Category: Criminal Justice

The “Lynching Bee” — Coming to Terms

In a historical context, the term bee brings to mind social gatherings or events where a group of people came together to accomplish a task or achieve a common goal. Often called work bees or community bees, they were associated with quilting, barn raising, and spelling—activities where a crowd assembled to work for a purpose, share skills, and socialize with one another. These collective endeavors had a sense of community, teamwork, and common purpose, as the effort involved cooperative social undertakings.1

But while completing a study on lynchings for the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project in 2019, I discovered a disturbing association for the colloquial term. Newspapers often discussed lynching bees—occurrences where mobs conducted extrajudicial spectacle hangings for amusement. This contrasted with horrific, racially motivated violence inflicted on victims more quietly, often in the still of the night.  

Researching Lynchings

My focus on researching racial terror lynchings started twenty-one years ago on the Lower Shore when the literature on these crimes was scant, and traces of this dark past were elusive. Of course, secondary literature and original research have advanced in recent years. However, in 2002, all I discovered during my literature review was Dr. Polly Stewart’s groundbreaking research at the Nabb Center. After she started teaching at Salisbury University in 1973, the folklore professor learned that lynchings took place in the area.

So, she started investigating these incidents, applying academic rigor to determine the facts, issues, and dynamics around the undocumented history2. The scholar encountered steep resistance to sharing this history, however. In those early years, Linda Duyer, a geographer, also did pioneering work building upon Professor Stewart’s investigations3.,4

lynching bee princess anne md
This postcard reads, “Looking for the negro, Princes Anne, Md.” Although undated and uncanceled, it is likely from a 1906 incident. A lynching did not occur that day as the judge sent the man to Salisbury. (personal collection)5

Using the work of these two forerunners, I began fieldwork in the communities. Of course, open access to digitized periodicals had not evolved, and the undertaking involved struggling to read old microfilmed newspapers at libraries in Crisfield and Prince Anne. My investigation also involved days of fieldwork–interviews and records searches in out-of-the-way places such as attics and basements of municipal buildings and courthouses. The phrase never caught my attention as I pieced together enough information to develop case studies for my courses on the history of criminal justice on Delmarva at the University of Delaware.

Lynching Bees

My understanding of associations with the term changed in 2019 while completing the Maryland Lynching Memorial investigation. As I dug into the Maryland Archive holdings–19th-century circuit court records, judgments, case files, correspondence, jury records, minutes, pardon dockets, police blotters, and a much broader array of digitized newspapers–this puzzling, troubling term shocked me. What is a lynching bee I mumbled as the first notice caused me to dig much deeper into late 19th and early 20th-century periodicals to determine if this was an outlier. Correspondents and editors often used this phrase, as it turned out.   

Here is a recap of the first 3 column inch narrative from the Midland Journal in Rising Sun, which brought the phrase to my attention. Following an attempt in Rowlandsville, a rural community near the Susquehanna River in Cecil County, the editor applied a larger font to the headline. On Christmas day 1907, an account of a drunken “lynching bee” at Rowlandsville appeared in city papers, the editor wrote. As villagers celebrated with a shooting match that turned into a booze fest, an African American named Webster was lying in a drunken stupor.

“In the spirit of fun (?),” he was suspended by the neck from the wagon bridge and left hanging until life was nearly extinct.” The editor added that the account created considerable commotion and “different versions of its authenticity circulated around the area. Some stated nothing of the kind happened while others said it was greatly exaggerated, but something of the kind did actually take place.”6

Understanding the term

A search of over 20 million pages at Chronicling America at the Library of Congress located 4,148 pages where a correspondent mentioned the phrase. For example, on March 31, 1900, the Baltimore County Union reported that Bel Air had a lynching bee. 

Using the idiom “lynching bee” to describe the horrific act of racial lynching was shocking. How could these appalling acts that terrorized generations of Black people be compared to other types of social bees? However, I had worked with this literature and the primary sources for decades, so I shouldn’t have been surprised as I knew about the shocking actions of jubilant spectators creating carnival-like atmospheres in many cases when any of these horrific acts occurred.

Note: Expanded from an article published in the newsletter of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.

Endnotes
  1. “Bee, n” OED Online, Oxford University, June 2022[↩]
  2. Ross Altman, “Polly Stewart – Lynching in Maryland,” FolkWorks”[↩]
  3. Linda Duyer, “The Complex Task of Writing History,” Delmarva African American History, December 31, 2018[↩]
  4. Linda Duyer. “Mob Law on Delmarva: Cases of Lynchings, near-Lynchings, Legal Executions, and Race Riots of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia 1870-1950.” Amazon, The Author, 2014 .[↩]
  5. Linda Duyer, “Looking for the Negro, Princess Anne, Md,” Delmarva African Amerian History[↩]
  6. “Rowlandsville Boozefest, Christmas Celebration at the Town on the Octoraro,” Midland Journal, Jan. 3, 1907[↩]

Researching First African American Police Officers in Atlantic City

I am investigating the nature of work for African Americans in the public sector during the Jim Crow Era, specifically in healthcare, local government, and public safety.  Drawing on archival research, interviews with local experts, and oral histories with tradition-bearers and pioneers who broke barriers, this research examines the opportunities, obstacles, and challenges for Black Americans before the passage of modern Civil Rights legislation.       

Atlantic City is one place I have included in the study. There a large, vibrant Black community contributed to the growth, development, and culture of the resort. As a result, the city had more public-sector employment opportunities. But it was far from equitable as Black people struggled to break through the barriers of discrimination and segregation. This complicated history is a perspective I am working to understand as I contextualize the opportunities in the public sector as Jim Crow lost its hold over the country.    

As Black Americans held a variety of government and nonprofit positions along the Jersey Shore, this has led me to ask about the first police officers, firefighters, nurses, and doctors.  Noting those who went first is crucial to understanding the forces at work. The published literature, especially the Northside by Nelson Johnson, is of immense help in understanding the healthcare professions and firefighters.

However, law enforcement needs more research as this part of the history of policing is largely unexplored. When did the first Black officer receive his appointment? What was his life story? After he broke the color line, what struggles did he face? These are some of the questions under consideration as I research the first cohort of early pioneers in police work.

Atlantic City Police Department around 1900
Members of what is believed to be the Atlantic City Police Department pose for a photographer, probably around the turn of the twentieth century. There are two African American policemen in the image. (Source: Bob Ruffolo)
Chief Harry C. Eldridge, Atlantic City Police Department, 1906
The Atlantic City Daily Press published this photo of “Chief Harry C. Eldrige, who died on May 4, 1906. (Atlantic City Daily Press, May 5, 1906)

This line of inquiry led me to Princeton Antiques Book Service in Atlantic City. The proprietor, Bob Ruffolo, was of immense help. He has an expansive collection of 20,000 local images and a vast knowledge of the past along the Jersey Shore. In the collection, he had this photograph of police officers, which he thought was from Atlantic City around the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. Standing in the uniformed ranks are two Black police officers.

I am still working on comparing this picture with other images from the force around that time, but only a few surviving images exist.  So I will keep at this. However, in the old microfilm reels at the Atlantic City Library, I located an image of Chief Harry C. Eldridge. He passed away in 1906. There appears to be some likeness to the chief in the group photo.

Finally, the Atlantic City Free Public Library (ACFPL) identified the first Black female police officer. In 1924, Margaret “Maggie Creswell became a seasonal officer and in 1927 she became a permanent member of the force. According to the library, she was the first female officer in the city and the state. Office Creswell retired in 1964.

Salem County Cold Case

Salem County Cold Case, an 1874 murder
An article about a Salem County Cold Case, a murder in 1874, published in the Salem County Historical Society Newsletter.

While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874.

From the beginning, the mystifying case stumped 19th-century lawmen and prosecutors. They swept the fields and marsh for evidence and interrogated the “usual types,” but the investigators failed to find a motive. Also, no one provided even the slightest information that might lead to a credible suspect, so the killer escaped.

The questions that stumped law enforcement lingered for decades, but those faded as one generation gave way to another. Still, the coroner’s verdict remains in the aging book of inquests at the Salem County Clerk’s Office. Abigail Dilks died at the hands of an unknown person in a lonely area of Lower Penns Neck near Harrisonville nearly 150 years ago.

Since true crime stories and unsolved mysteries are popular these days, I wrote a piece about this horrendous murder for the summer 2022 edition of the quarterly newsletter of the Salem County Historical Society. The case had mostly been lost in the recorded histories and written records of Salem County.

The arrow on this 1876 map for Lower Penns Neck Township shows the location of the murder. (Source: Atlas of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey by Everts & Stewart, 1876, from the West Jersey History Project West Jersey History Project –  Maps from the Everts and Stewart Combination Atlas Map of Salem and Gloucester Counties – 1876 )

The Coroner Investigated Deaths

A SERIES: COUNTY Judicial Officers

A SERIES — By examining county judicial officers from the colonial era to the early 20th century this series explores how Delmarva’s legal system developed and functioned. Justices of the Peace, magistrates, constables, and coroners provided the foundation, and this installment begins by studying the coroner, the judicial officer responsible for investigating deaths.

For over three hundred years, coroners took charge of investigating unnatural or mysterious deaths in Maryland and Delaware.  When someone raised the alarm after discovering a corpse, this county official hurried to the locality to examine the death scene, gather evidence, and figure out how the loss occurred.  Colonists brought this grim job over from England, it being a part of ancient British jurisprudence.  While the duties waned as the centuries slipped by, the coroner primarily conducted a legal and medical inquiry to determine whether the loss of life came from foul play, suicide, accident, or natural cause.1 

Coroners investigated this brutal murder in Camden County, NJ
Coroners investigated unnatural or suspicious deaths for centuries. This headline about a brutal murder is from a Camden County, NJ paper.

Adhering to the same general practices handed down over the ages, he went to where the body was discovered to take charge of the remains.  There, he checked the corpse for signs of foul play, inspected the place where it was found, interviewed witnesses, followed up on leads, and sometimes sought expert testimony.   Once he completed the initial work-up of the case, he impaneled a jury to view the body.

The Coroner’s Inquest

The inquest, a ghastly process, got underway after the jurors took a solemn oath, affirming on the Bible that they would diligently inquire into the time, cause, manner, and circumstances of the death. Pulled from their fields or shops, the hastily assembled jurors studied the corpse at the death scene, eyeballing it for wounds, bruises, or other marks of violence.  The legal requirement to “sit on the body” required a good look at the deceased, not just a quick peek, while examining it for cuts, gashes, or discoloration.  After completing the unpleasant viewing, sometimes at some of the most gruesome accidents or murders, they heard witnesses and examined other evidence.

After deliberating, the jurors rendered a verdict, ruling on whether someone was pushed, poisoned, shot, stabbed, harmed in some other way, or died of natural causes.  The inquest also sought to name the killer if the jury decided that the decedent was slain. If the panel identified a suspect, the coroner drew up a warrant and handed the case over to lawmen to arrest the suspect. 

The investigations, if appropriately done, required the know-how of a skilled homicide detective, combined with the knowledge of a physician, the judgment of a prosecuting attorney, and the wisdom of a judge. Otherwise, if the inquiry was too loose or unskillfully conducted great injustice was done.  In the ordinary run of cases, the cause was apparent, and the coroner rarely blundered.  Nevertheless, confounding cases put his fitness for the position to the test when there was a suspicion of death, but evidence of a crime was perplexing. Far too often, murders went undetected because the coroner botched the case, missing clues, failing to follow up on leads, or doing some other slipshod work.    

The Death Scene Investigator’s Appointment

It was not the most alluring appointment, nor did it lead to advancement in politics or riches.  While acceptable for the part-time nature of the post, the fee-based pay system did not make anyone wealthy.  Furthermore, the office rarely served as a stepping stone for higher political aspirations, though it was often a small plum handed out to loyal supporters of the party in power.   

Practically anyone could be chosen if they had connections.  However, their duties were occasional and unpredictable, so they had other primary occupations such as farming, merchandising, carpentry, or undertaking.  As the appointee did not need to know anything about medicine – or law for that matter — he could seek help in determining the cause of death from a physician when the cause was not apparent.

Crime Scene Investigation Advances

For centuries the coroner and his jury served an essential role in the criminal justice system. Part detective, part judge, he gathered evidence and presented it to a jury, which decided if a crime was committed and named the responsible person, if possible, in a simpler, less informed time.

However, in the twentieth century, enormous advances in medicine, forensics, police procedures, and crime scene investigations provided death investigation capabilities far beyond what untrained officeholders and their juries could provide.  The advances in medicolegal practices required highly skilled practitioners – pathologists for postmortems and the police and prosecuting attorneys to investigate crimes and handle legal matters. This was beyond the reach of this part of ancient English jurisprudence, which had once served a purpose but had become obsolete.

Instead of helping to detect a homicide and trace the criminal, this long, outdated system started hindering work that skilled specialists could do far more efficiently.  The returns from the untrained coroners and their hastily assembled juries were unreliable and often imperfect, demonstrating little understanding of the legal system or the complexities of forensics.

The Coroner Fades Away

Eventually, this ancient English institution and its inquest faded from the criminal justice system as reliance on police detectives and forensic expertise increased. The governor appointed Maryland’s coroners until 1939 when lawmakers abolished the archaic system, replacing it with qualified medical examiners.2,3,4  But Cecil County wasn’t ready to break away from the old English office.  So, Senator C. Clyde Squire exempted the county, this old English office, which had been around since the colonial days, lingering a little longer in this corner of Maryland.5

Isaac S. Bullock candidate for coroner in New Castle County, DE in 1918
Isaac S. Bullock, the Republican candidate for coroner of New Castle County in 1918. Source: Evening Journal, Sept. 13, 1918)

Delaware’s governor appointed coroners at first, selecting from among two candidates nominated by popular vote in each county. But the Constitution of 1831 made it an elective post, the voters deciding. The office was abolished in 1969. That year, the Board of Post-Mortem Examiners started determining the cause of death.6,7

It had not been the most important office, but it was a job that had to be done until advances in medicine, science, and police work made it obsolete.

For more see

The Coroner in Delaware (Under Development)

The Coroner in Cecil County (Under Development)

Pinkerton Detectives Investigated Chesapeake City Murder in 1886

Endnotes
  1. John Bouvier, in A Law Dictionary: Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America, and of the Several States of the American Union ; with References to the Civil and Other Systems of Foreign Law, 5th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Deacon & Peterson, 1854), pp. 317-318[↩]
  2. John G. Lee, Hand-Book for Coroners: Containing a Digest of All the Laws in the Thirty-Eight States of the Union, Together with a Historical resumé, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time: A Guide to the Physician in Post-Mortem Examinations, and Valuable Miscellaneous Matter Never before Collated (Philadelphia, PA: W. Brotherhead, 1881), 248-249.[↩]
  3. Cyrus Harreld Karraker, “Qualifications and Appointments,” in The Seventeenth-Century Sheriff: A Comparative Study of the Sheriff in England and the Chesapeake Colonies, 1607-1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), pp. 86-87.[↩]
  4. William R. Howell, “The Coroner,” in The Government of Kent County, Maryland: Historical and Descriptive (Chestertown, MD: Published through the cooperation of Washington College, 1931), pp. 90-92.[↩]
  5. Kenney, N. T. “Coroner Bill Nearly Killed by Amendment: Four Baltimore Senators Fail in Bid to Exempt City from new Setup Like Concession to Cecil County.” The Sun (1837-), Mar 29, 1939. [↩]
  6. “Coroner,” Delaware Public Archives – State of Delaware, December 19, 2018, https://archives.delaware.gov/delaware-agency-histories/coroner/.[↩]
  7. Chester C. Maxey, “Problems in Structure and Organization,” in County Administration in Delaware (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 26-28.[↩]