SALISBURY, Md. - Two civil rights groups in Salisbury are calling on the city to publicly apologize for its involvement in public lynchings of African-Americans around 100 years ago.
The draft resolution calls for the city to publicly apologize to the descendants of those lynching victims and to apologize for the role the city played in targeting the Black community at that time.
Monica Brooks of the Wicomico NAACP and James Yamakawa of the Wicomico Truth and Reconciliation Initiative stand outside the Salisbury Fire Headquarters -- now home to Salisbury's City Hall.
Brooks says that building and its chief at the time had direct involvement in Williams' lynching.
"The individual, the former fire Chief who directed this building, literally went inside this building to retrieve rope to assist in the lynching of Matthew Williams," she said.
We reached out to the city for a statement but did not receive one.
At a recent council meeting, Mayor Jack Heath said he has condemned the lynchings.
"No one deserves to be lynched and the people that uh, were doing it should've been punished. And I still uphold that condemnation." Mayor Heath said.
But Yamakawa says condemnation does not go far enough.
"I would say it's easy to condemn a lynching but lord knows it's taken like a hundred years for even that to get into federal law, when it should've been you know easy enough on day one," Yamakawa said.
If the city were to adopt the apology resolution, Brooks says that would be an important step but not an end all, be all.
"We saw this as one little tiny piece of a larger puzzle. Our puzzle involving town halls, different discussions, community conversations where we can educate the public at large," she said.
The draft resolution includes the names of lynching victim descendants. We asked James Yamakawa if that could open those descendants up to receiving financial compensation. We were told there's no easy answer and no monetary value that you can place on a life.
