One of the most unsettling yet ubiquitous aspects of lynchings across the country is that the people who committed these crimes, who took these artifacts home as souvenirs to share with their families, were rarely two-dimensional caricatures of evil; they were everyday people in the community: the grocer, the postman, the teacher, the doctor. “It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. They are people whose children and grandchildren are still part of these same communities today, here in places like Montgomery County. Some of them know what their fathers and grandfathers did, but they do not speak of it.
After the students went back to their seats, those of us present were silent as we processed what we had just heard.
I was unnerved in ways I hadn’t expected to be. Part of why, I now realize, is because these stories, told in this place, recalibrated my own sense of my physical proximity to this history.
I am a Black American who is the descendant of enslaved people and who was born and raised in Louisiana. My grandfather once shared a story with me of how when he was 12 years old, someone in his small town of just 1,000 people had been lynched and castrated. I watched the way the veins in his temple rose as he recalled that event of 80 years prior. His memory was clear; his voice was certain.
This history is never distant; it follows us everywhere we go. It lives under the soil of the playgrounds where we bring our children to play, under the concrete we drive on in our neighborhoods, and under the land upon which we live. It rests beneath our feet in ways that we are—that I am—still discovering. This is not true just of the Deep South; it is true of places across the country that pride themselves on tolerance and multiculturalism.
Montgomery County, Maryland, is such a place. “We walked this morning past where my great-great-grandfather was enslaved,” Jason Green, the chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation, said that day at the event. “But slavery didn’t exist here. Not in this part of Maryland. Not precious Montgomery County. These are the stories we tell ourselves, that we tell each other.” Murmurs of affirmation swept through the crowd.