Examining racial terror lynchings in Maryland

The night before a half-dozen men found 15-year-old Howard Cooper hiding in a barn under a pile of corn husks, pleading for protection, an angry white mob had surrounded the Towsontown jail miles away, demanding to know if the Black teenager were inside. Cooper had been accused of brutally beating a young woman named Mary Catherine Gray a few days earlier. Gray was the daughter of a prominent farmer who was living on land belonging to The Baltimore Sun’s founder, A.S. Abell, according to an April 1885 account in the newspaper.