THE SILENT SHORE

Chavis, director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, tells the neglected, true story of a Jim Crow–era lynching on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

On Dec. 4, 1931, Matthew Williams suffered the fate of so many other Black men in Jim Crow America. A mob, suspecting him of killing his White boss at a factory in Salisbury, Maryland, dragged him from his hospital bed, hanged him from a tree on the courthouse lawn, and set his body on fire. “In lynching Williams, the mob was terrorizing the entire Black community,” Chavis writes in a searing account of the lynching. Williams was one of four Black men targeted by racial terror on the Eastern Shore between 1929 and 1931 as the Great Depression inflamed racial tensions. The three others escaped bloodthirsty mobs, but Williams, straitjacketed on his hospital bed, was an easy target. Maryland’s attorney general conducted an investigation, but amid what Chavis calls “the system of silence” in Salisbury, a grand jury in March 1932 found “absolutely no evidence that can remotely connect anyone with the instigation or perpetration of the murder of Matthew Williams.” Chavis’ sophisticated analysis benefits from his unearthing of a report by Patsy Johnson, a boxer-turned–Pinkerton detective who, posing as a trainer of young fighters, went undercover in Salisbury and was told by the owner of the town gym that you couldn’t let Black residents “run wild” or they’d “run you out of town.” Another resident assured Johnson that prominent men of the community were behind the lynching, with the local police chief among those who dragged Williams from the hospital. Chavis’ scholarly narrative gets bogged down in the two chapters about Johnson's undercover activities. But the book effectively ties the lynching to present-day Salisbury and America as a whole, noting that the Black neighborhood of Georgetown “was all but erased after a highway was built through it” and that “the police are the 'inheritors of lynch mob terror.' ”

A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.