Maryland Governor Posthumously Grants Pardons to Lynching Victims

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan won gratitude last week from the Black community for his posthumous pardons of 34 victims of lynchings in the state between 1854 and 1933.

Hogan announced the pardons in Towson standing near a building that was formerly a jail and the scene of a gruesome lynching 136 years ago. A 15-year-old boy was pulled from his cell by a mob and hanged from a nearby sycamore tree.

The boy, Howard Cooper, was accused of rape and scheduled to be executed. He was lynched before his attorneys could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hogan said the teenager’s life was “taken so violently and so senselessly by an angry mob unwilling to give him the due process he was entitled to.”

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project and the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a marker beside the former jail where Hogan spoke. It briefly explained Cooper's story.

An all-White jury returned guilty verdict against him after deliberating for less than a minute on charges of assaulting and raping a White woman.

His attorneys had argued that Cooper’s 14th Amendment rights were violated because Black people could not serve on juries in Maryland. Their appeal in Maryland failed. No one was prosecuted for the lynching.

Maryland House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones, D-Baltimore County, the first Black person and first woman to hold the Speaker’s job in Maryland, said at the Towson ceremony that “we should collectively acknowledge it to move forward into the next chapter.”

With Hogan’s announcement, Maryland joins several states that have posthumously pardoned lynching victims.

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