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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. 

As the OHC’s 2021–22 Tzedek Lecturer Charles Chavis, Jr. will screen Hidden in Full View: Out of the Archive, Racist Plans are Laid Bare, a short film he produced and co-wrote that introduces the story of the lynching. After the screening he will discuss the process of researching and writing The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (2022). He will focus on the institutional and descriptive challenges of archival research and the importance of community archives in the fight for transformative justice. Chavis will appear virtually on Tuesday, May 17 at 12 p.m. via Zoom.

Chavis’s book Silent Shore offers a definitive account of the lynching, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of “modern-day” lynchings. 

In his book, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams’s death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams’s death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland’s Albert C. Ritchie was one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. 

Hidden in Full View is Chavis’s debut feature short documentary in a series that will uncover lesser-known episodes of racial terror in Black communities throughout the United States.

Chavis’s work focuses on the history of racial violence and civil rights activism and Black and Jewish relations in the American South, and the ways in which the historical understandings of racial violence and civil rights activism can inform current and future approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution throughout the world. He is the Founding Director of the John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, where he is also an Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and History.

Chavis is the national co-chair of the U.S. Movement for Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (US TRHT) and vice-chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The #breathewithme Revolution and leaders of the US TRHT are working toward lasting and transformative policies at the local, regional, and national levels to dismantle systemic racism, and for the establishment of a national commission.

He is the co-editor, with Sixte Vigny Nimuraba, of For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America (2020).

Chavis’s appearance is free and open to the public. Please register at ohc.uoregon.edu

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