Over 100 years after three men were lynched in Montgomery County, residents grappled with how to deal with the “uncomfortable truth” of local lynchings at a public hearing of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission held Saturday at The Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville.
[“These stories] should be hard to hear. They should be uncomfortable. They should make us angry. They should make us feel bad. They should break our heart,” said Jason Green, chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation. “This is not ancient history.”
The Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2019 by the Maryland General Assembly. According to its website, the 17-member commission is “authorized to research cases of racially motivated lynchings and hold public meetings and regional hearings where a lynching of an African American by a white mob has been documented.”
Commission Vice Chair Charles L. Chavis Jr. told MoCo360 in an interview the goal of the commission is to produce a report about lynchings and their impact throughout the state. The public hearings in each community are part of that process.
After the hearings held in person and virtually, the commission will make recommendations on how to address and remember the lynchings. Chavis said those recommendations could vary based on a specific community’s experiences and needs.
“It’s very empowering to see communities that are unified, specifically multiracial,” Chavis said of the participation in Saturday’s hearing. “It’s definitely encouraging.”
Commissioner Maya Davis credited the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project (MoCoLMP) and Montgomery History for the initial research into the stories and lives of the three lynching victims prior to sharing the histories of the lynchings with the audience.
“They were people, they were not just names mentioned in a headline. They were part of families, they were part of communities,” commissioner David Armenti said. “We want to know who their parents were, what communities they inhabited or came from, were they enslaved.”
According to the commission, here are the three documented victims of lynching in Montgomery County:
GeorgePeck, a Beallsville who had been enslaved for much of his early life, was accused of raping a young white girl in Beallsville in 1880. A doctor found the girl was unharmed by Peck, but a mob lynched Peck while he was being transported between a jail in Poolesville and a jail in Rockville.
John Diggs-Dorsey of Darnestown was accused by a white woman of rape in 1880 after her husband had tasked him with looking after the couple’s family farm while he was away. He maintained his innocence and was lynched by a mob that broke into his jail cell in Rockville.
Sidney Randolph, a Georgia native, was walking on a road in Gaithersburg when he was arrested for the nearby murder of a white girl due to his proximity. It is unclear if he had moved to the area or was passing through. Randolph’s lynching was the most well-documented due to the rise of Black newspapers as well as journalist Ida B. Wells’ criticism of the criminal justice process when it came to Randolph’s case and the lack of evidence. While he had been moved from a Montgomery County jail to a Baltimore jail for his own safety, he was ultimately lynched by a mob while he was in jail in Rockville.
No one was charged in the three lynchings. Chavis told MoCo360 that one of the goals of the commission’s work is to find potential descendants of the three lynching victims, but none have been identified yet.
Commissioner Teisha Dupree Wilson said while there are no known descendants of the three lynching victims, the incidents directly impacted Black residents. She relayed some of the “racial etiquette” that became commonplace in the county following the lynchings, which included Black men not making eye contact with white women.
“The culture and the legacy of lynching created an environment of racial terror and fear for a lot of individuals, not just those who are contemporaries of the lynching victims, but of those who follow them,” Dupree Wilson said. “It created intergenerational trauma that is not easy to escape.”
The public hearing provided the opportunity for those who had been impacted by the lynchings to share their perspective.
One speaker, Bobbie Legg, spoke virtually as she shared that just a few years ago, she was horrified to find out from her great-grandmother’s memoir that her family members were direct descendants of a man who led the lynching of Randolph.
“My ancestors and the mob of influential white men stopped [Randolph’s] future. They robbed him of his future, love … education and his future children,” Legg said. “Meanwhile, my ancestors continued to be influential business leaders throughout Montgomery County. My family went on to have generations of children with educational and career opportunities … It is reasonable to assume that I have benefitted from my great-great uncle not facing charges.”
Tim Warner, pastor at Emory Grove United Methodist Church, shared testimony of how his historically Black church and its members still face prejudice and hate.
“This trauma affects everybody … this could happen tomorrow in a different way,” Warner said. “We have not dealt with this trauma.”
Commissioner Nick Creary said the commission is exploring how to address the legacy of the lynchings. Any recommendation that comes out of the commission’s report could only go into effect with legislation approved by the Maryland General Assembly.
“[We have to be] actively soliciting and discussing ideas for what should reparations look like? What should accountability look like?” Creary said. “We’re never going to get justice, but we can at least get a measure of accountability.”
Commission chair David Fakunle encouraged the community to continue to share their stories and ideas by emailing mltrc@maryland.gov.
“Give us your insight, give us your wisdom, give us your recommendations. This is active participation, and your presence here is an act of resistance,” Fakunle said. “This does not happen without legislation … . Freedom is individual, liberation is collective.”
