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George Armwood was the thirty-fourth victim of lynching in the United States in
1933 and the second in Maryland in less than two years.
Of course, few in the Black community of Baltimore, including, undoubtedly,
Donald Smith, seriously advocated counter-lynching. But the anger over the
Armwood lynching, and over lynchings throughout the Southern U.S., was so great
that giving vent to desires for revenge was by no means out of the mainstream.
Even some normally moderate forces in the community responded with
uncharacteristic severity. For example, after Armwood's death, Marse Galloway, a
Black politician generally considered by activists to be compromised by his links to
white machine politics, stated:
We have kept quiet too long about the unjust laws and unjust treatment
meted us by the other race. Cowards never win any victories or wear any
crowns. We must protect ourselves as the white man protects himself. If we
find it is necessary to protect ourselves with guns and the like, then let us do
it wholeheartedly.
Expressions of individual anger were only part of the response by African
Americans in Baltimore to the Armwood murder. More significantly, a wide
spectrum of forces in the Black community mobilized collectively to protest the
lynching and to demand that the murderers be brought to justice. And, more than
at any previous time since the Grash, progressive whites joined in these protests.
The protests following the lynching of Armwood were in fact far, far larger
and more inclusive than those following the lynching of Matthew Williams on the
Eastern Shore in 1931, thereby providing a gauge of how far the Baltimore Black
freedom movement had come in the interim. Moreover, the 1933 ami-lynching
protests benefited directly from the contemporary mobilizations in the Black
community in both the Buy Where You Gan Work Campaign and the Euel Lee
Defense Campaign; in turn the anti-lynching response reinforced both of these
campaigns. And although the emerging Black freedom movement in Baltimore had
already attracted some national recognition, the national attention to and
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