After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to fatal violence against Black women, men, and children, who were frequently falsely accused of violating social norms or crimes. Although Maryland did not join the Confederacy, more than 87,000 Black people were enslaved there in 1860, and slavery remained legal in the state. These enslaved people were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which only authorized freedom for enslaved people in the Confederacy, and white enslavers in states like Maryland strongly resisted emancipation. Post-emancipation, racial violence and lynching emerged as forms of terrorism intended to intimidate Black people and enforce racial hierarchy and segregation. From 1865 to 1876, mass lynchings of Black people were common, and the total number of deaths is unknown. From 1865 to 1950, at least 6,500 Black people were lynched for resisting exploitation, violating social customs, or after simply being accused of a crime. In Maryland, 40 racial terror lynchings have been documented between 1865 and 1950, including at least three in Wicomico County. Between 1898 and 1931, at least three Black men were victims of racial terror lynchings near the courthouse in Salisbury. On May 26, 1898, a mob of more than 100 white people lynched Garfield King, a Black teenager from near present-day Allen, after he was held in the Salisbury Jail following an alleged altercation with a white man outside Twigg's Store; the mob kidnapped him, hanged him from a nearby maple tree, and shot his body at least 50 times. On December 4, 1931, a white mob lynched Matthew "Buddie" Williams, a 23-year-old Black man recovering from gunshot wounds at Peninsula General Hospital after an altercation with his white employer; without resistance from hospital staff, the mob kidnapped him from his bed, dragged him to the courthouse lawn, beat, stabbed, and hanged him, then set him on fire and dragged his charred remains through Salisbury's Black community as a reminder of the lethal racial order. On the morning of December 6, the body of an unidentified 33-year-old Black man was found beaten to death near a railroad track in Salisbury, and evidence indicates he was killed by the same mob that lynched Williams hours earlier. During this era, a strict racial hierarchy in Wicomico County enabled white people to lynch and terrorize Black people with impunity, and no one was held accountable for the killings of these three men.