The Republican governor of Maryland has issued a blanket pardon to 34 victims of lynchings who were hanged to death by white mobs between 1834 and 1933.
The posthumous vindications granted by Gov. Larry Hogan on Saturday were a historic first and included a pardon for Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old Black boy who was dragged from a jailhouse and hanged from a tree on July 13, 1885.
“In the interest of equal justice under law, I have made the decision to grant a posthumous pardon today for Howard Cooper,” Hogan said during the outdoor ceremony in which Cooper was honored with a historical marker and speeches by the governor and other officials nearly 136 years after his death.
An all-white jury took just a few minutes to convict Cooper of raping a white teenager in an area of Baltimore County known as Rockland, the Baltimore Sun reported.
The presumed victim in the case, Katie Gray, never testified that she was raped, and Cooper was put to death before his attorneys could appeal the conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hogan said he was compelled to take action after being petitioned by students at Loch Raven Technical Academy, who believed a pardon for Cooper was due “in light of the fact that he was never afforded due process under the law.”
“Studying this case led me to dig deeper,” Hogan said at the ceremony. “Today I am also granting pardons to all the 34 victims of racial lynchings in the state of Maryland which occurred between 1834 and 1933.”
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, state House Speaker Adrienne Jones and Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. also appeared at the ceremony with the governor for the historic moment, along with numerous other public officials.
Before signing the pardons, Hogan read the names of Cooper and the other victims including David Thomas, Jim Wilson, Isaac Moore, Jim Quinn, Thomas Jurick, John Jones, John Henry Scott, John Simms, Michael Green, James Carroll, George Peck, John Diggs, George Briscoe, Townsend Cook, Charles Whitley, Benjamin Hance, John Biggus, Asbury Green, James Taylor, Isaac Kemp, Stephen Williams, Jacob Henson, James Bowens, Sidney Randolph, William Andrews, Garfield King, Wright Smith, Lewis Harris, Henry Davis, William Burns, King Johnson and George Armwood.
Hogan said the final victim was a 13-year-old boy named Frederick “whose full name was lost to history.”
Public lynchings and mass hangings were commonplace throughout the Old West. During the eras of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights, bands of white vigilantes usually led by the Ku Klux Klan were notorious for carrying out lynchings, bombings and assassinations on Black people with impunity, and with few — if any — legal consequences.
During the lynching era, it was not uncommon for the deaths of Black men to be ruled as suicides to cover up murders by white mobs and police officers.
This type of white mob justice was typical throughout the Old South as the U.S. legal system turned a blind eye to the slayings of innocent Black citizens, rarely investigating and prosecuting such crimes. Even in cases where vigilante killings were brought to trial, all-white juries ensured that the crimes would go unpunished.
In one of the most notorious lynchings in American history, the two white Mississippi men who tortured and killed Emmett Till in cold blood in 1955 were quickly arrested and charged with first-degree murder, but they were acquitted a month later by an all-white jury after deliberations that lasted only a little more than an hour.
Memories of the atrocities remain an open wound for the Black community. The United States still has no law that makes lynching a federal crime.
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