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involvement in the protests after Armwood's death was far greater. The response
to the Armwood lynching was, therefore, another step in a process of growth in the
Black freedom movement in Baltimore in the early 1930s. This response, though,
represented a critical step, a qualitative break, for it marked the beginning of the
transformation of the Baltimore Black freedom movement from its early 1930s
forms.

It is not surprising that a lynching, even a somewhat geographically distant
lynching, would dramatically broaden Baltimore's growing Black freedom
movement. The Armwood murder was incredibly brutal, and this brutality shocked
many in Baltimore's African American community. Moreover, this murder was
shocking not because it was an act of insane passion by a lunatic fringe, nor because
it was an act of vigilante "justice" or community revenge. It was basically neither of
those. Rather it was shocking because it was a ritualized, methodical act of
oppression by a local white community aimed at the whole of a local Black
community; an act that celebrated the white community's belief in white superiority
and white domination; an act that reminded local Blacks that they existed only at
the forbearance of and within the limits set by whites. There was nothing
exceptional in all of this, for all lynchings of Blacks by whites represented this type
of terroristic disciplining of the African American community by the white
community. Accordingly, the wave of lynchings in the U.S. in the early and mid-
1930s made the anti-lynching movement a major feature of the Black freedom
movement throughout the country. So it was in Baltimore.

The fact, though, that Armwood was lynched on the Eastern Shore, and the
role of the state government in the lynching and its aftermath, provided the Black
community of Baltimore with additional reasons to respond sharply. The Eastern
Shore was Baltimore's backyard, its direct hinterland. Many Blacks in Baltimore or