In 1885, many years before the death of Emmett Till, a white mob stormed the old Towson jail at Bosley and Towsontown Boulevard. They dragged a Black teenager named Howard Cooper out of his cell and waited until just after midnight. And then, when the Lord’s Day was officially over, they threw a cord rope over a sycamore tree and lynched a terrified and squirming Cooper. His last words were “Goodbye, gentlemen.”

The 14-year-old Till’s kidnapping and murder in 1955 Mississippi became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement and a staple of American history textbooks. But history forgot about Howard Cooper. His mother quietly buried him; his grave remains unmarked. Even the old stone jail is not known as that anymore; thanks to a $1.7 million restoration, it’s an upscale office building with a wine cellar.

Howard Cooper’s story would not resurface until 2018, when the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project was born. An outgrowth of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative and its Community Remembrance Project, the effort seeks to remember the victims of 6,500 lynchings in the United States and tell their stories.

Historians have documented at least 38 lynchings in Maryland. Researchers from Goucher College working with the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project dug into the stories surrounding the lynchings, how the press covered them and whether anyone was prosecuted.

Will Schwarz, president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, was surprised to learn Cooper was lynched in the community he’d called home for nearly 30 years. Schwarz and his organization’s local affiliate, the Baltimore County Lynching Memorial Project, decided to memorialize Cooper at the old Towson jail every July 13, the anniversary of his death.

The Fourth Annual Howard Cooper Community Remembrance Ceremony will be held starting at 10 a.m. Saturday at the park across from the old jail at Baltimore and Bosley avenues. The event will feature Towson University assistant professor Kalima Young speaking about the meaning of memorials, the winning students from the county organization’s Racial Justice Poetry Contest and vocalist Ally Hunter-Harris singing the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.” Thunder Powell, a Black teenager about the same age as Howard Cooper when he died, will read Cooper’s story.

“Not only is the history not appreciated, and not known, but the connection of these legacies of lynching to the inequities we see today, and making that connection clear, is one of the reasons it’s important to do this,” said Schwarz, who made a film about the Cooper case.

At the ceremony in 2021, then-Gov. Larry Hogan issued a pardon for Cooper and 33 other lynching victims in the state. At that time, Baltimore County officials installed the Howard Cooper historical marker outside the two-story, stone jail building. It was the second marker acknowledging a lynching in the state, after one in Anne Arundel County. A third one is now in Salisbury. Hogan said he was inspired to issue the pardon in part by a petition from students at Loch Raven Technical Academy, who persuaded him that Cooper never got due process under the law.

Recognizing this history statewide marks a substantial shift in Maryland’s racial justice narrative. Even 20 years ago, white communities were reluctant to speak about Harriet Tubman as an Eastern Shore native who escaped slavery in Dorchester County and led many others to freedom. Today, a $22 million state and national park tells the story, with multiple sites forming an Underground Railroad tour. More communities are investigating where and when to place historical markers memorializing events associated with slavery and racial injustice. Hampton National Historic Site, just three miles from the old jail, has invested major federal resources in telling the stories of the thousands of Marylanders enslaved at the 25,000-acre plantation.

More recently, researchers at Goucher and Hampton have connected with Historic East Towson, a Black community where freed people from Hampton settled, to weave back together the three communities that were once part of the land that was Hampton Plantation. In the process, they have learned many stories long buried, said Nancy Goldring, president of the Northeast Towson Improvement Association and a member of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project’s board. Though Goldring is a student of local history, she didn’t know the Howard Cooper story until researchers uncovered it in 2018.

“I was aghast. I was like, whoa, in Towson?” she said. “I think this whole last few years has shown me a shadow side of the place where I was born and raised that I did not know existed.”

Howard Cooper’s story begins at the corner of Old Court and Falls Road near The Valley Inn, then known as Rockland. Cooper, 15, saw a young white woman he knew named Katie Gray at the train station and followed her into the woods as she walked home. Both Cooper and Gray said he assaulted her. She got away, went home and told her father. For days, he and a local mob looked for Cooper. When law enforcement found him, they took him to the jail in Baltimore City and held the trial there because the county sheriff worried he could not keep Cooper safe from the incensed white citizens of Towson. Prosecutors charged him with assault and rape; the punishment for rape was death by hanging.

Cooper denied raping Gray, and she never said he raped her. The only testimony that she was raped came from her family doctor, who looked at her two days later. But an all-white jury took one minute to convict him of both assault and rape. Authorities brought Cooper back to the Towson jail to await sentencing while his lawyers appealed to the state’s highest court.

“I was aghast. I was like, whoa, in Towson? I think this whole last few years has shown me a shadow side of the place where I was born and raised that I did not know existed.”

Nancy Goldring, Northeast Towson Improvement Association

After they lost the state appeal, the Rev. Dr. Harvey Johnson hatched a different plan. The leader of Union Baptist Church, one of the largest Black congregations in Baltimore, wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing Cooper didn’t get a fair trial because of the all-white jury. Johnson had had success pressing similar cases of discrimination. On Saturday, July 11, he announced his community had raised the funds to file the appeal. They would file Monday, July 13.

After newspapers reported the possible appeal, a mob formed near the courthouse and marched to the old jail, flagpole in hand. Cooper was dead within the hour. The day after the murder, The Baltimore Sun proclaimed: “There was very general satisfaction in Baltimore County with the lynching of Howard Cooper.”

Deborah Harner, a Goucher historian and archivist, said the supportive press emboldened the mob. A morning train even reportedly slowed down so passengers could have a better view of Cooper’s body.

“There was no shame in being part of a lynch mob, and there was no shame in watching and being a participant,” she said.

When Gray’s father was told of the lynching, he said in the Baltimore County Union newspaper: “I am glad justice has been done, Every right-minded man will say my friends acted wisely. Another trial would have been too much for Katie to bear, and God knows I would not have stood it.”

Though the men who lynched Cooper were never identified or brought to justice, Towson residents knew who they were. One participant described the mob to the Baltimore County Union as “mostly substantial farmers, all of them good citizens. There was not a rough character among us. Every man was actuated by the thought that, in avenging Miss Gray, he was protecting his own wife, sweetheart, or children.”

The names of those who lynched Howard Cooper may be lost to history. But not to Cooper himself, Schwarz said. They were his neighbors.

“They knew who he was, and he knew what they were,” he said. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like for him.”