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EASTERN SHORE IS DEFENDED AGAINST CRITIC
William Cabell Bruce
Takes Issue With Prof.
Broadus Mitchell On
Negro Lynching
LAX CHARGE DENIED
Senator Compliments People On Shore On English Ancestry And Praised Civic Accomplishments
Baltimore, Jan. 29 (£>)—-A defense of Salisbury and the Eastern Shore, accused of backwardness in spiritual and mental development, has been made by William Cabell Bruce, former United States Senator from Maryland.
The charges referred to by Senator Bruce were made by Professor Broadus Mitchell of Johns Hopkins University, in a report of the lynching of Matthew Williams, negro, at Salisbury last December 4. Professor Mitchell went to Salisbury at the request of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and prepared the report.
Lynchings Occur In Every State
"Prom the recent attacks on the character of our Eastern Shore brothers one might suppose that lynching is peculiar to the Eastern Shore," Senator Bruce said in a long open letter, published today. 'The fact is that it has occurred over and over again in many states of the union wherever the incitement to it has been sufficiently intense and widespread to provoke it."
Senator Bruce then cited a case in Baltimore county, on the Western Shore some years ago in which a man was taken from the Towson jail and lynched for an attack on a woman.
Advocating stern retribution for lynchers the former Maryland senator said: "Close as every group of American citizens are to the representative agencies of their government, and passionately impelled as they may be at times to reclaim the authority that they have delegated to the courts of justice, they have no right, when they lynch, to expect anything but stern retribution at the hands of the law."
Denies Lax Charge
Defending the shore against the accusations of Professor Mitchell he said:
"The mental and spiritual backwardness of the Eastern Shore is supposed by Professor Mitchell to be attributable to geographical isolation, due to the interpolation of the Chesapeake Bay between the Eastern and Western Shores of Maryland, but when it is remembered how close the Eastern Shore is to the doors of the two greatest cities in the world, Philadelphia and New York, it is hard to believe that the loss of mental stimulus and spiritual exaltation, which the Eastern Shore suffers from not being nearer to such an abode of intellectual power and seraphic sin-lessness as Baltimore, can be quite as pronounced as Dr. Mitchell seems to think."
The senator in concluding his letter complimented the people of the Eastern Shore on their English ancestry and praised the civic accomplishments of Salisbury, Snow Hill, Centreville, Chestertown and Denton.
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