A Maryland city’s apology for lynchings rings hollow for some

For some Salisbury residents, the lynchings are not worth revisiting. The city has moved on, they say. They point to two Black members on the five-member city council, including its president, D’Shawn Doughty, 29, as a sign of progress. To them, Salisbury is a world away from what it was in 1931.

Others see a city still weighed down by racism, power inequities and a fear of speaking up that they trace back to the Eastern Shore’s history of slavery, rigid Jim Crow laws and racist intimidation. They agree Salisbury has changed. But not enough.

While no one here has publicly opposed an official apology for the lynchings, the language of the document — and the extent to which it should acknowledge the city’s culpability — has been a source of contention. The debate in Salisbury about the apology, which the council is expected to formally ratify Monday, in some ways reflects the nation’s unease with how to address America’s history of racism and racist violence and the degree to which that legacy continues to shape the country.

Advocates pushed for a sweeping apology to Salisbury’s Black community and wanted the lynchings to be referred to as “racial terror lynchings” in the resolution. They also called for the city to apologize “for its historical role in targeting the larger Black community of Salisbury during and after these acts of racial terrorism, and for its negligence in not protecting its own citizens.”

Instead, they got what some feel is a watered-down version that doesn’t come to terms with Salisbury’s history of racism and the imprint that has left on its Black residents. The city, concerned about potential legal liability, directed the apology only to the family and descendants of the men who were murdered. It removed language calling on the city to more forcefully acknowledge the long-lasting effects of the lynchings and commit to repairing that damage.

“It’s a boilerplate, vanilla apology that doesn’t really say anything,” said James Yamakawa, head of the Wicomico Truth and Reconciliation Initiative, who began pushing for the action a year ago alongside the Wicomico County NAACP branch. But he sees its adoption as both the culmination of an effort and the beginning of a new one. “It has taken 100 years for the city to start talking about this,” he said, “so it might take a few more until the community has really understood what happened.”

Jeannie Jones wants the apology even if it doesn’t convey everything that she hoped it would.

A D.C. native, Jones often visited family members who lived in Salisbury growing up. Still, she didn’t learn until five years ago that her great-grandmother was the aunt of Matthew Williams, who on Dec. 4, 1931, was dragged to the Wicomico courthouse lawn, beaten and hanged in front of 500 to 1,000 people, newspapers of the day reported. His body was then paraded through a Black neighborhood and set afire in an empty lot.

In May 2021, she joined other Salisbury residents who walked the route from the hospital to the courthouse lawn along which Williams had been dragged.

They collected soil from the lynching site to be placed in a jar and delivered to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. The lynching memorial, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, is home to hundreds of similar jars of soil from lynching locations all over the country.

An apology, Jones said, would send a message of accountability. “If you don’t acknowledge that these things happened, it just leaves an open wound,” she said. “It never gets a chance to be healed.”

‘Unsatisfactory’

For many people who grew up here, Black or White, the lynchings were a hushed history. The events were not taught in school and rarely discussed in public. Two of the most traumatic days in the city’s past were essentially whispered away.

Randy Taylor, 58, who was elected Salisbury’s mayor in November, said his family moved here in the 1960s and he had never heard about the lynchings.

“Obviously, I knew that there had probably been racial incidents because of that period of time. But I didn’t know specifically that there had been actual lynchings,” said Taylor, who endorsed issuing an apology while campaigning.

Three weeks after the election, Taylor, who is White, said in a city council work session that some of the language in the apology proposed by advocates in September would need to be changed. “I think everyone could find some comfort in the spirit of that document that doesn’t have some of the things that I saw and talked [about] with the attorney earlier,” Taylor said. “It’s just a matter of wordsmithing it properly.”

In an interview last week, Taylor said the city’s version of the apology accomplished “both goals of offering a ceremonial apology but not recognizing that any of us living or the city was responsible for it.”

White mobs lynched at least 40 African Americans in Maryland between 1854 and 1933, according to the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established by the state legislature in 2019 to hold hearings and “make recommendations for addressing the legacy of lynching that are rooted in the spirit of restorative justice.”

At least seven lynchings and approximately 19 attempted lynchings took place in the lower part of the Eastern Shore, according to histories collected by Salisbury University. And beginning in the 1920s, the region became a hot spot for Ku Klux Klan gatherings, including cross burnings in its larger towns. H.L. Mencken, writing in the Baltimore Sun in 1931, said the Klan “got a firm lodgment in the lower counties of the Shore, and the brutish imbecilities that it propagated are still accepted gravely by large numbers of the people, including not a few who should know better.”

Williams’s was the last lynching recorded in Salisbury; the body of a Black middle-aged man that has never been identified was found beaten to death that very same night. Newspaper reports attributed his killing to the same mob.

The events shook the state, bolstered by extensive reporting from the Afro-American along with other Baltimore and Washington newspapers. Maryland Gov. Albert Ritchie (D), who had presidential ambitions, ordered an investigation and said the crime “must bring a blush of shame to every law-abiding Marylander.”

But the results of a probe Ritchie privately ordered were never released. And the investigator had found evidence of community involvement at every level.

Town leaders, including the fire chief and police chief, were allegedly complicit in the lynching, according to contemporaneous reports and interviews the private investigator conducted that sat in files for generations, said Charles L. Chavis Jr., an assistant professor of history at George Mason University who wrote “The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State.”

“We have to acknowledge the mistrust and neglect and how institutions historically have gotten it wrong,” Chavis, vice chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said in an interview. “They were supposed to protect and serve, and instead they were a part of violence to destroy communities. And so that has to be grappled with if we’re going to move forward.”

The first reported lynching in Salisbury was that of Garfield King, 18. On May 25, 1898, King, who was Black and suspected of murdering a White man, was dragged by a mob from his jail cell to the courthouse lawn, hanged from a tree and reportedly shot 100 times, according to an account in the Baltimore Sun.

Maryland creates commission on lynchings

Monica Brooks, president of the Wicomico County NAACP branch, called the city’s apology “unsatisfactory.” But, she said, the apology “was never meant to be the end all, be all. It is supposed to be the start of a conversation, a reflection, an auditing of practices for the city to recognize who has been missing, what may be inequitable and then actually do something about it.”

She pointed to ongoing issues with housing, education and city services for Black residents. She also noted a city workforce where Black people are underrepresented. Black residents make up about 40 percent of Salisbury’s population, and White residents make up about 46 percent, according to U.S. census data. Of the 489 people employed by the city of Salisbury, about 80 percent are White and a little less than 15 percent are Black, according to information provided by the city.

In December, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal voting rights lawsuit against Wicomico County alleging that its system for electing school board and council members is racially discriminatory and unlawful.

“Things have been status quo here for so long, and people think it’s normal. And it’s not normal,” Brooks said.

4,400 lynchings and few apologies

The Equal Justice Initiative has documented approximately 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans across 20 states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950. The U.S. Senate officially apologized to lynching victims and their descendants in 2005.

Efforts to memorialize lynching victims divide American communities

Community apologies for lynchings have been infrequent in America, but there are some examples.

The Annapolis City Council apologized in 2018 for lynchings, including that of Henry Davis in 1906 who was taken from his jail cell by a mob, hanged from a tree and then shot more than 100 times. In 2021, the Chatham County Board of Commissioners in North Carolina apologized for the killing of 16-year-old Eugene Daniel in 1921. The board said evidence suggested county officials at the time were partly responsible for his death after a mob wrested Daniel from a county jail cell.

The progress on an official apology from Salisbury had been stop and start. But last month, the TRUTH committee approved the city’s proposed apology while acknowledging that it was less than some in Salisbury wanted.

Opinion: Working toward racial healing by addressing lynching

“It has been a long, drawn-out process,” said Amber Green, 33, the committee’s chairperson. “I’m just glad to get it done, so we can move forward and do some things that are going to have lasting impact.” She envisions the city taking a more hands-on approach to ensure residents know its history of discrimination, lynchings and redlining.

“The biggest thing is that we want the city to do more than just apologize,” Green said. “This apology is that first step. And then we need to reconcile.”

Progress is, after all, the point, descendants of King explained to the council last November.

In emotional testimony, LaTanya Christopher, with her aunt sitting beside her, said that in seeking the apology “we do not aim to dwell on the past, but rather to learn from it, heal from it and ensure that such injustices are never repeated.”

The apology, she said, would be a “powerful symbol” and “a promise to work together to create a community where justice, equality and respect for all are not just words, but lived realities.”