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their forbearers had migrated to the city from the Eastern Shore. Many still had
family there. Moreover, while African Americans in Jim Crow Baltimore were
spared some of the racialist violence and terror that marked the Eastern Shore and
the Deep South (the last recorded lynching in the Baltimore area was 1911), a rise
in the level of terror on the shore threatened to precipitate a corresponding rise in
the city. Two lynchings in less then two years, plus a number of failed attempts
represented such a rise in the shore's level of terror. Finally, it was startlingly
apparent from the beginning that Maryland state and local governmental officials
were, if not complicit, at least willfully negligent in Armwood's death. Immediately
after his death, despite transparent rhetoric about abhorring lynchings, the response
of these officials ranged from foot-dragging, to covering-up, to scape-goating (of all
o
people) the Communists.
The response of progressive whites in Baltimore was also not surprising, for
parallel reasons. The racialist torture and murder of a single individual by a gleeful
mob is a form of oppression that can never be easily ignored by whites of liberal or
left-wing bent, whatever the main focus of their own political concerns. Also,
joining in a lynching protest involves few of the political dilemmas or ambiguities
of, say, supporting a Black community protest that calls for jobs for Blacks in white-
owned stores. Moreover, while Baltimore was socially and culturally on the border
of North and South* the Eastern Shore was in many respects the South, and in
Baltimore it was often seen as such. For many white progressives, whatever they
might think of the strengths of certain Southern traditions, in racial matters
especially, Southerness was seen as the source of reaction. A Southern-style
lynching was exactly the kind of activity from which white progressives in Baltimore
wanted to differentiate themselves. Finally, the behavior of state and local officials
in conciliating the lynching of George Armwood indicated the continuing power of
the Eastern Shore/South in state politics and elite ideology ~ something that
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