The Silent Shore

The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

Dr. Charles Chavis, Assistant Professor of History and Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, has written the definitive account of the lynching of 22-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland in 1931. He meticulously explores the subsequent investigation of Mr. Williams’s murder and the legacy of “modern-day lynchings.”

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Out of the archive, racist plans are laid bare:

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a 22-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams.

 

His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis, Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland.

Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams’s death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams’s death would have a curious afterlife: the politically ambitious Governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person.

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Governor Richie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders.

Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie’s Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland.

Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams’s death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of “modern-day lynchings.”

Featured in a new film:

A short film explores the implications of this suppressed history coming to light, 90 years after the lynching:

photo of a woman with gray hair, looking pensively from a church pew

View the trailer at hiddeninfullviewseries.com »

Praise for The Silent Shore:

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

 

—Kirkus Reviews

Chavis digs deep, finding documents never before seen publicly, to present a rich and revealing story of how lynchings were planned and executed, and of the conspiracy of silence among white people in the region that shrouded the perpetrators of lynching from accountability. The story resonates with power and caution for our contemporary efforts to address racial violence and discrimination.

 

—Sherrilyn Ifill, President / Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century

Chavis reconstructs the lynching, identifies many of the perpetrators, and explores the code of silence that protected the lynchers from prosecution. Chavis also takes pains to restore the individuality and humanity of Matthew Williams and to document the cultural erasure of Salisbury’s Black community as another aspect of anti-Black violence in Maryland. Joining other scholars, Chavis explains lynching as a device to terrorize and subjugate Black people.... Historians of lynching and racial violence are in debt to Chavis for uncovering the secret Pinkerton reports to the attorney general, which were unprocessed in the Maryland State Archives.

 

—Maryland Historical Magazine

Chavis, who has discovered period sources that shed new light on the lynching of Matthew Williams ... brings the sensibilities of both a scholar and a history detective to bear in scrutinizing the ins and outs of an often complicated story and narrative arc. This book is further enhanced by a number of excellent photographs and other illustrations, as well as some useful charts and maps.

—Claude A. Clegg III, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama

Chavis’s book brings the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light and breaks the silence that, up until now, has surrounded the murder of Matthew Williams. For nearly 90 years, this lynching has haunted the Eastern Shore; now, Chavis’s investigative work helps heal old wounds and opens new ones by revealing Williams’s killers and those who assisted them. The detailed retelling of these fateful events—reconstructed from sources never before used by scholars—is powerful, timely, and devastating.

—Aston Gonzalez, Salisbury University, author of Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

The detailed day-by-day and point-by-point account of the horrific lynching of Matthew Williams is rare, but as the revealed truth, it is necessary— no matter how painful it is to me or the descendants of other individuals involved. Dr. Chavis has done us all a great service, but what is of particular importance is how this case is handled ... will set a precedent for the way other similar cases—the more than 6,000 recorded lynchings in the U.S.—are researched, investigated, and addressed by the justice system.

—Ms. Tracey “Jeannie” Jones, Descendent of Matthew Williams

The Silent Shore is excellent and essential reading. By recovering the tragic story of Matthew Williams, Charles L. Chavis Jr. enriches the history of lynching in America. Deeply researched and brimming with important insights, this book locates the 'free state' of Maryland as a critical site of contestation over race, democracy, and citizenship in ways that continue to reverberate in the age of Black Lives Matter.

 

—Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, The University of Texas at Austin, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin

About the Author

headshot of Dr. Charles Chavis, in front of a bookshelf
Dr. Charles Chavis (in scripted type)

CHARLES L. CHAVIS, Jr., Ph.D.

Dr. Chavis is an assistant professor of Conflict Resolution and History at George Mason University, where he is also the founding director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. He is the national co-chair for the United States Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Movement and the vice chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and  coeditor of For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America.

 

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