Monday, January 15, 2007
Of Lynching and Queens Anne’s County, Maryland
It was a combination of things that brings this trip down memory lane.
My wife and I watched the movie Amistad a couple of weeks ago after Pastor David Seyller used a part of it to illustrate the basis story of Christianity at the First United Methodist Church of Crystal Lake.
Yesterday, Pastor Darneather Murph-Heath spoke about Martin Luther King in her sermon. Later my former legislative assistant Pete Castillo used the word “ballast” when we were over to visit him and his mother.
And I thought of how the slave traders on the ship Amistad threw ballast rocks overboard attached to 50 live slaves whom they had concluded they did not have enough food to keep alive on the ocean voyage.
I woke up thinking about what my father had told me while we were on the way to visit my mother’s grave in Church Hill, Maryland, which he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Georgetown University. We were staying at my sister Jan's in Severn.
As I drove north past what I think may have been a store (it was a house with an unpainted porch) on the left where a road ran off to the right between Centreville and Church Hill, Dad told me he used to live up that road.
It was one of three places in Queen Anne’s County where he lived. The family was poor and moved around, one time farming west of the James Clayland Stevens’ land near Sudlersville and Barclay where his bride-to-be Eleanor lived.
Dad told me that he and his father were walking down the dirt road toward their home one day when they say a bunch of men making a lot of noise.
They were lynching a black man.
My grandfather told my father not to look and just keep on walking.
I wonder how old my father was and whether the victim lived on the road. Dad told me there were blacks who lived there.
And, I wonder if the historians of Queen Anne’s County know about the lynching. It would have been in the 1920’s, I believe, because Dad was born in 1916.
Interestingly, the Maryland State Archives do not report any lynchings in Queen Anne’s County during the 20th Century and no lynchings in the state during the 1029’s. I’ll send the Archives a link to my story and see what reply I get. The photo is from the Archives' web site on lynching.
My wife and I watched the movie Amistad a couple of weeks ago after Pastor David Seyller used a part of it to illustrate the basis story of Christianity at the First United Methodist Church of Crystal Lake.
Yesterday, Pastor Darneather Murph-Heath spoke about Martin Luther King in her sermon. Later my former legislative assistant Pete Castillo used the word “ballast” when we were over to visit him and his mother.
And I thought of how the slave traders on the ship Amistad threw ballast rocks overboard attached to 50 live slaves whom they had concluded they did not have enough food to keep alive on the ocean voyage.
I woke up thinking about what my father had told me while we were on the way to visit my mother’s grave in Church Hill, Maryland, which he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Georgetown University. We were staying at my sister Jan's in Severn.
As I drove north past what I think may have been a store (it was a house with an unpainted porch) on the left where a road ran off to the right between Centreville and Church Hill, Dad told me he used to live up that road.
It was one of three places in Queen Anne’s County where he lived. The family was poor and moved around, one time farming west of the James Clayland Stevens’ land near Sudlersville and Barclay where his bride-to-be Eleanor lived.
Dad told me that he and his father were walking down the dirt road toward their home one day when they say a bunch of men making a lot of noise. They were lynching a black man.
My grandfather told my father not to look and just keep on walking.
I wonder how old my father was and whether the victim lived on the road. Dad told me there were blacks who lived there.
And, I wonder if the historians of Queen Anne’s County know about the lynching. It would have been in the 1920’s, I believe, because Dad was born in 1916.
Interestingly, the Maryland State Archives do not report any lynchings in Queen Anne’s County during the 20th Century and no lynchings in the state during the 1029’s. I’ll send the Archives a link to my story and see what reply I get. The photo is from the Archives' web site on lynching.
Labels: Lynch, Lynching, Maryland, Queen Anne's County
