Prince George's to honor Thomas Juricks, victim of county's oldest documented lynching
FORT WASHINGTON, Md. (7News) — Hundreds are expected to gather in Prince George's County, Maryland Saturday to remember a man who was lynched by an angry mob back in 1869.
Thomas Juricks, a Black farm worker, was accused of attacking a white woman. It happened on Oct. 12, 1869, where the Tantallon community and National Golf Club now sit, not far from the Fort Washington National Park.
The historical maps show back then it was a land of scattered farms.
On that autumn day, as he drove an ox cart along a lane, Juricks was grabbed by a mob and accused, without evidence, of what the Evening Star newspaper called a “terrible outrage."
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Those same articles reported what happened next: “The brutal perpetrator,” the headline reads, “taken out and lynched.”
“He was grabbed out of the clear blue sky. I mean, this man was minding his own business and he was accused, [with] extremely nonexistent evidence, dragged off by a white mob and lynched,” Prince George’s County Councilmember Jolene Ivey said.
Ivey is now part of an effort to make sure that history is confronted in all its horror.
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“They tried to hang him from the tree but when they didn’t have the rope short enough, they jumped on top of him on his shoulders and pulled him down until he was dead,” Ivey said.
“This was really [a] racial terror lynching,” Lula Beatty of the Prince George’s Lynching Memorial Project said.
From 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday at the Harmony Hall Regional Center in Fort Washington, the group will be leading a community remembrance to honor Juricks, the victim of the county's oldest documented lynching.
“It was done to kill him but also to terrorize the community around him and to create this feeling of being unsafe, being insecure, being fearful,” Beatty said.
As those old articles reported, Juricks was buried in a prominent place to serve as a “sufficient warning” to the community.
“We’re trying to lift up the history that’s been hidden because we think there’s a lot of pain in our county and in our country," Beatty said of the memorial. "And so we think knowing the truth will start us on a path toward being able to talk honestly and openly and trying to get to a point of healing reconciliation and true justice.”
7News is sharing some historical documents from the Maryland State Archives. Click the links below to enlarge the documents.
SEE MORE FROM MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES
