Lynching in Maryland

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The Baltimore City Historical Society's 3rd Annual Workshop for Baltimore Historians

May 4, 2007, organized by Professor Garrett Power

MARYLAND LYNCHINGS: THE ILLUSIVE RECORD OF MOB VIOLENCE AND SHAMEFUL DENIAL.

Twentieth century lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore captured the attention of the media state-wide. Courtrooms served as a stage for the public drama, and the press coverage became part of the story. The Workshop addressed the differences in the treatment of the news to be found in the Baltimore press, (Sun papers and Afro American) from those on the Maryland Shore (Salisbury Times, Cambridge Daily Banner, Worcester Democrat) It discussed the public trials and the news accounts, and considered how they may have instigated the carnage or calmed the crowd, disguised the miscreants or exposed the wrongdoers, exposed the racial violence or denied that it occurred.

In a broader sense the workshop pondered the difficulty of the task faced by the historian when reconstructing the truth of racial violence, and documenting the vigilante assaults on the rule of law. For the ongoing effort to document lynchings in Maryland it credited the pioneering work of the Maryland State Archives in its website Judge Lynch's Court .

The videos of the conference are available on Google Drive with permission to access.

Featured speakers included

Sherrilyn Ifill, at the time of the workshop was Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. She subsequently served as the seventh President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) from 2013 to 2022, and currently serves as President and Director-Counsel Emeritus. Sherrilyn Ifill writes about the history of racial violence and contemporary reconciliation efforts. Her book about truth and reconciliation commissions for lynching entitled, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century released by Beacon Books in February 2007.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers discussed courage in the time of lynching. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, named "Top Ten Biographies 2005-2006" by Booklist Magazine and rated "Top Ten Literary Best Sellers" by Library Journal. Her previous books include Mencken & Sara: A Life.

Moderator:

Christopher E. Haley, Maryland State Archives Chris Haley is the Research Director for the Archives' History of Slavery in Maryland.

Commentators:

Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, Maryland State Archivist, retired. Dr. Papenfuse held the positions of Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents from 1975 until 2013. As director of the extensive activities of the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Dr. Papenfuse was responsible for the Archives' vast collection of government and private records. Dr. Papenfuse presented an impassioned plea for a careful search of all evidence relating to lynching in Maryland coupled with adequate funding for the State Archives to catalogue and preserve those sources. He referenced an e-publication he created of a disintegrating clipping file kept by Governor Ritchie and summarized recent investigations into the sources relating to lynching. See: 1931-Newspaper Clippings and Correspondence Relating to the Lynching of Matthew Williams, Courthouse lawn, Salisbury, MD, December 4, 1931 MSA S 1048-1 & 10.

C. Christopher Brown, at the time of the workshop, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland School of Law and a partner in Brown, Goldstein and Levy, and served as General Counsel for the ACLU of Maryland. He authored The Road to Jim Crow: The African American Struggle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 1860–1915 published in 2016 by the Maryland Historical Society, now the Maryland Center for History and Culture.


Just as the Ritchie clipping and correspondence file is a rich resource for the study of lynching and the attitudes towards lynching, so too are other sources from public and private records which have yet to be fully explored.  For example, in June 2002, the State Archivist addressed the Maryland Municipal League about preserving and making accessible municipal records in Maryland. In those remarks he talked about an Annapolis City Councilman and an Annapolis lynching:

The oldest extant municipality in Maryland is Annapolis, the capital, founded in 1694 and chartered by Queen Anne in 1708.  Over the years the surviving town records have been carefully inventoried and retired to the State Archives, making their historical records one of the best municipal collections in any state, comprising over half of all the municipal records in our collections.  We have placed the Annapolis records inventories and schedules for retention and disposition on line at http://mdsa.net, where you can review them at your leisure, but I would like to close with an example that in part emerges from the official records of the town, a story that has meaning for us on a number of different levels.  It might be called the life and times of Councilman Wiley H. Bates.  From his biographer we know that Bates was born into slavery in North Carolina in August, 1859.  After the Civil War, he worked as a water boy and freight boy on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.  His father died when he was 13, and Bates found himself working on a boat that traveled on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal between Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and Cumberland, Maryland.  It wasn't long before Bates' mother sought a more stable life for her son and moved with him to Annapolis, where he worked culling oysters.  When he got a little older he joined Asbury United Methodist Church, the oldest black congregation in town.  Incredibly energetic and optimistic in a society that had afforded him no formal education to speak of and institutionalized racial discrimination, he worked hard at anything he tried:  waiting tables, crabbing, splitting wood and peddling it on the streets.  His outgoing and friendly nature earned him a trusting clientele that later patronized the grocery store he opened at 54 Cathedral Street while still in his early 20s.  He took a bride and made a home for himself a few doors down from the store.  As the grocery business grew, Bates became known for his fair business practices and honest dealings with his customers, who called him the "Negro Gentleman."3

Bates' popularity and leadership skills earned him a seat on the Annapolis city council in July 1897, when he was elected Annapolis' third consecutive black alderman representing the third (later fourth) ward and it is for this service we turn to the municipal records.  During his two years on the council, Bates served as a member of the standing committees on public buildings and electric lights.4  Bates worked with the mayor, the city counselor, and five other council members to conduct such city business as electing city police officers, overseeing the grading and paving of city streets, approving the installation of electric lights and telephone poles throughout the city and the laying of additional track for the Annapolis and Baltimore Short Line R.R. Co., as well as the granting or denying of city liquor licenses.  Far from being a passive member of the council, Bates took a leading roll as an advocate for city blacks from his earliest days on the council.  In early October 1897, he spearheaded an effort to petition the legislature for funds to build the city's first public school for "colored" children.5  When in May 1898 the city council ordered an additional appropriation to help pay the salaries of teachers at the all white Annapolis High School in order for the school year to extend into June, Bates made sure that the salaries of black teachers were increased for the same purpose.6  In October 1898, Bates proposed a council resolution condemning the lynching of  Wright Smith, a black man accused of assaulting two white women, who was dragged from the Annapolis City jail in the middle of the night and then shot in the back while trying to flee a mob of angry white men.  Bates called the lynching a disgrace to the city and cited his belief that Smith would have been brought to justice shortly by due process of  law.  Although Governor Lloyd Lowndes  publicly condemned the lynching as "an outrage,"7 Bates' resolution was defeated in the city council with only one other member voting in favor of it.8

Bates did not serve again on the Council but his place was taken by other members of the African American community.  By 1908 racism was so rampant in the city and elsewhere in the state, that the Maryland legislature, having lost at state-wide referendum, attempted to disenfranchise African Americans at the local level by passing a new ordinance for Annapolis that in effect said that if your grandfather could not vote, you could not either (1908 Laws of Maryland, Chapter 525).  That meant that the descendants of African Americans slave or free, could no longer vote or hold office.  By 1908 James Albert Adams was serving on the Annapolis City Council in place of Wiley Bates.  He lost his seat, not to regain it until 1915, when the Supreme Court upheld the right to vote and hold office of another Annapolitan, John B. Anderson, a veteran of the Civil War.

By then Wiley Bates had retired from the grocery business in 1912, and was one of the wealthiest black residents in town.  He invested in local real estate and built on his reputation as a champion of improved education for blacks.   In the 1920s, Bates donated $500 of his own money toward the purchase of land to build a new black high school in Annapolis.  The new school opened in 1933 and was named the "Wiley Bates High School" in his honor.  At the age of 69 he published an autobiographical book of "sayings" that told of his deep Christian faith, his belief in the value of perseverance, hard work, thrift, brotherly love and a good measure of "pluck."  Aware that the basic needs of food and shelter for many of the older blacks in Annapolis were not being met on a regular basis,9 Bates directed in his will that one of his Annapolis homes be incorporated as "The Bates Old Peoples Home" to be used as a refuge for elderly blacks "regardless of sect."10  He died in 1935 at the age of 76, a testimony to the fruitfulness of diligence, optimism, and the persistent struggle for civil, economic  and social freedom.

We can tell Bates's story today largely because the municipal sources were preserved in a central location and made available to the public.  From the proceedings of the Annapolis city council dating from 1720, the original bylaws and ordinances dating from 1779, city commission reports from 1843, and the mayor's case files from the 1950s, a wealth of information lies at the fingertips of the anyone wishing to more completely uncover the secrets of  life in Annapolis over the past 350 years.


Sources:

3.  Wiley H. Bates, Researches, Sayings and Life of Wiley H. Bates (Annapolis:  1928), p. 25.

4.  The other standing committees were finance, streets, Market House, fire department, and by-laws.  Maryland State Archives ANNAPOLIS MAYOR AND ALDERMEN (Proceedings) 1892-1898, MSA M49-14, 1/22/1/66, p. 350.

5.  Maryland State Archives ANNAPOLIS MAYOR AND ALDERMEN (Proceedings) 1892-1898, MSA M49-14, 1/22/1/66, p. 374.  The Stanton School was built in 1900.  Before 1900, the Gallilean Fisherman School, founded by Methodists, and St. Mary's Catholic Church served as private schools for black children.  See Philip L. Brown, The Other Annapolis 1900-1950 (Annapolis:  The Annapolis Publishing Company, 1994), p. 53.

6.  Maryland State Archives ANNAPOLIS MAYOR AND ALDERMEN (Proceedings) 1892-1898, MSA M49-14, 1/22/1/66, pp. 419-420.

Bates Resolution re: Lynching

7.  "Annapolis Lynchers," The Baltimore Weekly Sun, 8 October 1898.

8.  Maryland State Archives ANNAPOLIS MAYOR AND ALDERMEN (Proceedings) 1898-1901, MSA M49-15, 1/22/1/67, p. 27.

9.  Maryland State Archives ANNAPOLIS MAYOR AND ALDERMEN (Proceedings) 1892-1898, MSA M49-14, 1/22/1/66, p. 371.

10.  Maryland State Archives ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY REGISTER OF WILLS (Wills) MSA T2559-11, WMN 1, 1/1/10/56.

11.  Maryland Municipal League.

       http://www.mdmunicipal.org/

For further information on lynching in Maryland see: the "Lynching in Maryland" genealogical project of the BAAHGS–Baltimore Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society written and directed by Brett M. Tyler and Donna T. Hollie. Its objective, building on the research and writing of the Judge Lynch's Court project at the Maryland State Archives, is to continue the biographical research and writing about individuals lynched, their family and community, and to extend the research and writing to those who perpetrated and collaborated in lynching.