A Maryland commission seeking reconciliation unites descendants of victims and perpetrators. Is it working?
by Petula Dvorak, October 28, 2024
“This brought tears to my eyes,” said Eric Ashby-Bey, after he watched a Black woman throw her arms around the White descendant of an enslaver, a woman who had nervously and earnestly stood before an audience in a historic, Black church and apologized for her ancestors’ role in American slavery.
This was a powerful moment at a long-delayed gathering, when a community read aloud the names and told the buried stories of five men who were lynched in these central Maryland counties along the Chesapeake Bay more than a century ago.
“It just can’t be Black folks telling these truths,” said Ashby-Bey, who recently learned that one of his relatives, James Bowens, had been lynched in 1895 in Frederick County. “We’ve got to be a whole nation telling this truth.”
The hearing in Bel Air, Md., on Saturday was one in a series that has been held by the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a group created by state legislation and authorized to research more than 40 historical lynchings of Black people by White mobs....
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