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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Charles L. Chavis Jr., "The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
Description: On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore: The Lynching o...