The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old
Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the
legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of
white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a
twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His
gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the
wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black
laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For
nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the
shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the
deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of
Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis
Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative
documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the
last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of
anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that
surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety
for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it
nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after
the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims
rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death
would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious
governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself
as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in
the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black
person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton
detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover
in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams.
Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to
participating in the lynching and who also named several local law
enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury,
after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the
perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor
Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the
pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland.
Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of
lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the
immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics
of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury,
the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of
"modern-day lynchings."
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