by Julie Messick

Eighty years ago, the rope used to lynch a black lumber worker was cut up into pieces tucked away by some of the 2,000 spectators, and his story remains as part of the hidden history of Salisbury.

Matthew Williams was accused of murdering his employer, Daniel Elliott. A mob of around 200 men gathered while six men entered the hospital to get Williams, where he was recovering from injuries obtained from being chased by his employer’s son.

Upon finding Williams, they dropped him from the first floor window and dragged him to the lawn of the courthouse. They hanged him on a tree on the courthouse lawn and raised his body up and down several times. The mob then set his body on fire at the edge of the black section of town.

“The Matthew Williams lynching rocked the community, and some say those reverberations have continued throughout these 80 years,” said local historian Linda Duyer, who organized a remembrance event for a victim of a different lynching that occurred in Princess Anne in 1933. “Salisbury residents quickly swept that incident under the rug… in the months that followed, the town had to organize to celebrate its bicentennial (1932), with parades and activities of all sorts.”

The day after the lynching there was barely any mention of it in the local papers, including The Holly Leaf, which was the student newspaper of the State Normal School, now Salisbury University.

“(It’s) shocking to be in a place where this event happened,” said Lauren Atteck, the president of the Salisbury University chapter of the NAACP. “You would hear about this happening more in the deep south, not in Salisbury.”

The Baltimore Sun raged against the lynching and the people who did not prevent it. The residents of the Eastern Shore reacted to the condemnations of the lynching from Baltimore newspapers with threats of boycotting Baltimore businesses. Wicomico County residents denied participating in the lynching, instead blaming people from other counties or from Virginia.

The newspapers reported that Williams had murdered his employer, but several accounts of the incident claim that the victim’s son James, rather than Williams, had murdered his father.  One account suggests that Williams had saved up a large amount of money and had given it to Daniel Elliott for safekeeping. Elliott’s son supposedly stole that money and when his father confronted him about it, he shot him. After all this time, the true culprit most likely will never be known.

“It is amazing to think about these events that occurred solely based on racial prejudices and how they were considered to be a just punishment for the crime,” said Ricky Felton, the vice president of the SU NAACP.

The excuse for the lynching reported by the local papers in the weeks following was the feeling of anger and frustration about the delay of a trial of another African-American criminal. Peggy Stewart, a history professor at Salisbury University, attributes the lynching as “being part of a chain of similar events and was almost a sign of the times due to the Great Depression and other factors.”

No leader or members of the mob were identified. This conclusion was typical of practically all lynchings that occurred in the South and elsewhere in the United States.