When Mencken and Duffy confronted lynching

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened April 26 in Montgomery, Ala., preserves for visitors and the national conscience the country’s role in the grotesque history of lynching. And Maryland is not exempt from the stain of it.

The Equal Justice Initiative, the Montgomery nonprofit that created the memorial, documented nearly 5,000 lynchings nationally between 1877 and 1950, including 28 in Maryland.

While the Eastern Shore newspapers largely ignored them, the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, along with the Afro-American, took a more aggressive stance in covering these tragic events over the years.

The Evening Sun’s H. L. Mencken took direct aim at the Eastern Shore in a 1931 column entitled “Eastern Shore Kultur,” in which he described the Shore as “a lush stamping-ground for knavish politicians, prehensile professional patriots, and whooping soul-savers who succumbed to its poor white trash.”

The Shore predictably went wild. Mencken was threatened with death if he set foot there, Sun delivery trucks and the newspapers they carried, along with their drivers, were attacked. Other products from Baltimore arriving there were also in jeopardy.

Mencken had an ally in Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun editorial cartoonist Edmund Duffy, whose brush-and-pen drawings provoked demonstrations. His 1931 “Maryland, My Maryland” depicted the brutal lynching of a black man who had confessed to the murder of a white businessman on the Eastern Shore.

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