Professor Charles Chavis Jr. has invested five years probing the lynching of a young Black man in Salisbury on the Eastern Shore 90 years ago--what 23-year-old Matthew Williams meant to his family and community, the leaders of the supposedly spontaneous mob, how the white power structure covered up the crime -- and what it all means today.
Chavis’s book, The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State, will be out next week. And with Samson and Katrina Binutu, he’s producing a film about the crime, Hidden in Full View.
