Carroll County’s history of racial violence, including the 1885 lynching of an African American man named Townsend Cook, was the subject of a weekend hearing in Westminster.

The event Saturday was facilitated by the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is authorized by the state to research cases of racially motivated lynchings and hold public hearings where the lynching of an African American by a white mob has been documented.

“It’s hard, but this is a necessary history to know because people have been hurt because of this history, and it comes from a narrative that believes one group of people is less than the other,” David Fakunle, chair of the MLTRC, said in a brief interview Saturday. “I don’t think it should take much for people to understand that’s fundamentally wrong. I’ve learned that we all want the same things in life. We want to be acknowledged, we want to be appreciated, we want to be respected, we want to be understood and we want to be loved.”

Fakunle said that the Westminster hearing, held at Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ on Bond Street, was the final regional hearing. More than a dozen others have been held in counties across the state since 2021.

The meeting was held in Westminster because of the lynching of Cook, an African American man who was about 20 years old when he was killed near the city jail on June 2, 1885.

A biography on Cook in the Maryland State Archives said he was accused of the assault and rape of a Mount Airy woman and was jailed. He denied the allegations. A mob broke into the jail, overpowered the sheriff, and lynched Cook from a nearby tree along a city road.

The first group of speakers delivered “descendant testimony,” relaying family stories about Cook’s lynching or recalling personal accounts of segregation in Carroll County. Kevin Dayhoff, a Westminster Common Council member, spoke during this portion, saying that his mother and grandmother would tell him that “something terrible” had happened near the old city jail.

“All these years, the murder of Mr. Cook remains a burden on our community, and it’s about time that we talked about it,” Dayhoff said. “It is a stain on our history, a burden that can only be lifted by being brought out into the open and into the light of day.”

Dayhoff acknowledged the presence of several notable attendees, including Westminster Mayor Mona Becker, Julia Jasken, president of McDaniel College, and Rodney Morris, president of the Carroll County NAACP.

The meeting then allowed time for responses from community members, including archivists, professors at McDaniel College and Carroll Community College, and members of the Carroll County coalition of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. The MLMP is an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization that works to foster reconciliation efforts in the state and advocate for public acknowledgment of lynchings.

“I don’t think we’re going to ever live in a country where it’s not important to do this work, to remember our history of racial terror, but that being the case, we’ll continue to do the work to remind people and to confront that tragic history,” said Will Schwarz, founder and president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.

With regional hearings concluded, commissioners announced that the MLTRC’s next public hearing is scheduled for April 4 and 5 in Baltimore.

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