On December 4\, 1931\, a mob of white men in Salisbury\, Maryland\, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old B lack 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\, wh ich 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 Sou th\, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mi ssissippi it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings a fter the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice\, but Williams's death would have a c urious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritc hie would\, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FD R\, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. A young local admitted to participat ing in the lynching and also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this\, a grand jury\, after hearing 124 witness st atements\, 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 Maryla nd. The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Willia ms's death on the politics of racism in the United States\, the Black comm unity in Salisbury\, the broader Eastern Shore\, the state of Maryland\, a nd the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."
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