9th Annual "Lynching in Maryland" Conference

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project will hold its 9th Annual "Lynching in Maryland" Conference on Saturday, October 24, 2026 from 9:30am to 4:00pm at the The Lewis in Baltimore.

This year's conference program presents a full day of powerful, thought-provoking, and inspiring presentations and discussions with experts, thought leaders, and community members. Speakers and attendees will consider the history and truth of racial terror lynching in Maryland, its lasting effects, and the efforts around the state to confront the truth so that healing and reconciliation might begin.

We are offering both in-person and virtual attendance. Those attending in-person will be provided with morning refreshments and lunch; opportunity to purchase books written by guest speakers; and access to the Lynching in Maryland exhibit, a collaboration between The Lewis and the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. Doors open at 8:45am for networking and light breakfast. See below for additional conference details ~ and check back as program updates will be made over the coming weeks.

9th Annual "Lynching in Maryland" Conference Program

The Maryland Lynching Memorial: Community Engagement in Memorialization

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project has been working to create a permanent, public Maryland Lynching Memorial dedicated to the state’s 38 known and countless unknown racial terror lynching victims. Conversations with the broader community have been ongoing to guide the project, ensuring the process creates space for community voices most affected by racial terror, preventing reinjury, and pursuing repair. Join Maryland Lynching Memorial Project board member Clory Jackson, and experts in the field of public arts and memorialization, to hear an update on the Memorial, why community engagement is important in memorialization, and to contribute to the conversation.

Ms. Jackson is a creative artist-activist blending live performance, social discourse, and grassroots organizing to help communities disrupt patterns of hate and systemic oppression. She founded The Brownsville Project in 2018, inspired by her journey tracing her father’s family history as Black Americans in Appalachia and her maternal grandmother’s legacy as a Civil Rights activist in Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from Spelman College, an MFA in Acting from Penn State University, and studied musical theatre at Shenandoah Conservatory. After performing regionally and working in New York’s tech start-up scene, Ms. Jackson merged her business knowledge with her family's civil rights legacy and her passion for storytelling. She is deeply committed to lifelong learning, currently exploring spiritual healing and liberation practices that inform her work.

Keynote: Getting to Reparations

Maryland is at the epicenter of truth-telling and reparations work. Host to the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the only government appointed body in the country, and the recently established Maryland Reparations Commission, we must ask: What does it take to get to reparations? In this keynote session, Dorothy A. Brown will explore why reparations are necessary for Black Americans, a path of how to achieve it, and what we might consider in the work ahead.

Ms. Brown was born and raised in the South Bronx in New York City. A nationally recognized scholar in race, wealth, and tax policy, she currently holds the Martin D. Ginsburg Chair in Taxation at Georgetown Law. Ms. Brown is the author of The Whiteness of Wealth: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans-And How We Can Fix It and her 2026 book, Getting to Reparations: How Building A Different America Requires A Reckoning With Our Past. She has appeared on ABC’s The View, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi show, MSNOW Connect with Jacob Soboroff, New Yorker Radio Hour, NPR’s Marketplace, and PBS News Hour. Her opinion pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

Copies of Ms. Brown’s book, Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past, will be available for purchase and signing at the conference.

Reparations in Maryland

Immediately following Ms. Brown’s keynote session, she will join Dr. Nicholas Creary and a panel of leaders in the field, in a dynamic discussion about reparations in Maryland and the ways that we may contribute to the work ahead.

Dr. Creary is a distinguished higher education leader and scholar whose work bridges rigorous historical research, public engagement, and transformative institutional leadership. He is the author of Domesticating a Religious Import and African Intellectuals and Decolonization. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Creary co-founded and served as a commissioner on the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which developed comprehensive recommendations to confront and repair the legacy of racial terror lynchings in Maryland, drawing upon transitional justice principles and community-driven investigation and reform efforts. He has taught at Georgetown University, Marquette University, Ohio University, and the University at Albany (SUNY), and is currently teaching at Coppin State University. He earned his B.A. in History and African Studies from Georgetown University, an M.A. in U.S. History from The Catholic University of America, and a Ph.D. in African History from Michigan State University.

Impact and Repair from Trauma

Guided by Stacey Stephens, MSW, LCSW-C, conference attendees will build an understanding of the impact that trauma has on us as well as learn exercises that may be incorporated into our daily routines of self care.

Stacey B. Stephens has been the Director of the B’more for Healthy Babies in Upton/Druid Heights, The Center of Restorative Change at the University of Maryland School of Social Work since 2011. As a visionary leader, she assists communities and everyday people as they strive to attain equitable health and mental well-being. Ms. Stephens enjoys teaching and inspiring future health care professionals. She is a jazz aficionado and a poet who enjoys baking from scratch and watching the sun rise around the world. Ms. Stephens was named the 2022 Social Worker of the Year by the Maryland Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers and was recognized as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women in 2026.

MLMP Digital Archive: Translations Project

Join MLMP Digital Archivist Hannah Young, educator Dr. Katherine Arner, and MLMP intern Bonnie Holmes as they discuss the MLMP Digital Archive Translations Project. To date, nearly 200 newspaper articles published in the 1800s in the United States, and written in languages other than English, have been identified to have covered racial terror lynchings in Maryland. Of these, Baltimore-based German newspapers printed the majority. An additional 48 articles were printed in papers from Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, Spain, and Germany. In addition to hearing about the translation process, we will learn what has been discovered thus far, what the information reveals about the crimes and role of the newspapers, and the use of language in reporting.

In addition to her support of the MLMP Digital Archive, Ms. Young has worked on large archival projects such as ProQuest’s Black Studies and Women and Gender database. She has her masters in Library and Information Services from Catholic University.

Members of the MLMP Digital Archive will be available during the lunch break to offer demonstrations of the archive site and answer questions.

Red Record Consortium

The Red Record Consortium recognizes that the work that unites comes with specific and solemn responsibilities. Investigating, analyzing, and publishing information on historical racial violence draws on a broad history of racism and oppression. These historical harms continue to affect the families and communities who were subjected to violence, for whom the wrongs were never addressed. The Consortium grew out of a 2025 convening hosted by Northeastern University Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. Today, the Consortium is a nationwide group of scholars and non-academic researchers who all work in the area of historical racial violence. Members of the Consortium will present their research to include: cataloging Jim Crown crimes, pedagogy and impact, mapping racism, ethical archiving, and more.

Dr. Nikki Brown has been teaching American and African American history at the University of Kentucky since 1999. She majored in History at Oberlin College, and she earned a PhD in History from Yale University in 2001. Her book, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal won the 2006 Letitia Woods Brown Award for Best Book in African American Women in History. Dr. Brown is also a professional photographer, and has recently completed a photography project on African American men in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She is currently working on a book about Louisiana’s Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Gianluca De Fazio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison University. He received his PhD in Sociology from Emory University. Dr. De Fazio’s research interests include the study of political violence in Northern Ireland and lynching in the United States’ South. He is the director of two digital history projects: Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia and Memorializing Racial Terror: Lynching Markers in the United States.

Additional panelist information coming soon.

Naming Resistance as a Response to Racial Terror

What did resistance look like in response to atrocious acts of racial terror in the 1800s and 1900s? In the face of these horrors, were communities galvanized to organize with solidarity or develop individual responses? In what ways have their echoes informed our best practices today? How do they appear in our memory terrain? What lessons can be carried to strengthen the foundation of our collective future? Jaelon T. Moaney will explore these—and other—questions while collapsing the space between then and now.

Mr. Moaney currently serves as Deputy Director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College—the first college chartered in the sovereign United States. His lineage on the Delmarva Peninsula traces back over three centuries, including ancestors who founded and established the free Black kinship communities of Unionville, Copperville and the Hill in Easton. Appointed in 2023 by Governor Wes Moore as the youngest member of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture and unanimously re-elected for a second consecutive term as Vice Chair of the State agency, Moaney has provided thought leadership on cultural stewardship in the U.S. Congress and across the country. His multilateral advocacy and extensive board service has contributed to multiple federal designations including the Southern Maryland National Heritage Area, the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park expansion, and the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Isaac Mason Escape Site.

Elbert Williams: Resistance and NAACP’s First Voting Rights Martyr

After 40 years in the courtroom, retired attorney Jim Emison has devoted the last 15 years to civil rights causes including investigating, speaking, and writing about the 1940 murder of Elbert Williams, the first known NAACP member killed for his voting rights work. Mr. Emison’s work has been the subject of two Associated Press articles and has been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. In 2019, he was a featured narrator in WNPT, Nashville Public Television’s, regional Emmy award winning documentary, The Fight to Vote, Black Voter Suppression in Tennessee. As a result of Mr. Emison’s work, the United States Department of Justice placed Mr. Williams on its list of cold cases of racially motivated murders, opened under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. The District Attorney for Tennessee’s 28th Judicial District opened an investigation into the murder in 2018, but the trail had gone cold.

Mr. Emison’s book, Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr, will be published on October 20, 2026. He will be joined in conversation by a colleague to discuss his research; the establishment of an Elbert Williams Interpretive Center (Brownsville, TN), modeled on the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS; and his recommendations for change.

Copies of Mr. Emison’s book, Murder on the Hatchee, will be available for purchase and signing at the conference.

MLMP at the Lewis Museum: "Lynching in Maryland" Exhibit

All in-person attendees will have access to the permanent exhibit on Lynching in Maryland, created by the Lewis Museum in collaboration with the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project. Plan to spend time walking through this important Maryland space.

Support

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project is committed to providing accessible, low-cost educational and community experiences for conference attendees. Funds generated through ticket sales and tax deductible contributions directly support programming expenses. If you or your business are interested in being a Conference Sponsor, please contact MLMP Giving or 443-912-4440. Thank you for your support.