SALISBURY, Md.
TEASER: The last two recorded lynchings in Maryland, in 1931 and 1933, and other incidents of racial violence in the Jim Crow era on the Eastern Shore, still affect the region, University of Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill argues in her book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century.
Matthew Williams was dragged from his hospital bed and lynched outside the former Wicomico Hotel. Two years later, George Armwood was stabbed and hanged before a mob dragged his body to the Somerset County Courthouse and set it on fire.
Those two lynchings, in 1931 and 1933, were the last recorded in Maryland, and it’s unclear whether any witnesses are still alive. But those events — and other incidents of racial violence in the Jim Crow era on the Eastern Shore — still affect the region, University of Maryland law professor Sherrilyn Ifill argues in her book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century.
Ifill recounts the lynchings and suggests that racial violence isn’t just a history lesson — it’s a trust-shattering horror that taints relationships between Blacks and Whites even today. Many White Eastern Shore natives don’t even know the lynchings occurred, Ifill says, but for Blacks, they left a legacy of fear and mistrust.
“The wounds of White supremacy,” she writes, “still stand open and untreated.”
While researching the book, published in February, Ifill says many Blacks from Baltimore and Washington D.C., warned her to be careful on her trips to the Eastern Shore — seven decades after the lynching took place. Racial tensions simmer to this day along the Eastern Shore. And much of it expresses itself in ways seemingly unrelated to the lynchings, such as a recent debate over where to put a statue of abolitionist and native son Frederick Douglass.
