The City of Annapolis is in the process of creating a permanent memorial at Northwest Street Park to honor the victims of lynching in Maryland with the help of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project (MLMP). While there is no set date for its opening, MLMP is aiming to complete the memorial in 2026. Lynching was a form of racial terror that inflicted deep harm and trauma on Black communities across the state. For many, the pain of that history remains within living memory.
Located at the end of Northwest Street on College Creek, the site was selected in coordination with the Caucus of African American Leaders (CAAL). The MLMP will lead a public competition to determine the final design for the memorial. The MLMP reports more than 6,500 Black people were lynched in the United States between 1850 and 1950, including at least 38 in Maryland.
“The City of Annapolis fully supports the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project and its mission to advance racial reconciliation by documenting the history of racial terror and honoring its victims,” said Mayor Jared Littmann. “This memorial is about more than history. It’s about honoring people, their lives, and the pain their families endured. It is a chance for the community to reflect, remember, and take a step toward healing.”
MLMP achieved a significant milestone with the opening of Lynching in Maryland in October 2024. The exhibit explores the history and consequences of racial terror in the state and is a collaboration between MLMP and the Lewis Museum. The opening of the installation is the culmination of a campaign initiated by MLMP in 2020 to establish a partnership with the Lewis to create both a permanent exhibit on the history of lynching in Maryland and build a memorial for all known and unknown lynching victims in the state.
“We appreciate the many supporters of this creative project, and look forward to partnering with the local community throughout the process,” said Amy Millin, president of the MLMP. “Mayor Littmann and the City of Annapolis’ role in providing space for the Maryland Lynching Memorial is instrumental in our collective responsibility to acknowledge the history of racial terror in Maryland, and is an important step on the journey towards truth.”
This isn’t the first memorial to be created to showcase racial terror, as Alabama created its lynching memorial in 2018 to address and acknowledge racial terror that their state, like many other southern states, was known for. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is an outdoor structure that includes 800 monuments, each representing a U.S. county where lynchings occurred and listing the names of people killed in that county. Most radically, the memorial is surrounded by replica memorials for each of the 800 U.S. counties to claim.
“Each county represented here will have the opportunity to take one of the figures back to their communities as a way to remember and to begin a conversation,” observed Nia-Malika Henderson, a senior political reporter for CNN, when she visited the memorial. “It will also be obvious which counties do not claim their monuments.”
There are more than 4,400 victims commemorated on the memorial’s rust-colored steel columns—800 more lynchings than had previously been recognized, according to the memorial’s website.
After the Civil War, lynching became a terrorist tactic that white people used to exert power over newly-freed black men and women. Although many Americans think of it as a Southern phenomenon, lynchings took place in the North, too. Lynching was not de jure legal in that it was carried out by a mob rather than a formal judge and jury. However, because lynchings went unchallenged in courts, they became a de facto form of legalized mob violence.
In a recent report, Lynching in America, researchers documented 4,075 lynchings of African-Americans that were committed by southern whites in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.
Lynching differed from ordinary murder or assault. Members of the Ku Klux Klan celebrated it as a spectacular event and drew large crowds of people who tortured victims, burned them alive, and dismembered them. Lynching was a form of domestic terrorism that inflicted harm onto individuals and upon an entire race of people, to instill fear. It served to give a dramatic warning that the ironclad system of white supremacy was not to be challenged by word, deed, or even thought.
This terrorist act, while it has seen a decline, continues on today, as historians reported that the last lynching was in the 80s; many Black activist groups refute that, as reports claim the last lynching was as late as last year. JULIAN’s “Crimson Record,” a modern version of journalist Ida B. Wells’ “A Red Record,” which documented lynchings, breaks down dozens of what the group argues are modern-day lynchings from 2000 to as recent as last year.
“A Crimson Record exposes the long-buried truth about modern-day lynchings, calling these crimes exactly what they are despite systemic attempts to erase and deny them,” said JULIAN founder Jill Collen Jefferson. “Lynching has never disappeared — it has adapted, hidden behind silence and indifference.”
In the last 6 years, there have been 11 reported deaths with victims found hanging by a rope, with reports of suicide being the cause in all of those cases; suicide was used as a cover-up. Demartravion “Trey” Reed, one of the 11, was found on Sept. 15, 2025, hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Police ruled it a suicide, but reports confirmed that Reed had 2 broken legs and other injuries, making it impossible for him to have hung himself.
“Today, as in the past, it survives in the shadows. If we are to end this brutality and secure justice for the victims, their families, and the communities left to carry the pain, we must confront it openly and speak its name without fear,” Collen added.
Javion Magee, a 21-year-old truck driver from Chicago, was found dead on Sept. 11, 2024, near his truck in Henderson, North Carolina. His body was found with a rope around his neck. Local police ruled it a suicide, but the Magee family denied those claims, citing that Magee never suffered from a mental illness. The sheriff held on to those claims, citing that the rope was not tied in a traditional noose. Other victims of being hanged by a rope came with conflicting reports and minimal follow-up from investigators in the area of deaths.
These cases force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: supremacy is still enforced in our communities through terror — not as a relic of the past, but as a living, evolving practice,” Jefferson noted. “Many would rather confine this violence to history books, but that denial is exactly what allows it to continue. The extraordinary effort to obscure modern-day lynchings — more than other acts of hate — reveals a deeper fear: that naming them would expose how deeply this violence is rooted in our present.”
