Racial Violence in Montgomery County

Independence Day 1896. Sidney Randolph is pulled from the Montgomery County jail in Rockville by a crowd of 20-30 men and murdered. No one was convicted of the murder; no one was even charged. This was the last lynching known to have taken place in Montgomery County.

We know that anger and hate did not die that day in Rockville with Mr. Randolph. After all, people involved in the lynching lived into the 1950s and even the 1960s. John William Garrett, who assaulted and kidnapped Mr. Randolph before the lynching, lived until 1963. The attitudes common at that time were slow to die. Through much of the 20th century, Montgomery County was no haven for blacks, with segregation, like Mr. Garrett, surviving into the 1960s. The results are with us still.

This article explores the violent expression in Montgomery County of the attitudes that led to Mr. Randolph’s lynching through the last century and into our own. This exploration is far from complete; we eagerly seek insights others may have.

All that said, it should also be clear that Montgomery County, Maryland, is not Montgomery County, Mississippi. The Freedom Movement in the 1960s included this part of Maryland among the border states along with Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. These were the least virulent parts of the south, distinguished from the Upper South, the Deep South (which included the Eastern Shore), and Mississippi. The violence that was common, rampant, and made headlines in those other regions was rare here. Racial tension was largely kept undercover, known to the people who lived here, but kept out of the papers, and even, to a large extent, out of public records. Consequently, evidence of incidents must come largely from the testimony of individuals, which is both scarce and incomplete.

But there were incidents. The first we know of in the new century after Sidney Randolph died was the near lynching of Tocha Martin, probably between 1910 and 1912. William E. Woods described it in an interview in 1976. Tocha Martin, he said, was arrested under suspicion of attacking a white woman and taken to the Rockville jail. A group of men--Woods said they were the KKK--got together and determined to take Martin out of the jail and lynch him, just as the mob did with Sidney Randolph in 1896. But they were overheard by a man named McPhearson. McPhearson told 'the boys in the back lane,' who included Woods. These 'boys', some with guns, then went to the jail and waited for the attackers to come. They never did. Significantly, a black deputy sheriff, George Meads, was prominent in both the incident and in getting Tocha Martin's case dismissed. His presence and the actions of the boys in the back lane showed that some things had changed since 1896.

Much later, in 1966, in Emory Grove, an historic black community, Robert Taylor, a veteran born in 1892, was killed when his house burned down. Officially, this was simply a tragic fire, but people in Emory Grove believe it was murder, according to the Reverend Timothy B. Warner, pastor at Emory Grove United Methodist Church. A dispute over ownership of the house and racial restrictions, still in force in that part of the county, may have led someone to set fire to the house. Whether it was arson cannot now be proved, but the oral history shows that those who were potential targets of racial violence believed that people hated them strongly enough to do it.

The experience of the Reverend James E. Prather a decade before gives credence to that fear. In 1954, he was on the Board of Education, which had to manage desegregation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown v. Board of Education. One Sunday, while he was conducting a service at his church, Poplar Grove Baptist, someone threw what Reverend Prather described as a Molotov cocktail in the door. Three years later, crowds demonstrated against the integration of Poolesville High School. They were not violent, but their anger was manifest.

Two other incidents blur the line between racial violence and racist actions. In July 1961, John and James Giles, along with Joseph Johnson, went fishing. They passed a man and a 16-year-old woman in a car. Words were exchanged and a fight broke out. The man ran to get help; the woman fled into the woods. The Giles brothers and Johnson followed the woman. The police came and arrested the three black men. The woman accused them of rape. Brought to trial, two juries, one all-white, condemned the three to death. Several years later, after they had spent years on death row, new evidence was found. The Giles brothers were retried and exonerated in 1967; Johnson, who had not been a party to the retrial, was pardoned in 1968.

The other incident took place in August 1972. George Pelecanos based his novel The Turnaround on this story. It started when three white men drove through KenGar, indulging in some racist joyriding. They threw firecrackers at a crowd that included the four-year-old daughter of Gene Hopkins. Hopkins thought the bangs of the firecrackers were gunshots. Scared and angry, he ran for his gun. He and four other men encountered the three white men, one of whom was beaten. Another was shot and killed; Hopkins turned himself in two days later. He said he killed the man by accident. He was tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum sentence. The charges against the other four were dropped. The two white survivors were not charged for throwing the firecrackers.

On 31 July 1986, responding to a call, police found Keith Warren dead, hanging from a tree. They ruled it to be suicide. Several discrepancies in what witnesses told police and violations of police procedure led his mother to contest the ruling. The body was exhumed and examined; what was found was not consistent with what the police first reported. The case was reopened in November 2025 and the cause of death changed from ‘suicide’ to ‘undetermined.’ Was Keith Warren lynched? We may never know how he died.

An account of racial violence in Montgomery County should also note the presence of the Ku Klux Klan. There is much to be learned about the Klan in the county; the Klan has earned the moniker ‘Invisible Empire’ by keeping who it does and who is in it secret. Though its recorded actions here were not violent, the presence of the Klan always includes a potential for violence, as Wood’s account of the near lynching of Tocha Martin shows.

I have yet to find evidence that the first Klan, active under Reconstruction, was active in Montgomery County. But the second Klan, which reached Montgomery County in 1922, had perhaps as many as 12 chapters by the fall of 1925, extending from Takoma Park and Bethesda to Poolesville and Damascus. In Montgomery County, as in the country at large, the Klan had reached its high point by 1925. It then faded rapidly as scandals took their toll.

We know little about the membership of the Klan in Montgomery County, but it was almost certainly small in comparison with other states and even with Prince George’s County and the Eastern Shore. Nor were the chapters here as active as they were elsewhere. They certainly took part in the Klan parades down Pennsylvania Avenue in August 1925 and September 1926. In 1925, Klan members from elsewhere camped in Bethesda and Rockville. They were also probably at cross burnings and induction ceremonies held in Arlington and Prince George’s County and at a statewide convention of the Klan near Annapolis in 1924.

In May 1923, four Klan members in full regalia marched down the aisle during a service at the Rockville Christian Church and handed the pastor an envelope with two $10.00 bills and a message that identified them as Montgomery Klan #12. The pastor was not certain whether the message merely a statement or a warning. A similar incident may have taken place at the Dickerson United Methodist Church in the late 1940s, where they presented the minister with a Bible and a Confederate flag.

That same month, the Klan burned a cross in a vacant lot in Rockville. A year later, in May 1924, the Chevy Chase Klan inducted 185 ‘novices’ near what is now MacArthur Boulevard. “Nearly 1,000 automobiles formed a continuous stream in both directions….”

Disbanded in 1944, the Klan, was revived in the 1950s as the civil rights movement gained steam. Whereas the second Klan was formed as a single organization based in Atlanta (then the District before returning to Atlanta), the third Klan was more diffuse. It was also more violent than the first Klan, especially in Mississippi. We know little about it here, but it was active at least through the end of the century.

Klan members shot bullets in the air in the black community of KenGar in 1969. The Klan also held rallies at Lake Needwood in 1982 and in Little Bennett Park in 1997. The rally at Lake Needwood was almost comical and spoke to the weakness of the Klan at that time: there were 24 Klansmen, but 300 police officers and 140 members of the press.

Are they any stronger now? We don’t know. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Maryland White Knights as a statewide organization of the Klan, but gives no details about its strength overall, much less in this county.

Much has changed in Montgomery County since 1896. The forces of hate are less virulent, widespread, and powerful now than they were then. Yet they remain. The KKK images posted on a page linked to Damascus High School in 2022 and the anti-trans actions of the Proud Boys at Loyalty Bookstore in Silver Spring in 2023 show that the anger and hate that slipped the noose around Sidney Randolph’s neck still linger, despite all that has changed since that Fourth of July.

^[1] “Ken-Gar Residents, Officials Discuss Slaying of Youth, 18: Montgomery Slaying Is Discussed ,“ Washington Post, 30 August 1972;  “Man, 28, Man, 28, Guilty in Slaying: Manslaughter Is Verdict in Ken-Gar Case, Washington Post, 1 December 1973; “Ken-Gar Killer Gets 10 Years,”Washington Post, 21 February 1974;

^[1]  Full documentation can be found at https://www.thekeithwarrenjusticesite.com/.

^[1] “50 at Klan Session Held in Kensïngton,” Washington Post, 29 October 1925, p. 2.

^[1] The Klanmap from Virginia Commonwealth University is helpful, but probably incomplete. https://labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/

^[1] Evening Star, 8 May 1923, p. 12.

^[1]  Washington Post, 30 May 1923.

^[1] Washington Post, 16 May 1924.

^[1] “Klan Rally Peaceful Under Tight Security.” Washington Post, 6 November 1982.

^[1]Daryl Davis describes the rally at Little Bennett Park inThe Klan Whisperer(Silver Spring, MD: Lyrad Publishing, 2024), pp. 223-226.