The lynching of George Armwood
18 October 1933The Somerset County jail and courthouse, Princess Anne, Somerset County, MD
A mob of around two thousand took George Armwood from the Princess Anne jail, mutilated and hanged him, and burned his body at the courthouse. The state identified nine leaders; the county indicted no one.
Note: Describes mutilation and the burning of a body.
George Armwood was twenty-two or twenty-three, a labourer from Pocomoke City, accused of assaulting a seventy-one-year-old white woman on 16 October 1933. He was arrested, moved to Baltimore for safety, and then returned to the Eastern Shore on a judge's order.
On the night of 18 October a mob estimated at two thousand broke into the Somerset County jail at Princess Anne. Armwood hid under his mattress and was dragged out. He was beaten and stabbed, a rope put round his neck, and he was pulled behind a truck through the town. Before he was hanged his ears were cut off and his gold teeth pulled out. The mob then dragged the body back to the courthouse, hanged it from a pole and burned it.
Governor Albert Ritchie sent state police, who identified nine men as leaders of the mob and arrested them. A Somerset County grand jury returned no indictments at all, and the men went home. It is the last recorded lynching in Maryland. In 2019 the state created the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission - the first state commission of its kind in the country - to document this killing and the more than forty others on its record.
Sources
- October 18, 1933: Mob of 2,000 White People Lynches George Armwood in MarylandA History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiativecalendar.eji.org
- George Armwood (c. 1911-1933), MSA SC 3520-13750Maryland State Archivesmsa.maryland.gov
- Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Interim ReportMaryland State Archivesmsa.maryland.gov