the welfare reform work plans of the 1990s, black women who received free flour from the Red Cross in 1931 were required, in exchange for this small charity, to work as domestics in white homes.
the 1930s marked the decade in which lynching had the most widespread geographic diversity, perhaps reflecting the effect of a nationwide economic depression on the inclination of whites even outside the South to vent their frustration, anger, and fear in racial violence.
In the weeks that followed the lynchings, Shore whites almost uniformly blamed the lynchings not on the mob but on frustration over the slow pace of the Lee and Davis cases that fall, in which blacks had been arrested for committing violent crimes against white victims. The failure of the legal system to promptly bring these men to “justice,” said Shore whites,
In fact, Euel Lee and George Davis, the men accused of the crimes in Worcester and Kent Counties, had themselves narrowly escaped lynch mobs. By the time Williams was lynched in December, Lee and Davis were alive only by virtue of having been spirited to the safety of the Baltimore City jail, in each case just an hour ahead of marauding Shore whites carrying ropes.
The ILD’s tactics and brand of lawyering were confrontational. Their effort was always to expose systemic injustice, not just provide representation for individuals. Exposing racial discrimination in the justice system would, ILD lawyers believed, encourage blacks to support communism as a more egalitarian alternative.
The ILD’s representation of Lee saved his life for two years and resulted in a landmark decision from the Maryland Court of Appeals affirming the unconstitutionality of jury selection practices that excluded blacks.
Ades, with the assistance of Stanley Levinson, another ILD lawyer, successfully challenged the verdict on the grounds that African Americans were excluded from jury service in Towson. In fact, it was conceded at the trial that no African American had been selected to serve on a jury in Towson in the twenty-six years preceding the Lee trial. In a landmark decision, the Maryland Court of Appeals threw out Lee’s conviction on the grounds that the exclusion of African Americans from jury service in Baltimore County violated Lee’s constitutional right to be tried by an impartial jury of his peers.
The charge that “Communist interference” was to blame for the racial violence that beset the region from 1931 to 1933 became a kind of mantra in Shore newspapers.
The reprieve for Lee was brief. He received a new trial in Towson, and was again convicted. Appeals of this conviction were rejected. Lee was executed at the Baltimore jail on October 28, 1933,
More than one hundred witnesses were called before the grand jury after the Williams lynching. Forty-two witnesses were called before the grand jury in the Armwood case. In both instances, the men were found by the jury to have died “at the hands of persons unknown.” Both in and out of the courtroom witnesses and spectators to the lynchings insisted that the lynchers were strangers who had come from out of town.
In the fourteen cases of reported lynchings in Maryland beginning in 1885 and ending in 1933, no suspected lynchers were ever indicted.
It is the presence of spectators, the open and audacious criminality of this distinctly public murder, that gives lynching its particular terror.
The willingness of lynchers to act publicly is tremendously significant. It reflects the lynchers’ certainty that they would never face punishment for their acts. The willingness of the crowd to participate in lynching—to cheer, to yell their encouragement, or just to stand and watch without intervention—is perhaps equally terrible.
many lynching photographs show crowds that represent what can best be described as a cross section of the white community.
Despite the open and almost bacchanalian revelry of lynching, what invariably followed was days of silence. Those who had witnessed the lynching never talked about it, not even among themselves.
After the Matthew Williams lynching, the decision to be silent came from the top. On December 5, the day after the lynching, the Salisbury Times set the tone by imposing a news blackout on the lynching. Instead, the paper published “A Statement” explaining its decision not to report on the lynching.
Certainly, whites did not talk about who was involved in the lynching and whether they would be brought to justice. Instead, in the days and weeks after the lynching, whites closed ranks to protect their neighbors and acquaintances from prosecution. More than one hundred witnesses were called before the grand jury investigating the Williams lynching, yet none could identify members of the lynch mob.
In Princess Anne, even after state police officers in sworn testimony identified nine men as leaders of the lynch mob, a local grand jury issued no indictments for Armwood’s murder.
The town sheriff, Luther Daugherty, who had stood at the door of the jail when the mob attacked, announced the day after the lynching that he thought that all of the lynchers were from Virginia. Nearly every local official—from the jailer to the local judge to the coroner to local eyewitnesses—repeated this claim. And this became the official story.
lynching was a tool of white supremacy.
Lynching enforced white privilege, Jim Crow, and white domination of the political, educational, and economic advancement of the community through terror.
The horror of lynching reminded blacks that, as a last resort, violent reprisals could be exacted for breaches of the social order. This means that, at least in the short term, ordinary whites—even those who would never have joined a lynch mob—benefited from lynching,
there is strong evidence to suggest that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the northern industrial centers between World War I and World War II was fueled at least in part by lynchings and the threat of racial violence in southern communities.
Affirmative efforts were made as well to control the response of the local black community. After Matthew Williams was lynched, Salisbury mayor Wade Insley called a meeting of local black leaders in what the Afro described as “an old Dixie custom of getting the colored leaders of the city ‘in line.’”31 The mayor advised blacks to stay off the streets and ordered that blacks close their businesses temporarily. A similar curfew was not imposed on white businesses.
crowd of one thousand local men used force to try to keep the National Guard from arresting men who’d been identified by the state police as leaders of a lynch mob. This crowd could not be explained as a “foreign mob” from “Virginia.” No one had known the National Guard were coming into town. They had arrived in the hours before dawn, and no significant out-of-state contingent could have been mobilized to face the Guard on such short notice. It was local townspeople in Salisbury who sought to repulse the arrest of the suspected lynchers.
A day later, when the Somerset County state’s attorney ordered the four suspected lynchers returned to Princess Anne for a habeas corpus hearing and the four men were brought before local judges, a crowd of nearly one thousand well-wishers crammed into the county courthouse and cheered the release of the four men, affirming their solidarity with the suspected murderers.
The complicity of average whites in joining or condoning the lynchings convinced many blacks that whites were simply not to be trusted.
Snow Holden expressed the sentiment of many blacks when after the Williams lynching he concluded, “It’s got to be one or two good [whites], but if push come to shove, they’re not going to do no better’n keep quiet.”
Lynchings were rarely single events. In many lynchings in the Deep South, whites would burn black homes and businesses after a lynching. Ripples of violence could last for weeks or even months.
There is no record of any white person ever having been convicted of murder for lynching a black person—not in the thousands of instances of white-on-black lynchings in thirty-four states.
In the heated climate of hurled insults between Baltimore writers such as H. L. Mencken and various Shore newspapers, the question of a change of venue came to be more about the “honor of the Shore” than about whether a black defendant accused of the quadruple murder of a white family and chased from the Shore by lynch mobs could get a fair trial.
the court’s decision to reverse Lee’s first conviction for the murder of Green K. Davis after his trial in Towson. The conviction was reversed on the grounds that blacks had been impermissibly excluded from jury service in Baltimore County, where the trial was held. The decision was great because it affirmed for courts throughout the state that excluding blacks from juries—a practice outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving a black defendant from West Virginia in 1888, but still very much in practice in many states in the 1930s—would be regarded by the Maryland Court of Appeals
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That Lee was entitled to a new trial meant that his execution—the event that many Shore residents regarded as the only outcome that could provide justice for the murdered Green K. Davis family—would not happen in 1932. This “delay” in what Shore residents were certain would be Lee’s execution (there seemed to be no question that he would be convicted and given the death penalty) was a principal reason that Shore residents cited for why the Matthew Williams and George Armwood lynchings occurred.
the reversal of Lee’s conviction was described contemptuously as evidence of Bernard Ades’s Communist-backed manipulation of legal technicalities. Adherence to the Constitution was merely a legal technicality when a black man was accused of an interracial crime.
With this statement, the Times articulated for the community the expected code of behavior. According to his own account, publisher Charles Truitt genuinely believed that there might be a “Negro uprising” in Salisbury. He insisted, even years after the lynchings, that there really was Communist infiltration of black communities on the Shore, and that the Elliot murder was part of a larger plot by blacks to assassinate white leaders in the town.
No evidence of a “Negro uprising” or of Communist influence in the death of D.J. Elliot was ever found to corroborate Truitt’s suspicions.
The news blackout on the Williams lynching enabled whites to minimize the significance of this hideously violent racial act.
Discussions about the lynching by Baltimore papers or the national media were regarded as “outside interference.”
Although more than one hundred witnesses were called before a grand jury, none recognized any of the lynchers.
week after George Armwood was lynched, the Somerset Marylander and Herald devoted its principal editorial to asking “Who Took Armwood to Baltimore?” The editors regarded Armwood’s removal to Baltimore as “the cause of the lynching.”
The editors also offered the assurance that the lynchers were not from Somerset County, insisting that “had there been built around Somerset County that night a fence that would have excluded all outsiders, there would have been no lynching.”
The responsibility for skewed racial coverage of the events during this period does not fall entirely on the local media. The Baltimore Sun also had its limitations. It failed to report on black lynching victims and communities in ways that sufficiently conveyed their humanity and complexity. The Sun’s postlynching news coverage, while clearly more balanced than that of local Shore papers, focused exclusively on the perspectives and viewpoints of whites.
no story in the Sun included interviews with the family of either man or of residents of the black communities who were terrorized by the lynchings.
