The Resistance Project: a thorough analysis of self-liberation from county slavery
The anchor of any story should be accurate data, and it’s taken a while to compile information from various sources relative to the activity of the self-liberation done involving the land that would become Howard County. There is a lot of it! Advertisements placed in newspapers was only part of the story, and that’s because everyone didn’t place an ad. It’s also because the person who placed the ad has to be traced: were they the enslaver, or merely a representative of the actual enslaver? Did the person get captured and returned, or did they make it out?
Using data we’ve assembled and then drilling down on other documentation, we’re working to place the materials onto a map of the county that will enable resident, visitors and students to be able to better visualize what was happening in Howard County over time from when it was still part of Anne Arundel up to the Civil War in 1864. Who was doing what is what we will show.
Founding projects:
In order for our nonprofit to do the work associated with examining the historical lynching activities that happened on Howard County soil, we first did an examination of what easily-accessible history existed from which we could draw. As highlighted on our website, we are committed to “Truth FIRST, then Reconciliation.” This is more than just a slogan for us. HCLTR cannot advance its mission with integrity until having done a deep dive into the local culture that not only tolerated – but also facilitated – lynching hysteria and activity. Having found inadequate fact-based research about local county Black history for the time period before 1930, we decided we had to create it.
We have TWO main vehicles for pushing out content we generate regarding local Howard County Black history: a Facebook page, and a subdomain of our website. Links to access both are below. Note: additional researched stories are being compiled in order to create a publication. Stay tuned!
The Facebook page called “Howard County Maryland Black History” can be accessed from this link:
Feel free to “like” the page in order to have them (possibly) come through your Facebook feed. (If only we knew the secret to the Facebook algorithms that control that!)
The other research HCLTR initiated in late summer of 2021 is the Ellicott City Black History Roundtable initiative. Ellicott City was selected because it was (and still is) the county seat of Howard County. Additionally, many of the lynching activities occurred within the borders of Ellicott City. We launched the initiative by examining data from the 1860 census of Ellicott’s Mills, and then proceeded to create and facilitate a research lab in order to ascertain and compile the accurate history surrounding an Ellicott City landmark (Thomas Isaac’s Log Cabin). That work has turned into a book, and we are continuing to link records together in order to be able to tell accurate local history stories of the time period we specialize in. In the meantime, our subdomain can be accessed by this link: