Firing of black police chief in Maryland’s Eastern Shore revives dark memory of the region’s past as a hotbed of lynchings

On Dec. 4, 1931, a white mob yelling, “Let’s lynch him,” dragged Matthew Williams, a 23-year-old black man, from a bed in the  “Negro Ward” of a hospital in Salisbury, Md.

Williams, who had been shot in the shoulder and leg after he was accused of killing his white employer, lay wrapped in a straitjacket.

The mob was met with little resistance from the hospital’s superintendent.

“If you must take him, do it quietly,” the superintendent of the Peninsula General Hospital told them, according to the Archives of Maryland Biographical Series.