On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Twenty-First Century Lynching

Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Beacon Press (2007)
Reviewed by pattrice jones

Everything happens somewhere.

In 1933, in the small town of Princess Anne on the Lower Eastern Shore of the state of Maryland, hundreds of local citizens stormed the county jail, seizing and stabbing George Armwood (a black man accused of attacking a white woman) before dragging him down the stairs, his head thumping on every step. The crowd outside joined in kicking, punching, and mutilating the body of the unconscious man. Insensate but probably still alive, Armwood was then dragged through the streets, hung from a tree, and beaten with sticks. The white mob then carried Armwood’s body to the corner of Prince and William streets, drenched him in gasoline, and set him on fire. His charred body was displayed, for more than a day, in a lumberyard near the Washington Hotel.

 As Sherrlyn Ifill reports, “Black residents, particularly children on their way to school, saw Armwood’s body as it lay in the lumberyard on that Thursday morning.” Seventy years later, one of those children recalled the day, saying “What could you do? You went on to school.”

I have walked down Prince and William streets. I know well the white facade of the self-consciously historical Washington Hotel, which architecturally asserts pride in its continuity with the past. I wonder if that’s the same lumberyard, just across the alley. The first time I walked through the town, the nearest to the rural property to which I had just moved, I felt decidedly uneasy. Something about the forced and not nearly successful historical charm created an atmosphere of smothering silence. Without knowing anything of the incident just recounted, I said to my companion, “Something awful happened here.” For some reason, I felt compelled to whisper.

We often use the word “unspeakable” when we cannot find words to explain or express our repugnance for extreme or sexualized violence. But the word is literally true for lynching, as the details of these community orgies tend to become literally unspeakable in the public spaces where they actually happened, with white perpetrators and eye-witnesses pretending innocent unawareness and black community members not daring to speak of what they know except to each other.

And yet the howls of the mobs and the cut-off cries of their victims reverberate for generations, perhaps even more strongly because they are neither voiced nor acknowledged in the public life of the community. In On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Twenty-First Century Lynching, law professor Sherrilyn Ifill traces the reverberations of late-date lynchings in three Eastern Shore communities, thereby doing a real service to those communities while at the same time demonstrating her thesis that, because every lynching was a local act, perpetrated by local whites in order to terrorize local people of color, only truly local restorative justice processes — whether these include conversations, reparations, or public commemorations — can begin to mitigate the ongoing damage.

Ifill writes with remarkable empathy and emotional insight for one whose training is in law rather than psychology. Her words ring true for me both as a psychologist and as a white anti-racist activist who stumbled unwittingly into what felt like a race-relations time-warp when moving to the Eastern Shore. Her depictions and explanations of both the prideful insularity of local whites and the especially deep distrust of whites by local African Americans helped me to retroactively understand dynamics that, as an outsider to both communities, I could perceive but not explain. She’s undoubtedly right that such local injuries cannot be healed by “national conversations” or other non-local remedies.

Everything happens somewhere. Every one of the almost five thousand lynchings perpetrated in the United States between 1885 and 1960 happened somewhere in particular and probably still resonates, in its own particular way, in that particular place. Ifill offers a strategy for healing places.