On-camera in “The Three Lynchings”
(In order of appearance)
“The Three (Known) Lynchings of Montgomery County, Maryland” features interviews and comments from three people:
Anthony Cohen
Historian Anthony Cohen has traveled thousands of miles by foot, boat, rail (and mail crate) to trace the steps of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. He says he was surprised while researching county history one day to stumble across an account of one of the county’s three lynchings. Although born and raised in Montgomery County, Cohen had never read or heard of these events. Cohen is a member of the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project, and is president of the Menare Foundation, Inc., which operates the Button Farm Living History Center on 40 acres inside Seneca Creek State Park in Germantown, MD. The farm is Maryland’s only living history center dedicated to depicting 19th century slave plantation life.
Sarah Hedlund
Sarah Hedlund is the archivist and librarian for Montgomery History, where she manages both the Montgomery County Archives and the Jane C. Sween Research Library and Special Collections. With the help of volunteer researchers and genealogists, she has spent over a year piecing together deeply researched accounts of the three lynchings and the people involved in them, sorting through tangled family relationships, hundreds of newspaper articles and any other discoverable accounts and documents in an attempt to paint a fuller picture of what happened in Montgomery County in the late 19th century. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland with a specialization in archives and digital curation, and is also a classical musician.
Hedlund’s article for Montgomery History on the first two lynchings, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown: The 1880 Lynchings in Montgomery County, Maryland” was awarded the Arline Custer Memorial Award for 2020 by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. The awards committee found that that the article “expertly used photographs, maps, and other primary sources to immerse the reader in two local incidents and contextualize them in a broader historical narrative of racial violence in the late 19th century.”
Michael V. Williams
Montgomery County native Michael V. Williams is a social studies resource teacher at John F. Kennedy High School and co-coordinator of the school system’s Minority Scholars Program, an initiative aimed at reducing the opportunity gap by expanding the number of African American and Latino students in honors and AP courses. In 2016 Montgomery County Public Schools, with more than 160,000 students, named him its “Teacher of the Year.” As narrator, Mike’s is the voice of the “Three Lynchings” film. But he also appears in the film to speak personally, standing near the site of the third lynching — and near Clinton AME Zion Church, which he attended growing up. Mike is also a member of the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Howard University, a master’s degree in history from Northwestern University, and a master’s of teaching degree in secondary social studies from Johns Hopkins University.