Shortly after midnight on Sunday, October 6, 1907, a large white mob lynched an 18-year-old African American man known as William Burns in Cumberland, Maryland. After being involved in an altercation with a local white police officer on October 3, 1907 that resulted in the officer’s death, Mr. Burns was arrested and driven to the local police headquarters and held in a cell. The next morning, he was transported to the county jail, also in Cumberland, Maryland. While he awaited trial, a mob entered the jail, abducted Mr. Burns, and beat and shot him to death. Although several local officials were present, no one would identify members of the mob, and no one was ever held accountable for the lynching of William Burns.
Originally from Fauquier County, Virginia, Mr. Burns relocated to Allegany County and had been living there for six months before October 1907. Before his death, Mr. Burns was employed as a porter at Alpine Hall, a hotel in Cumberland, and as a driver for George Palmore, the owner of a local saloon. After work on Thursday, October 3, Mr. Burns and another local Black man named Jesse Page visited a couple of local saloons near the canal wharf in Cumberland. While at the second saloon known as Kate Preston’s saloon, Mr. Burns was accused of disorderly conduct and thrown out. Shortly thereafter, August Baker, a local white police officer on the Cumberland Police Force, arrived on the scene to arrest Mr. Burns. Before the officer could take him into custody, a struggle ensued, wherein Officer Baker struck Mr. Burns with a mace. Reports stated that during the struggle, Officer Baker was shot in the abdomen by Mr. Burns, but was still able to handcuff Mr. Burns. After calling for assistance, the officer had a Black ice wagon driver named Humphrey Green and another witness, bartender Abram Speck, transport Mr. Burns by cab to the Cumberland police station before he was placed in the local jail. While Mr. Burns was incarcerated, word spread around Cumberland that Officer Baker had been shot, and on Saturday, October 5, Officer Baker’s death was publicly pronounced by a coroner’s jury.
Meanwhile Jesse Page had fled in fear after being assaulted at the scene. In the confusion witnesses had thought he was an accomplice to a crime when in fact, he had gone to phone the police. (The next morning he would go to the station and be held in a cell near William Burns at the county jail.)
Reports indicate that Mr. Burns feared retaliation from the citizens of Cumberland.
As anger rose in the white community, County Sheriff Horace Hamilton chose not to put extra guards on duty at the jail, stating that he did not fear an uprising.
In most cases of racial terror lynching, local law enforcement failed to intervene or use force to repel lynch mobs, even when the threat of lynching was evident and underway. Despite their legal responsibility to equally protect anyone in their custody, law enforcement were often found to be ineffective in preventing, or even complicit in, the seizure or lynchings of Black men, women, and children by abdicating their responsibilities or yielding to mobs’ demands.
That evening, Deputy Sheriff Noah Hendley was the only person standing guard at the jail.
Mr. Page had thankfully been cleared of any charges and released earlier that day, as the mob also sought to lynch him.
By midnight on October 5, an initial group of approximately 50 white men gathered in the streets near the jail “with their coats turned inside out and handkerchiefs bound over their faces.”
By the time the mob reached the jail, there were several hundred participants.
Contemporary reports described conflicting accounts of how the mob was able to enter the jail and abduct Mr. Burns. According to Deputy Sheriff Noah Hendley, the mob stormed the jail and demanded keys to enter, which he refused. He stated that the mob then obtained a pole, which they used repeatedly in an effort to break down the door. Unsuccessful, the mob then held him at gunpoint, stripped his clothing, and took the keys, which they used to enter the jail. Alternatively, some informants reported that Deputy Sheriff Hendley gave them the keys, which allowed them to enter the jail. Other reports claim that Hendley’s wife convinced him to give up the keys or that the mob forcefully gained entry.
After entering the jail and locating Mr. Burns, the mob beat and dragged him outside. Reports indicate that by this time the mob had grown to approximately 2,000 active white participants and spectators.
A local white attorney, Benjamin Richmond, who arrived as the mob was beginning to storm the jail, attempted to locate other officers who could intervene. Richmond later reported that after he left the jail, he managed to find one additional officer, by the name of Goss. Richmond convinced officer Goss to take him to the police station in search of more officers. Once there, they found four policemen, with Lieutenant Schmutz among them, sitting quietly with the door locked and lights low. By the time officers returned to the jail, the mob had already dispersed. Richmond stated that when he urged the officers to go after the mob, they “moved in a rather leisurely fashion,” and “of course...they arrived too late.”
The mob had dragged Mr. Burns out of his cell, down the stairs and outside into the street. Some members of the mob demanded that Mr. Burns confess to killing Mr. Baker, but he would not. Other members of the mob were already convinced of his guilt. Intent on proceeding with the lynching, at approximately 12:40 am on Sunday, October 6, the mob beat Mr. Burns and shot him repeatedly even after he had already expired. The mob intended to burn Mr. Burns’ body but Reverend William Cleveland Hicks, the rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, pleaded with the white mob to stop the mutilation of Mr. Burns’ body.
Cumberland police officers failed to arrest any of the mob participants who had participated in lynching William Burns. After his lynching, Richmond strongly criticized the Cumberland police force, stating,
“The conduct of the police of Cumberland was simply shameful and disgraceful. Although the disorder was going on for more than half an hour, not one of them appeared on the scene until after the negro was dead, and would not have come then but for my action.”
Reverend Hicks also spoke out against the lynching. Delivering a sermon later in the day on the Sunday that Mr. Burns was lynched, Reverend Hicks stated that, “Last night a crime far worse was committed, committed in cold blood. The righteous anger of Thursday and Friday was cast to the winds, and license, vengeance, and savagery were given full sway. Ah, my friends, who are responsible for these awful crimes against civilization and against God? Is it that band of men alone who dragged the criminal from his cell and who fired those shots? No. It is your fault and it is mine. We must share in this disgrace, for we, as a city, have allowed that pesthole, the saloon, to spring up everywhere, and to bring forth its deadly, devilish offspring.”
Although officials and community members like Richmond and Reverend Hicks at times expressed condemnation of racial terror lynchings, this outrage rarely led to meaningful outcomes in holding white mobs accountable for lynchings.
On October 12, Allegany County commissioners offered a reward of $500 for the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the lynching of William Burns. Despite the fact that the mob that lynched Mr. Burns had grown to at least 2,000 people, Deputy Sheriff Hendley stated that he was unable to identify anyone in the crowd, “some of whom seemed respectable and others who were not.” Other witnesses also claimed they could not remember, let alone identify, those who participated in the lynching. Yet there were newspaper reports that stated, ““It is said that some of the lynchers are known and that the mob included several prominent citizens who have never been known to carry revolvers, but who did so upon this occasion.”
Chief Judge A. Hunter Boyd, who had been on the scene urging the crowd to disperse and recognized spectators, directed a grand jury to investigate Mr. Burns’ lynching. The jury convened, but returned a verdict on October 19th that no one could be identified for prosecution of the crime.
The Afro-American Ledger, a Baltimore-based Black-led newspaper, published an article on October 12, writing about the white mob that killed Mr. Burns, stating that, “without doubt, everyone of them is guilty of murder in the first degree and justice will not be done until everyone implicated in it is brought before the bar and receives the penalty of his crime.”
The article also implicated Deputy Sheriff Hendley, stating that,
“. . . without doubt, the deputy sheriff should be immediately removed for he certainly failed in his duty, if he did not connive with the law breakers in carrying out their deadly purpose. The idea of a man standing with a weapon in his hand, allowed by the law to use it, and then failing to protect not only the prisoners, under his charge, but the property of the government of the state. The sheriff heard that there were threats being made, but took no interest in the matter save to remove himself as far from the scene as his duty would allow.”
Mr. Burns’ sister arrived from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania hoping to transport her brother’s body back to Pittsburgh, but she was not able to acquire the funds to do so. On October 10, Mr. Burns was buried at the Sumner Cemetery in Cumberland, Maryland. An announcement in the local newspaper stated that “the funeral will be quietly conducted.”
Despite the mob’s lawlessness and failures of law enforcement that resulted in the lynching of William Burns, no one was ever held accountable for his death. William Burns is one of at least 29 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching in the state of Maryland between 1877 and 1950.
Buried inside a Washington Herald article that was mostly exactly worded from a Cumberland press release, one line said something to the effect “We don’t even know if his name *was* really William Burns. He left laundry that hadn’t been picked up with the name ‘James Hughes’ on the tag.” A search for James Hughes did not return results, but there were Hughes in Delaplane.
In placing his sister Selina’s name with the family name Hughes, we found a family in the area where the mother still resided. And she in fact, was from and had a sister still living in Pittsburgh. In researching all of the children, they all had families or death records, except a boy of the age of William Burns by the name of Robert Wormley Hughes. Robert disappeared from the historical records.