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an hour wage. Williams then reportedly attempted suicide by shooting himself in
the chest and was subsequently shot in the head by Elliot's son, as the son rushed
into his father's office. Gravely wounded, Williams was arrested and held under
guard in the hospital in Salisbury. The mob dragged Williams from his hospital
over the token resistance of the chief of police and a deputy sheriff and was hanged
on the courthouse green. The hanging was a white community event: the crowd
numbered about 2,000 whites including, according to Sheriff Phillips, "a lot of
women." It was reported that three uniformed policemen directed traffic on the
crowd's periphery. To underline the fact that the lynching was meant as a
terroristic warning to the local Black population as a whole, Williams* body was cut
down, carried by a procession to a vacant lot in the Black community, soaked with
gasoline, and burned. Still not satisfied, the mob later carried Williams mutilated
body back to the center of town and hung it again.55

The lynching of Matthew Williams was widely publicized, partly through
Communist Party and ILD networks, and was met with a wave of revulsion
nationally, in parts of the state of Maryland, and especially in the Black community
of Baltimore. Black leaders, most notably the editors of the Baltimore Afro-
American, joined with the ILD in demanding prosecution of Williams' murderers
and the local anti-lynching movement began to revive. In response, a pattern
emerged that would be repeated many times in the future, as a number of
government figures ranging from local Eastern Shore officials to the State Attorney
General William P. Lane, Jr., attempted to blame Ades, the ILD, and their
intervention on behalf of Euel Lee, for the lynching. Nevertheless, Governor
Ritchie, under increasing pressure, rhetorically reversed his earlier hands-off stance
toward Eastern Shore mobs and made elaborate promises to prosecute not just the
lynch mob leaders, but everyone involved. In reality, however, the state turned the
investigation of the lynching over to the Eastern Shore judicial system, and, despite