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

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twentythree-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage.

For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more wellknown incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryl...