Anne Arundel County Executive Stuart Pittman apologized on behalf of the county government for its role in slavery and the lasting harm caused during an event at Maryland Hall on Saturday.
“We collectively offer our inadequate but deeply felt apology that has for 160 years been withheld and pledged to never allow this history or this acknowledgement to be forgotten,” Pittman said.
The executive’s announcement came after a broader discussion of Anne Arundel’s past, with speakers describing how slavery and later government actions shaped the lives of Black residents in Anne Arundel County.
“Looking back through the history of the world, the apologies and the atonement and in some cases the reparations for harm done by countries by communities have been missing in the United States of America and it has absolutely been missing in Anne Arundel County,” said Pittman.
Anne Arundel joins other institutions that have acknowledged ties to slavery, including The City of Annapolis and The Baltimore Sun, whose historic ads selling enslaved people were displayed Saturday at Maryland Hall, alongside other historical documents and artwork celebrating the county’s Black community.
Before Pittman spoke, Chris Haley, director of the Study of Legacy Slavery in Maryland for the Maryland State Archives, taught about Anne Arundel’s history.
Slave ships entered the United States in Annapolis and London Town. From 1790 to 1860, roughly half of the population of Maryland was of African American descent.
After emancipation, Maryland and Anne Arundel’s governments continued to discriminate against and traumatize their Black residents.
Courts and sheriffs allowed lynching, and there were at least five in Anne Arundel.
A short drive from Annapolis is the site of the former Crownsville Hospital, where Black patients were used for labor, experimented on, and buried in unmarked graves. The Old Fourth Ward in Annapolis was once a thriving, predominantly Black neighborhood and it was leveled to build parking lots and government buildings.
“If you want to know more, look more, search more, for this is not only our history or their history. It is our history,” said Haley.
In his remarks, Pittman spoke about his family’s history of benefiting from enslaved labor, at times his voice breaking with emotion.
Pittman’s ancestor Dr. George Hume Steuart came to Anne Arundel from Scotland in the 1700s. He was a politician who, in Pittman’s words, “made his fortune in the tobacco industry on the backs of enslaved men, women and children from Africa.”
Pittman currently lives on a property purchased by his ancestor in 1747.
“I have not yet met a person whose ancestry has been traced to enslavement on the land where I live, and if I ever do, I will want to know that person, their ancestors and their family history,” said Pittman. “Those things are very hard to find. Black history has been erased, and it was done deliberately.”
Pittman announced his intention to apologize last month and had to reschedule in a larger venue to accommodate demand.
There was some confusion this week as to whose idea this apology was. The initial announcement credited the Caucus of African American Leaders and the NAACP for the request.
At a Nov. 10 county council meeting, NAACP President Stephen Waddy said the organization made no such request and asked the county to remove the NAACP from all communications about the event.
“This seems performative. It seems more political than it did anything else to me,” said Waddy in an interview on Wednesday.
Carl Snowden, convener of the Caucus of African American Leaders, said he asked for the apology.
“[Pittman] understood that if this county is to be the best county for all, it had to reflect all of its people,” said Snowden. “All of the great problems that exist in our nation can be solved by a simple apology, anyone who knows anything about history knows that it must start somewhere.”
Have a news tip? Contact Bridget Byrne at bbyrne@baltsun.com, 443-690-7205 and Instagram @brdgtbyrn.ed
