Charles L. Chavis Jr., Ph.D. is the author of the forthcoming book, The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State.
Where were you when you heard about this story and what touched you to tell this story?
I was in the classroom. I was actually a doctoral student at the time at the amazing Morgan State University in Baltimore. I was there and studying like a normal student, trying to get my Ph.D. on the grind, and I ran across this story. Most of the time when we think about lynchings and racial terror, we think about Mississippi and Louisiana. But here I am in Maryland, and I run across these lynchings that took place in Maryland, which, in many ways, most people don’t think of Maryland as a Deep South state. But what I discovered is that there [were] a number of lynchings that took place here.
How did you research and what was your methodology to begin to find what hadn’t been told?
What we have to realize and recognize is that when we look at archival institutions, libraries, museums and things like that, historically, they’ve not been in space where our stories are salvaged. If we think about the Black experience, historically in a contemporary sense, for so many times, so many stories have just been suppressed or hidden. As a researcher, when I think about the Black experience, when I think about the Black perspective, I think about what would someone do who did not value your story. Where would they place your story, and oftentimes, what we have to realize [is] that our stories are suppressed or hidden, and that includes in a tangible sense as well. It’s not just figuratively, but it’s also in terms of a tangible sense. The story is literally hidden. And that’s exactly what happened with this case, I was doing research, looking at the newspapers of the Black press.
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