Maryland reported 25 to 30 lynchings during the same period, depending on the source. Ifill says seven of them occurred on the Eastern Shore.
She says she didn’t intend to single out the Eastern Shore. But as she researched nationwide lynching accounts for a possible book, she found the Eastern Shore an ideal example of how Northern and Southern communities have failed to come to grips with the legacy of lynching.
“It’s like it never happened,” says Mary Ashanti, president of the Wicomico County NAACP, who said there is no marker to note where Williams was lynched. Even people with relatives who witnessed it say the lynching was a taboo topic.
“We didn’t really talk about it,” says Salisbury City Councilwoman Shanie Shields, whose late grandfather, James Stanley Pinkett, worked at the Wicomico Hotel and was one of the few Black witnesses to the Williams lynching.
Pinkett was a bellhop at the hotel and saw an angry mob gather, calling for the death of Williams, who was accused of killing his employer in a shooting at the man’s business. Williams was himself in the hospital for wounds he sustained in the gun battle.
Pinkett “called my grandmother and told her to stay in the house. He said, ‘You keep everyone in the house,’” Shields says. “He was scared. He didn’t even commit the crime.”
Shields says her grandfather didn’t talk about the lynching. No one of his generation did.
“I think things like that, we should let pass. Evil things, I don’t think you should burn ‘em up and keep that stirred,” says Mary Pinkett of Salisbury, 93, a niece of James Stanley Pinkett.
That silence was even more rigidly maintained by White witnesses.
“I think the silence was the most disturbing part of the research,” says Ifill. “Fear of talking about these events continues even 75 years after.”
The Williams and Armwood lynchings followed a typical pattern. Few White witnesses claimed to know who was in the mob. No one was ever convicted of the hangings. Even the local newspapers claimed that the guilty were unknown characters from out of town.
