Going Further

Montgomery County

• The archivist at Montgomery History, the county’s historical society, has been working with assistance from volunteer researchers, genealogists and others to compile in-depth accounts of each of the county’s three known lynchings and the many people associated with them. These accounts are available here.
• The Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project seeks to educate and engage the community about the history and legacy of lynching and racial terrorism.
• The county has established a Remembrance and Reconciliation Commission to support community dialogue about racial justice and establish a memorial for African Americans who were lynched in Montgomery County.
• The film “The Three (Known) Lynchings of Montgomery County, Maryland,” is available for screening. Please contact us for further information.

Maryland

• On a statewide level, the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project works to advance the cause of documenting the history of racial terror lynchings, advocating for public acknowledgement of these murders and working to honor and dignify the lives of the victims. The site includes links to other county projects around the state.
• The Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established by the state to research cases of racially motivated lynchings and hold public meetings and regional hearings where a lynching of an African American by a white mob has been documented.
• The Baltimore Sun has posted an online interactive map documenting more than 40 known lynchings in the state.
• The state memorial project was founded by filmmaker Will Schwarz, who has two short documentaries available online on incidents in Maryland. The first is “BURN: The Lynching of George Armwood,” which details the 1933 lynching of a 23-year-old Black man on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The second is “Outrage in Rockland: The Lynching of Howard Cooper,” on the lynching of a man near Schwarz’s home in Towson, Maryland.
• “On the Courthouse Lawn, Revised Edition: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century,” is an in-depth examination of lynchings on Maryland’s Eastern Shore by civil rights attorney Sherrilynn Ifill, with insights and details that are common to many of these murders.

United States

• “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” is a report by Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. EJI has documented close to 4,500 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Its work continues the efforts of the Tuskegee Institute, which kept records on lynchings from its earliest days.
• As EJI’s online map shows, these lynchings were most common in the South, but occurred from Texas to the Canadian border and from California to New York State.
• The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also known as the National Lynching Memorial, opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018. The memorial includes 805 hanging steel rectangles, representing each of the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place.