While the Trump regime tries to erase America’s history of slavery from national parks and exhibits, Maryland continues to acknowledge the decades of racial terror that resulted in at least 38 lynchings in the state and thousands more across the country.
Truth is under general attack at the very top of government. Trump’s executive orders have instructed the Department of the Interior to remove historic markers that “inappropriately disparage Americans past.”
But officials in Maryland have maintained a steady effort to document lynchings as a way of “honoring victims, acknowledging history, celebrating resilience and promoting healing.”
Those words, describing the mission, appear in a March 9 letter from the Mayor of Annapolis offering space in the state capital for a Maryland Lynching Memorial, the latest development in an eight-year effort to confront this dark history.
While some historical markers have been placed in Maryland counties where 19th and 20th Century lynchings occured, the Annapolis memorial would serve singularly as the state’s official acknowledgement of the terror inflicted on Black people by white mobs in the decades after the Civil War.
According to the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, the non-profit most focused on the legacy of slavery and racial terror, about 6,500 lynchings occured in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950; historians documented at least 38 of them in Maryland, going back to 1854. The last one occurred on the state’s Eastern Shore in 1933.
The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project has been underway since 2018, working with affiliates in 13 counties to establish markers near lynching sites. The search for a location for a statewide memorial has been underway for several years.
In his letter to the project on Monday, Mayor Jared Littmann offered a section of Northwest Street End Park, between two cemeteries at Northwest Street on College Creek, for the construction of the memorial.
“Annapolis is proud to join the growing list of stakeholders in this act of reparative justice,” Littmann’s letter said. “By establishing this sacred space, we fulfill our responsibility to stand up and confront the history of racial terror in our state and ensure that those who were lynched are never forgotten.”
Will Schwarz, the founder and former president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, says a competition will be held to determine the design of the memorial. Democratic leadership in the General Assembly, he adds, has pledged to seek some state funding for the project.
“This is a watershed moment for our efforts to build the Maryland Lynching Memorial,” Schwarz told supporters of the project in an email. “It underscores our responsibility to those whose memories we seek to sanctify to manage this effort in a solemn, dignified and deliberate manner.”
I moved to Maryland from Virginia almost ten years ago. Bishop Douglas Myles told me, "Jim Maryland and Baltimore will make a lot more sense to you if you keep in mind that this is an Old Southern State."