On October 18, 1933, George Armwood, a 23-year-old African American labourer, was lynched in Princess Anne, Maryland, in what would be the last recorded lynching in the state. Like many before him, Armwood’s death was not the result of a trial or a guilty verdict, but the wrath of a white mob that demanded blood.
It began on October 16, 1933, when a 71-year-old white woman named Mary Denston reported that she had been assaulted while walking home from the post office. She later identified George Armwood as her attacker. Armwood, who lived near Pocomoke City, was soon found at his employer’s home and arrested by police.
Before any charges could be proven, they beat him severely in a field across from his mother’s home before taking him to jail. She later said she thought her son might have already been dead from the beating.
Fearing a lynch mob, authorities moved Armwood from jail to jail across several counties. From Salisbury to Cecil County and eventually to Baltimore County, they tried to stay one step ahead of white mobs hungry for vengeance.
Armwood was later returned to Princess Anne on the assurance that he would be safe. But in a country where the mob often dictated justice, safety was an illusion.
On October 17, an angry mob of over 1,000 people surrounded the jail and forcibly broke in, dragging George Armwood out despite the presence of law enforcement.
George Armwood was beaten, stabbed, and kicked as a noose was tied around his neck. He was then taken to a nearby property and hanged. But the mob’s rage wasn’t satisfied with death alone. They dragged his lifeless body back to the courthouse, hung it from a telephone pole, and set it ablaze.
His charred remains were later dumped in a Lumber Yard, left out in the open until authorities recovered them the next morning.
Reports estimated that Princess Anne, normally home to 800–900 residents, swelled to 5,000 people that day as news of George Armwood’s arrest and the threat of lynching spread across the region. Many came not to prevent the violence, but to witness it live and direct, turning the small town into the stage for one of Maryland’s most horrific acts of mob brutality.
In 1935, a grand jury heard testimony from 42 witnesses, including a dozen Black men who had been held in the jail during the lynching. State police even identified nine white men as the mob’s ringleaders. Still, not a single person was held accountable for George’s lynching.
George Armwood’s story mirrors countless others. In Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, a white woman falsely accused a Black man named George Richardson of rape. The result was days of deadly race riots that destroyed Black homes and businesses. When it was all over, the woman confessed that she had never even met him. But by then, the damage was done, just as it was with George Armwood.
George Armwood’s story might have been lost to time, like so many others, if not for ongoing efforts to confront and remember this history. Today, his memory lives on at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore where his story, along with those of 37 other lynching victims, is featured in the “Lynching in Maryland” installation, created in partnership with the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.
Inside the exhibit, soil collected from the site of Armwood’s lynching rests in a glass jar, one among 38 others. Each jar is a symbol of a life taken and a society’s failure to protect it.
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/maryland-black-history-lynching-reginald-lewis-museum-exhibit/
https://marylandmatters.org/2019/02/13/state-lawmakers-propose-commission-to-confront-dark-history-of-lynchings-in-maryland/
https://www.lewismuseum.org/lynching-in-maryland/
