B2 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021
BY PETER HERMANN
AND JASMINE HILTONThree people were killed in the
District on Monday night and ear-
ly Tuesday, pushing the city’s
homicide count to 183 for the year,
a 14 percent increase from this
time in 2020.
The slayings continued a string
of violence in the city, where an-
other seven people have been
killed since Thursday. Police have
blamed the violence on illegal
guns and simple arguments that
escalate.
Police said one recent killing
was the result of a domestic dis-
pute and another an argument
between neighbors in an apart-
ment building. On Saturday, a 52-
year-old woman was killed in a
hail of 58 bullets fired outside the
Mayfair Mansions apartments,
where she lived in Northeast
Washington. Police said they do
not believe that woman, Angela
White-Hooks, was the intended
target.
Authorities in the District have
struggled to curtail violence as
gun crimes mount. Police have
fewer officers and are calling for
more accountability in the crimi-
nal justice system as members of
the D.C. Council emphasize a p ub-
lic health approach to fighting
crime.
About 8:30 p.m. Monday, police
said, they were called to a s hooting
inside a building in the 4900 block
of G Street SE, just off Benning
Road near Marshall Heights, and
found a woman fatally shot in a
hallway. She was identified as Da-
metrics Evans, 47, of Southwest.
Police said they also found a
man who had been shot inside an
apartment. He was taken to a
hospital with injuries that police
described as critical and life-
threatening.
Authorities said the shootings
occurred during a dispute among
neighbors. Shaun Tyree Brown, 21,
of Southeast has been charged
with first-degree murder while
armed and assault with intent to
kill. Efforts to reach relatives of
Evans were not successful; a fam-
ily friend said they did not want to
talk.
About 10:30 p.m., police said,
they found a man stabbed in the
1600 block of 18th Street SE, in the
Fairlawn community near the An-
acostia Freeway and Pennsylvania
Avenue. Police said it appears two
men stabbed each other, and one
of them died. They said the men
knew each other.
Authorities said the man who
survived, 30-year-old Charles
Haythe of Southeast, has been
charged with second-degree mur-
der while armed. Police identified
the man who died as Aaron Lang-
ford, 26, of Southwest.
And shortly after 2 a.m. Tues-
day, police said officers found the
body of Keon Bonner, 40, of
Northeast, in an alley in the 1500
block of Ogden Street NW in Co-
lumbia Heights. Police said he had
been fatally stabbed.
A woman who identified her-
self as Bonner’s grandmother said
Tuesday that she did not want to
comment.
[email protected]
[email protected]Emily Davies and Magda Jean-Louis
contributed to this report.THE DISTRICT
3 killings hours apart
bring y ear’s total to 183
Hance was eventually taken to
a remote spot on Newtowne Neck
Road, where he was hanged from
the branch of a witch hazel tree.
His arms were tied behind his
back at the elbows, and his right
hand was tied to his right foot.
“There was no struggle beyond
the working of the legs,” the Balti-
more Sun reported, according to
the Archives of Maryland.
He was found that morning by a
local farmer heading out to cut
wheat. He had no shoes on, and
his clothes were stained with
blood. “It was a gruesome enough
sight to satisfy any lover of hor-
rors,” the newspaper said.
It was June 17, 188 7, and it was a
scene that was repeated thou-
sands of times across the United
States in the decades after the
Civil War and well into the 20th
century.
“Par for the course,” Walthour
said in a recent interview. “You
really don’t know how many more
people were lynched like that. His
happened to be documented.”
Hance, who was about 22, had
been arrested for allegedly accost-
ing the White daughter of a St.
Mary’s County farmer three weeks
earlier. He was in jail awaiting
action by a grand jury, the news-
papers reported.
His killing was one of about
6,500 known lynchings across the
United States between 1865 and
1950, said Gabrielle Daniels, a
project manager with the Equal
Justice Initiative, a nonprofit ra-
cial justice and legal advocacy
group based in Montgomery, Ala.
The vast majority of the victims
were African American. And the
method was not just hanging,
Daniels said. People were also
shot, burned alive and drowned.
The marker is part of the initia-
tive’s Community Remembrance
Project, which has helped place 50
markers around the country that
recall acts of racial violence and
terror.
In Maryland, its blue-and-gold
signs have already been raised in
Annapolis to remember the lynch-
ings of five African Americans in
Anne Arundel County; in Balti-
more County, to remember the
lynching of a 15-year-old in 1885;
in Salisbury, to mark the lynch-
ings of three African Americans
between 1898 and 1931; and in
Allegany County, to remember the
lynching of another Black teen-
ager in 1907.
There are believed to have been
RETROPOLIS FROM B1
at least 40 lynchings in the state,
according to the wording on
Hance’s marker.
Virginia saw at least 84, accord-
ing to the initiative’s count. States
in the Deep South recorded hun-
dreds. Mississippi saw more than
650, and Louisiana at least 549,
with 52 in one parish alone, ac-
cording to the initiative.
In the 1880 Census, Hance, then
15, was listed as an oysterman and
servant, apparently residing with
another oysterman, 24-year-old
Henry Mattingly.
Seven years late r, according to
the newspaper accounts, he was
working as a hand on a vessel
owned by Frank Russell. Leonard-
town is on Macintosh Run, a
broad body of water that empties
into the Potomac River about 60
miles south of Washington.
On May 27, Hance was return-
ing from delivering a message to a
local judge when he allegedly en-
countered Alice Bailey, who was
about 18 and the daughter of farm-
er Sherkliff Bailey. She had been
out gathering magnolias, whichwere later found strewn along a
road, the Baltimore Sun stated.
Newspapers reported that
Hance made an “improper” pro-
posal. Alice Bailey fled and was
allegedly pursued by Hance, who
was described as a “fiend.”
Catching up, Hance “attempted
the outrage but owing to the des-
perate resistance of the lady and
the publicity of the locality, desist-
ed,” the St. Mary’s Enterprise re-
ported.
He was arrested by a constable
and two other men. He “admitted”
the alleged assault, the paper said,
and was taken to the jail.
There was talk of a quick lynch-
ing, but it was dismissed as rumor,
the paper reported.
The mob took action three
weeks later. It was claimed that
townsmen wanted to spare Alice
Bailey from testifying in court.
The doctor who reportedly in-
terrupted the lynching, John T.
Spalding, might have called for an
end, instead of just a change of
location. “If he had stepped out to
do that, even if it had cost himgreatly, how would he have been
remembered?” Daniels said.
Once the mob got Hance out-
side town and found the likely
tree, he was pulled from the horse
and placed in a buggy.
“Are you guilty of ravishing this
girl, or not?” someone in the mob
supposedly asked him.
“I am guilty and ought to be
hung, I suppose,” he allegedly re-
plied, according to the St. Mary’s
Beacon.
“Do you want to pray?” one of
the lynchers asked, according to
the paper.
“May God Almighty have mercy
on my poor sinful soul,” was the
reply, the newspaper reported.
Then the buggy was pulled out
from under him.
Hanging from the tree branch,
arms bound, his body was “a grim
example of the penalty St. Mary’s
men with wives, daughters, and
sisters exact for crimes like
Hance’s,” the Beacon said.
No one was ever held account-
able for the lynching, although
bystanders thought they recog-nized the voice of Alice Bailey’s
father among the disguised mob.
“We have thoroughly investi-
gated the lynching case... and
have failed to fix the guilt upon
any particular party,” a g rand jury
reported that September.
Hance was buried in the old
cemetery of Leonardtown’s St.
Aloysius Catholic Church.
More than a century later, the
tragedy of Benjamin Hance had
been largely forgotten in St.
Mary’s County.
Walthour, a longtime county
resident and retired educator,
said she had never heard of it. Nor
had Karen Stone, manager of the
St. Mary’s County Museum Divi-
sion, who later researched the in-
cident and helped write the his-
torical marker’s text.
But “it didn’t surprise me at all
that it happened, that it happened
here,” Walthour said. “And, of
course, the whole Black man,
White woman... that’s what was
happening across the country at
that time.”
The alleged victimization ofWhite women was often used as
the excuse for violent attacks on
Black men.
Walthour and Stone said they
learned about the incident
through the Equal Rights Initia-
tive, which researched thousands
of lynching cases across the coun-
try and produced an online map
that included the lynching in St.
Mary’s County.
Hance’s is the only such case
that has surfaced there, thus far.
But “a county is not less implicat-
ed because there was only one
documented case,” said Daniels, of
the Equal Justice Initiative.
She said her organization pub-
lished a study, “Lynching in Amer-
ica,” in 2015 that detailed many
cases and types across the coun-
try.
Among the worst were “public
spectacle lynchings,” she said.
There you had “hundreds to
thousands of primarily White
community members who would
come... [in an] almost carnival-
like” atmosphere, she said. “Entire
communities could participate
and bring their children.”
Many lynchings were also pho-
tographed and used as postcards.
“When we released that report
a number of community members
were reaching out... ‘Has there
been a lynching in my communi-
ty? Has this happened here?’ ”
Daniels said in a r ecent interview.
“People wanted to do some-
thing,” she said. “They wanted a
way to respond.”
The memorial marker project
was a result.
“A nation reveals what it values
through what it chooses to memo-
rialize,” she said.
Memorials to the Civil War’s
Confederacy abound, she said.
“But we don’t have memorials that
talk about these individuals who
were lynched, unless they were
very high-profile cases.”
The two-sided markers are
made of aluminum, and each side
has room for 1,450 characters, in-
cluding spaces and punctuation.
The plaques are roughly three feet
by three feet and stand on a seven-
foot-tall post.
One side of Hance’s marker de-
tails his lynching. The other side
discusses a broader history of
lynching in the United States.
“This marker will help to con-
tinue to bring light to these types
of things that happened... in our
country and our history,” said Wal-
thour, of the NAACP. “And it hap-
pened here.”
[email protected]RETROPOLIS
Oysterman’s lynching was emblematic of 1880s America
WILL NEWTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) speaks during a May 8 event held by the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project at the old Baltimore County
Jail in Towson. The Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative has already installed markers in Anne Arundel County and other locations.balladeers combined with
African “call and response”
choruses to create an entirely
new music.
From those roots would come
a singer out of Winchester, Va.,
named Patsy Cline, who
epitomized country music and
helped spread the genre around
the world.
It’s a d elightful bit of Virginia
history, beautifully portrayed at
several sites along the
Shenandoah Valley: at the
Birthplace of Country Music
Museum in Bristol, the
Southwest Virginia Cultural
Center and Marketplace in
Abingdon and the Settlers
Museum of Southwestern
Virginia in Atkins.
I could see the story of those
multicultural settlers being
taught in Virginia public schools.
And without any of the
consternation or backlash that
taints discussions about the
subject these days.
White parents, who think that
any mention of race in school is
critical race theory — w hich they
claim is a scheme to make their
children feel bad about being
White — w ould see that’s not the
case.
After learning about the birth
of country music, I wanted to
know more about Southwest
Virginia. I t’s still rural and
sparsely populated compared
with the rest of the state, roughly
90 percent White, working class
and solidly Republican.
An article posted in
September to the University of
Virginia’s Center for Politics
website found that for voters in
the state who fit that profile,MILLOY FROM B1 “racial resentment” was a
driving force behind their
candidate preferences.
“Conservative policy
preferences among white
working class voters on a wide
range of issues were closely
connected to their racial
attitudes and specifically to their
belief that white people have
been losing ground in American
society because of unfair
advantages enjoyed by Blacks
and other nonwhite groups,”
wrote Emory University
professor Alan I. Abramowitz.
How did all of that mountain
harmony turn into racial
resentment? I discovered a
history text that helped explain
that, too.In the 1830s, artisans and
small farmers along the Blue
Ridge were paying higher
property taxes than the wealthy
planters in the Tidewater region
whose property included
thousands of enslaved Africans.
Before the small farmers could
organize to change the tax
structure, however, Gov. Henry
Wise pushed for expansion of
the railroad into Southwest
Virginia.The railroad did not just
disperse slavery but also the
white-supremacist ideology that
rationalized the system. I n
“Southwest Virginia’s Railroad:
Modernization and the Sectional
Crisis,” historian Kenneth W.
Noe noted that “in a sense, both
Northwest Virginia and
Southwest Virginia... unloaded
their ideology as well as their
goods off the train. Not only did
southern modernization and
slavery go hand in hand, then,
but the determination to defend
slavery and the broader
economic and social system it
held on its back joined them.”
Not only does this study of
history offer clues about the
origins of today’s racial
resentments, it also shows that
once again history repeats itself.
In the last presidential
election, more than 60 percent of
Southwest Virginia voted for
billionaire Donald Trump, who
had trafficked in racial
fearmongering on the campaign
trail and continued to do so
while in office. Now, a T rump-
endorsed multimillionaire is
taking a page from that same
book. Republican Glenn
Youngkin, in his battle against
Democrat Terry McAuliffe to
govern Virginia, is riling up the
White vote with claims that
teaching critical race theory —
which is not being taught in
public schools — i s an attack on
White parental rights.
So under that definition,
would we not teach that when
Virginia seceded from the Union
to become part of the
Confederate States of America
before the Civil War, residents
whose mind-set had not been
warped by the railroad andslavery chose to break away to
form what would become the
state of West Virginia?
I t’s worth remembering that
there was a time in Virginia
history, even during slavery,
when settlers from a variety of
races and ethnicities managed to
get along better than a lot of
people seem capable of today.
T hose who lived in the
mountains learned quickly that
survival depended on
cooperation and camaraderie.
They worked together, broke
bread together and invented new
music and dance.
From the various museums
and historical sites in the
Shenandoah, we learn that the
Africans came with sweet
potatoes, okra and black-eyed
peas. The Cherokee brought the
corn, squash and beans. The
Irish cooked up chicken and
dumplings. At some point,
somebody showed up with corn
liquor, and that’s when the party
really started.
There was clogging, stomping
and flatfoot dancing; the Dutch
and English square-dancing with
the Africans and the Irish.
And from it all came not just
new music and cuisine but in at
least one instance, a new
ethnicity — a people called the
“Melungeons,” who are thought
to have European, Native
American and African ancestry.
Of course, in Virginia that was
outlawed as “race mixing.” But
an unjust law couldn’t stop
people from being people, from
being free. That’s a h istory lesson
to be continued.
[email protected] To read previous columns, go to
washingtonpost.com/milloy.COURTLAND MILLOYIn Va., a m ulticultural country music history lesson
I could see the story
of those settlers
being taught in
Virginia public
schools without any
consternation.
Subscriber ExclusivesFor Your Ears: Post Reports, a Daily Podcast from The Washington Post
Recent episodes have explored the comedy-drama “Insecure,” Ahmaud Arbery’s killing, a possible “twindemic,” America’s
broken supply chain, Colin Powell’s legac y, a new model for afforda ble housing, President Biden’s poll numbers, childcare,
and looted treasure and offshore accounts. Each Post Reports podcast gives you unparallele d reporting, expert insight,
and clear analysis – everything you’ve come to expect from The Washington Post. Martine Powers is yo ur host, asking the
questions you didn’t know you wanted a nswered. Podcast s are posted weekdays by 5:00 p.m. ET.
Listen at washingtonpost.com/podcast s/post-reports.