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terrorized.
It should be pointed out that not all whites on the Eastern Shore supported
the lynching. Armwood's white employer, John Richardson, for example,
attempted to hide Armwood from the mob before his arrest. Significantly, though,
Richardson was arrested for his trouble. Also some of the law enforcement
officials did make a real attempt to prevent Armwood's murder, and a number of
the state police were later willing to identify some of the lynchers. Nonetheless, a
large portion, if not most of the local white community, supported this lynching and
indeed the use of lynching in general. Reverend Asbury Smith of Baltimore
remarked after Armwood's murder:
1 have lived on the Eastern Shore the greater part of my life. My family and
friends are there. To know that these people whom I love almost without
exception approved of the brutal lynching of Armwood grieves me deeply. I
feel ashamed of being an Eastern Shore man. I feel ashamed of being a
white man.l"
A particularly monstrous feature of the Armwood lynching was that it could
easily have been prevented, and was, in fact, only carried out with the collusion of
locally-based officials and the acquiescence of the governor and his aides. After
Armwood was originally arrested and jailed in Salisbury, a lynch mob immediately
began to gather outside his cell (on the very lawn where Matthew Williams was
lynched two years earlier). Alarmed, the sheriff hustled Armwood out the back and
drove him to Baltimore where he was placed in the city jail. A cry went up on the
Eastern Shore, and State's Attorney Robins, who was based in Princess Anne,
applied pressure for Armwood's return so he could be charged and tried. Just over
24 hours after he was removed from the Eastern Shore, Armwood was back.
It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about the situation that a
lynching was in preparation. Juanita Jackson Mitchell, who was then the president
of the City-Wide Young People's Forum, later remembered that the gathering mob
was reported on radio in Baltimore throughout the day of October 18, as if to
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