Given its charge, the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission probably won’t consider the case of Hattie Carroll, but it should.
The body, the nation’s first statewide commission of its kind, was created in 2019 to “research certain cases of racially motivated lynchings” of Black people by white mobs in Maryland between 1854 and 1933. The commission’s life will be extended through 2026 by legislation that’s expected to pass Maryland’s General Assembly soon.
But Carroll wasn’t hanged from a tree. She died at the hands of whites who were parties to a nonjudicial killing of another kind.
It was on the night of Feb. 8, 1963, that Carroll, 51, had her deadly encounter with 24-year-old William Zantzinger. She was a barmaid in the Emerson Hotel, which was on the corner of Baltimore and Calvert streets. The mother of 11 children, Carroll lived in Cherry Hill, just a few blocks from the subsidized apartment I lived in as a teenager.
Zantzinger was a white tobacco farmer from Southern Maryland whom The Evening Sun called a “Charles County socialite.” He showed up to a ball at the Emerson that night wearing a top hat, white tie and tails – and wielding a wooden cane. According to media reports, he and his wife drank heavily, and late into the night, Zantzinger became noticeably unsociable.
At one point, Zantzinger, who managed his family’s 630-acre tobacco farm in Southern Maryland, repeatedly struck Ethel Hill, 30, a black waitress who also lived in Cherry Hill, on her hips with his cane. Each time he hit her with more force, she would later testify, as reported by The Evening Sun. Witnesses at his subsequent trial said they heard Zantzinger call out to a waitress, “Hey, Black girl, get me a drink.” At another time, his talk became coarser when he shouted, “Give me a drink, you n****r.”
Eventually, Zantzinger went to the bar and ordered a drink from Carroll, a deacon and choir member at Gillis Memorial Methodist Church. “Just a minute, sir,” she said politely. But Carroll wasn’t moving fast enough for him. “Why are you so slow, you Black bitch,” Zantzinger exclaimed as he struck Carroll across her shoulder with his cane.
Carroll, who had a history of heart problems, collapsed and was taken to Mercy Hospital, where she died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few hours later.
Zantzinger was arrested and tried under an indictment that could have resulted in a first- or second- degree murder conviction.
But the three-judge tribunal that heard his case ruled that Zantzinger was guilty only of manslaughter. And the prosecutor panned the idea that racial bigotry played a role in this case.
“We do not feel that the racial question is a critical issue and we do not intend to dwell on it,” said Deputy State’s Attorney Charles Moylan Jr.
Then he added, strangely, “But William Zantzinger might well not be sitting in the Washington County Courthouse but for the fact that, in his inner thinking, he never accepted the verdict of Appomattox Courthouse,” where the Civil War ended with the surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In sentencing Zantzinger to just six months in prison, one of the judges blamed Carroll, at least in part, for her death. His reasoning was that if Carroll had been in better health, she probably would not have died from the blow.
The judges delayed Zantzinger’s sentencing for three months so he could return to his farm to harvest his tobacco crop.
Carroll’s case was a miscarriage of justice that had the trappings of a modern-day lynching. Actions by the prosecutor and judge to depreciate the justice meted out to Carroll’s killer is an all-too familiar mistreatment of poor Black citizens who have been victimized by the criminal acts of well-to-do whites.
The circumstances of her death and the outcome of Zantzinger’s trial sparked outrage in Baltimore and across the country. Bob Dylan wrote a ballad about the events and released “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in 1964. It is ranked No. 35 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “100 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs.”
I know that asking the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission to expand its charge to take on cases like this is a heavy lift. As currently constructed, the commission doesn’t have the staff or budget for more than the research, hearings and report writing mandated by the original legislation.
But if the Legislature is serious about seeking truth and reconciliation in the lynching of Black people, it needs to do much more. It should give the commission the tools it needs to also look for truth and reconciliation in the state’s more recent deadly cases of systemic racism — cases that appear to have been rooted in the same racial animus that fueled lynch mobs.
DeWayne Wickham is the public editor for The Baltimore Banner.
