Howard Cooper was only 15 years old when he was lynched by a mob outside the Baltimore County Jail just after midnight on Monday, July 13, 1885. The masked and hooded men who broke down the door, overpowered the warden, and stormed into his cell, found him hiding beneath his mattress. News reports had routinely exaggerated Howard’s age, but to a Baltimore Sun reporter who saw him in court he “looked like a frightened boy.”1
The Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln’s declaration freeing enslaved African Americans in Confederate states, had gone into effect on January 1, 1863, only seven years before Howard was born.2 Six years before Howard’s birth, on November 1, 1864, Marylanders narrowly amended their constitution to outlaw slavery within the state.3 And on February 3, 1865—roughly five years before Howard came into the world—Maryland ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution4, which officially—if not yet practically5—abolished slavery throughout the country (except, infamously, “as a punishment for crime”).6
Yet in 1885, when Howard, who was Black, was accused of raping Katie Gray, a white woman in her early 20s, only white men were allowed to serve on Maryland juries. Although the boy denied raping Katie, and she did not testify that she was raped, the all-white jury at his trial took less than a minute to find him guilty of the charge, effectively condemning Howard to be hanged.
This year on July 13th, 141 years after Howard’s body was cut from the branch of a sycamore tree and passed to his grieving mother, a crowd gathered near the old stone jailhouse in downtown Towson to remember him and to confront our state’s history of racial injustice. The event, hosted by the Baltimore County Lynching Memorial Project,7 drew leaders from across the region, including Senators Shelly Hettleman, Mary Washington, and Charles Sydnor, Delegates Kathi Forbes and Michele Guyton, Sarah David, who recently won the Democratic party primary for Baltimore County State’s Attorney and is unopposed in the general election, and Natasha Dartigue, leader of the state’s Office of the Public Defender.
It is fitting that so many elected and aspiring officials were present at this event, which included music and poetry and a presentation by Marc Schindler, of the Georgetown University Center for Youth Justice. Because the lynching of Howard Cooper, besides being a crime, was also a political act.
In the years following the Civil War, hopeful Black Marylanders were increasingly frustrated by their inability to leverage the electoral process to address the persistent legacies of slavery and institutionalized racism. Some began turning, instead, to the courts for redress. Howard Cooper’s case became part of those efforts. According to contemporary newspaper reports, a Baltimore-based group called The Progressive Society, which was led by two Black waiters from Baltimore, along with leaders from some of the city’s African-American churches, were raising money to appeal Howard’s case to the US Supreme Court, which they believed would be more sympathetic to their rights as citizens. One member of the lynching crowd told a reporter the assault was triggered by fears the group had succeeded in reaching their financial goal:
“When we received information that enough money had been raised to carry Cooper’s case to the United States Supreme Court we concluded that the only way to save Miss Gray from further mental suffering was to act promptly. We thought that if money was gotten together on Sunday, Cooper would probably be removed to the Baltimore city jail on Monday.”8
This account suggests the crowd’s purpose was solely to protect Katie Gray from the discomfort of a second trial. However, a Supreme Court ruling in Howard’s favor would have resulted in more than a retrial: It also would have compelled the state of Maryland to let Black citizens serve on juries. That outcome would have significantly compromised the courts as a tool of white supremacy.
Schindler, in his remarks, reminded the audience just how poorly the justice system had been serving Black Marylanders at the time. In 2025, as Assistant Secretary & Chief of Staff of the state’s Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), he participated in the rediscovery of an abandoned graveyard on the grounds of the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a DJS facility in Prince George’s County first established in 1870 as the House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children. From 1877 through 1939 at least 243 Black children died while incarcerated at this facility; most were placed in unmarked graves—often with little or no notice or explanation to their families.9 During those same years, Schindler said, only 26 white children died at The House of Refuge, the state’s segregated facility for white children, which today operates as the Charles Hickey School.
Schindler also revealed that the records of the House of Reformation include Howard Cooper’s name—for a sentence served when he was just 12 years old.
More than 150 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation and the official end of slavery. Three years after Howard’s extra-judicial execution, in 1888, Maryland finally desegregated its juries when the legislature removed the word “white” from its service requirements.10
Still, many of the concerns that moved The Progressive Society and African-American clergy of the 1880s continue to echo into our own time. The recently passed Youth Charging Reform Act, for example, was conceived to reduce the number of children, almost all Black or brown, who were automatically being tried in the adult criminal justice system, where the experience is harsher and the outcomes more deleterious.
At a time when some would have us forget the past, or re-write it to conceal harder truths, it is important to look with courage and honesty at Howard Cooper’s life, trial and murder.
The mob was hostile. Reformers sought opportunity. The press focused mostly on a good story. But at least one reporter, from the Baltimore Sun, recognized more was at stake. “Cooper’s mother,” he wrote with searing understatement, “was much affected when she came to the jail and saw her son’s body.”
To learn more, watch Outrage in Rockland: The Lynching of Howard Cooper or visit the websites of the Baltimore County Lynching Memorial Project and the Forgotten Children Initiative at Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice.
Written by Robin Campbell of Catalyze LLC.
Baltimore Sun, May 21, 1885, cited in The Lynching of Howard Cooper, by Alexander Ormond Boulton, Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol 106, No. 3, Fall 2011. https://www.mdhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/MHMFall2011.pdf
Archives of Maryland, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc2600/sc2685/html/conv1864.html
Maryland and the 13th Amendment, Washington College, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. In the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth“.—National Museum of African American History & Culture (https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth).
National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment)
The Baltimore County Union, 18 July 1885. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/013700/013733/tif/lynching.pdf
Governor Moore Unveils Roadside Historical Marker Recognizing Maryland’s House of Reformation for Colored Boys, The Office of Governor Wes Moore, May 7, 2026 (https://governor.maryland.gov/news/governor-moore-unveils-roadside-historical-marker)
Baltimore’s Civil Rights Heritage, https://baltimoreheritage.github.io/civil-rights-heritage/1885-1929/
I believe it is questionable that Miss Gray "did not testify that she was raped." According to the Baltimore County Union of 23 May 1885, she did in fact accuse him at his trial: "Miss Gray positively identified him [Cooper] as the man who had assaulted her. . . . She gave her testimony in a subdued voice, but very intelligently, and her lady-like appearance and demeanor at once excited the sympathies of all present." Another account chose not to record her testimony in deference to her "sensibilities." Of course, one might reasonably question what is meant by "assault" in this instance: an attack but not a rape (which is what Cooper was reported as admitting to)? a rape?; and it is possible that Gray lied - anyi-lynching activist Ida B. Wells certainly argued, with evidence, that white women lied about consensual relationships/relations with Black men when discovered. Though what constitutes "consent" might also be questioned. Alternatively, was Cooper framed as a troublesome youth? In my view, we'll never fully know what happened. Which, of course, is moot: lynching, whatever the circumstances, is a heinous crime, committed with impunity.