A scholarly history lays bare a horrific example of Depression-era racial terrorism in Maryland.
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.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4292-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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