According to family lore, George Armwood was a happy, quiet, and hard-working young man. He could often be heard whistling and was said to have a beautiful singing voice, as well. But when Armwood arrived at his cousin Mary’s house on October 16, 1933, he was in a panic. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” he yelled. “They’re gonna kill me. I didn’t do it!”
More than a half-century later, Mary Armwood recounted this moment to her granddaughter, Tina Johnson. As Johnson recalled recently, the two of them were sitting in the living room watching the soap opera The Young and the Restless and discussing the recent arrest and incarceration of one of their family members over a verbal altercation with a White woman. This, Johnson says, sparked her grandmother’s memory. Mary told her about how police had come to search her house for Armwood, who’d been accused of assaulting a White woman; how her family had seen Armwood being violently dragged past their house after he’d been found in the woods; how a White mob had later dragged his body by the house again, after they lynched him, “so that we could see it.”
Sherrilyn A. Ifill, in her 2007 book On the Courthouse Lawn, fills in the details. When Armwood was arrested, he wasn’t taken to the nearest jail, in Princess Anne, Maryland, because lynch mobs were already forming there. He was instead taken to Wicomico County, then farther away, to Cecil County, then all the way to Baltimore, where he was presumed to be safe. But local officials in Princess Anne, under intense pressure from their White constituents, ordered his return. A local judge promised the governor that Armwood would be safe…