Garfield King | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1880 |
| Died | Outside the courthouse in Salisbury, Maryland |
| Known for | victim of lynching |
| Part of a series on the |
| Nadir of American race relations |
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Garfield King (c. 1880-May 25, 1898) was a black man lynched by a mob in Salisbury, Maryland. [1] He reportedly shot Herman Kenney, a 22-year-old white man with a revolver after arguing. [1]
Around 11 p.m on May 25, 1898, a number of men from Trappe approached the jail that King was being held in while awaiting trial for the shooting. By 12 a.m their numbers had reached about 100, both local and from outside of Salisbury. Shortly after they demanded that Sheriff Dashiell hand over the keys to the jail. After the Sheriff refused, the men used a telegraph pole as a ram to force open the gates of the jail. Once inside, the leader of the mob used a sledge hammer to break open the lock on King's cell. King was dragged from his cell to the courtyard, where the crowd tied a clothesline around his neck and hung him from a tree. King survived the initial hanging as the clothesline that was used broke. After a few minutes unconscious, King awoke and attempted to escape. He was then shot and beaten before a stronger rope was tied around his neck and he was strung up for a second time. King's body was riddled with more than 50 pistol and gunshot wounds. Newspapers reported that his body was "shot to pieces." The crowd dispersed around 2 a.m. [2]
After the lynching, King's body was cut down and lain at the engine house. Crowds of people reportedly stole the threads of the rope that was used to hang King as a souvenir. King was later buried at the Potter's field of the city after his father was unable to retrieve his body. [3]
A week afterwards, a coroner's inquest was opened into in order to identify the leader and participants of the lynching. Over 50 witnesses were called to give evidence, but no one was definitively identified. The leader of the lynching was described as a tall, lean man wearing a mask. It was reported that the leader may have been involved in other lynchings around the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Identification of the other men involved with the killing was hampered as many of them had their faces blackened or reddened. The verdict of the inquest concluded that King had been killed by unknown parties, and no charges were ever brought in his death. [4]
On May 31, a group of local African-Americans convened in the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church and drafted a resolution condemning the lynching that was published in The Salisbury Advertiser on June 4, 1898. [1]
His murder and the murders of two other victims of lynching in Salisbury were memorialized by the erection of a plaque next to the old Salisbury courthouse on May 23, 2021 [5] by the Salisbury Lynching Memorial Task Force and the Equal Justice Initiative. [6]
Salisbury is a city in and the county seat of Wicomico County, Maryland, United States. Salisbury is the largest city in the state's Eastern Shore region, with a population of 33,050 at the 2020 census. Salisbury is the principal city of the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city is a commercial hub of the Delmarva Peninsula.
The Omaha Race Riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, September 28–29, 1919. The race riot resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a black civilian; the death of two white rioters; the injuries of many Omaha Police Department officers and civilians, including the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of white rioters who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha. It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities and certain rural areas of the United States during the Red Summer of 1919.
On March 19, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young African American man, was murdered by a lynch mob in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had been wrongfully sentenced to death for the rape of Nevada Taylor, but Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court had issued a stay of execution. To prevent delay or avoidance of execution, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was held, and abducted and lynched him from the Walnut Street Bridge.
Claude Neal was a 23-year-old African-American farmhand who was arrested in Jackson County, Florida, on October 19, 1934, for allegedly raping and killing Lola Cannady, a 19-year-old white woman missing since the preceding night. Circumstantial evidence was collected against him, but nothing directly linked him to the crime. When the news got out about his arrest, white lynch mobs began to form. In order to keep Neal safe, County Sheriff Flake Chambliss moved him between multiple jails, including the county jail at Brewton, Alabama, 100 miles (160 km) away. But a lynch mob of about 100 white men from Jackson County heard where he was, and brought him back to Jackson County.
The lynching of Marie Thompson of Shepherdsville took place in the early morning on June 15, 1904, in Lebanon Junction, Bullitt County, Kentucky, for her killing of John Irvin, a white landowner. The day before Thompson had attempted to defend her son from being beaten by Irvin in a dispute; he ordered her off the land. As she was walking away from him, he attacked her with a knife and she killed him in self-defense with a razor. She was arrested and put in the county jail.
George Armwood was an African American who was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, on October 18, 1933. His murder was the last recorded lynching in Maryland.
Matthew Williams was a black man lynched by a white mob in Salisbury, Maryland, on December 4, 1931.
William Burns was a 22-year-old African-American man who was lynched on October 6, 1907, in Cumberland, Maryland, for the alleged murder of white Cumberland police officer August Baker.
David Jones was an African-American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee on March 25, 1872 after being arrested as a suspect in a killing. He was mortally wounded while in jail, shot twice in the back while resisting white mob members who came to take him out; the whites pulled him into the Public Square and hanged him from a post outside the police station, with a crowd of an estimated 2,000 in attendance. The sheriff interrupted the hanging and took Jones down. Taken back to the jail, Jones died of his injuries on April 9, 1872.
Jim Taylor was an African-American man who was lynched on April 30, 1891 in Franklin, Tennessee.
Jo Reed was an African American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 30, 1875, where he was taken by a white mob from the county jail after being arrested for killing a police officer in a confrontation. He was hanged from a suspension bridge but, after the rope broke, Reed survived the attempted lynching, escaped via the river, and left Nashville to go West.
The lynching of Jay Lynch, age 28, took place in Lamar, Missouri, on May 28, 1919. That year had 83 lynchings in the United States. This was one of four against white men.
Horace Maples was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob of approximately 2,000 people in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 7, 1904. Maples had been accused of murder and was being held in the county jail when it was set on fire by the crowd. He jumped from a second story window in the jail, but was seized by the crowd and hanged on a tree on the courthouse lawn. Maples' body was then shot full of bullets by people in the crowd.
Leonard Woods was an African-American man who was lynched by a mob in Pound Gap, on the border between Kentucky and Virginia, after they broke him out of jail in Whitesburg, Kentucky, on November 30, 1927. Woods was alleged to have killed the foreman of a mine, Herschel Deaton. A mob of people from Kentucky and Virginia took him from the jail and away from town and hanged him, and riddled his body with shots. The killing, which became widely publicized, was the last in a long line of extrajudicial murders in the area, and, prompted by the activism of Louis Isaac Jaffe and others, resulted in the adoption of strong anti-lynching legislation in Virginia.
The Richard Dickerson lynching took place in Springfield, Ohio, on 7 March 1904. Dickerson was an African American man arrested for the fatal shooting of a white police officer, Charles B. Collis. A mob broke into the jail and seized and lynched Dickerson. Riots and attacks on Black-owned businesses followed.
A mob of white Vigo County, Indiana, residents lynched George Ward, a black man, on February 26, 1901 in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the suspected murder of a white woman. An example of a spectacle lynching, the event was public in nature and drew a crowd of over 1,000 white participants. Ward was dragged from a jail cell in broad daylight, struck in the back of the head with a sledgehammer, hanged from a bridge, and burned. His toes and the hobnails from his boots were collected as souvenirs. A grand jury was convened but no one was ever charged with the murder of Ward. It is the only known lynching in Vigo County. The lynching was memorialized 120 years later with a historical marker and ceremony.
Hullen Owens was an African-American man who was lynched in Texarkana, Bowie County, Texas by a white mob on May 19, 1922. According to a 1926 report by the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, this was the 26th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States.
William Andrews was an African American laborer who was lynched by a white mob in Princess Anne, Maryland on June 9, 1897. Andrews, then 17, was tried, convicted, and hanged all in one day after being accused of assaulting Mrs. Benjamin T. Kelley.
The Wicomico Truth and Reconciliation Initiative (WTRI) is a movement in Wicomico County, Maryland, United States, to address the community's history of white supremacy through education and advocacy. The organization was formed in 2018 by James Yamakawa and Amber Green.
