— The motto of Somerset County, still visible on its official seal, is semper eadem, Latin for "always the same." In many ways, the Eastern Shore county 120 miles southeast of Baltimore has lived up to the slogan.
Long before anyone had heard of the pioneer who took office last week, the county's origins in the American plantation system created a booming farm economy — giving rise to a rural elite that has been slow to give up power. The county that would become a hub for boatmaking in the late 19th century and seafood through the middle of the 20th was the last county in Maryland in which a lynching took place and the last to integrate its schools.
Over the years, those incidents and other, subtler ones have helped give Somerset, a place known for the beauty of its coastal marshland, a reputation for resisting racial reform that has been difficult to shake.
As of last month, though, things are not the same. On Nov. 2, voters elected an African-American to countywide office for the first time in Somerset's 344-year history. The Rev. Craig Mathies Sr. of Princess Anne, a local pastor and former car dealer, garnered 307 of 560 votes cast in District I, defeating his Republican opponent to become one of the county's five commissioners. He was sworn in Tuesday.
"I don't think I knocked on 15 people's doors during the campaign," says Mathies, 55. "I figured if God meant for this to happen, it would happen. It did."
Says Kirkland Hall, president of the Somerset County chapter of the NAACP: "Finally, our children can say to themselves, 'There's hope for me. I can get a job in the government; I can even be a county commissioner.' I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders."
How could a county that has long been at least one-third African-American have taken 31/2 centuries to elect a black countywide representative? The answer lies in the peculiar — some would say insular — politics of this 611-square-mile jurisdiction in the state's southeastern corner.
The man who made the breakthrough has never met a transformation he didn't like.
Legacy
Mathies sits in a popular restaurant in Princess Anne, a town of about 2,400 that serves as the seat of Somerset County.
Well-wishers black and white drift by to say hello. He greets them with a smile and a bit of chat about deer hunting and church.
It's hard to fathom, in a way, that one night within living memory, just two miles from here, a mob of 2,000 whites dragged a black man, George Armwood, from his jail cell, stabbed and bludgeoned him to death, and hanged his body from an oak tree.
The tragedy in 1933 left a mark on the county's psyche that remains today.
"I don't deal with the forms of racism that my grandfather or even my father did," Mathies says as he orders a salad for lunch. "But people with power still don't give it up lightly."
If history is any guide, when change happens in the county he has lived in for 50 years, now home to about 25,000 people, it happens slowly, often only under duress.
Incorporated in 1666 and named after a sister to the Baroness Baltimore, Somerset County wasted no time in embracing the plantation-based economy that would make the most of a terrain ripe for tobacco farming. The system, dependent on slave labor, helped create industries that enriched a closely connected group of white landowners — and entrenched an imbalance of power between blacks and whites that some say has lasted to the present day.
"The people in power here, the ones who decide everything, are white," Mathies said before the election. "The African-American community has never had any say, and the older generation of influence and wealth wants to keep it that way."
Even after slavery was abolished in 1863, some Eastern Shore landowners kept black children in involuntary "apprenticeships" until a federal court in Baltimore shot the practice down. Nearly a century later, the U.S. government withheld funds to Somerset in an effort to bring about compliance with Brown v. Board of Education, the court case that ended segregated public education. The county's schools integrated in 1969, 15 years later than Baltimore's.
When progress did occur, it seemed written in vanishing ink. The county appointed its first African-American school superintendent, H. DeWayne Whittington, in 1988, and the all-white school board terminated his contract without explanation four years later. Whittington filed a lawsuit for racial discrimination — his suit alleged that one member of the board had told a local reporter, "The last thing we need is a [racial expletive] running the school system" — and won a $920,000 judgment in a Baltimore federal court.
"It is the unanimous opinion of this jury that monetary compensation alone is not a sufficient punishment for an act of racism," the jury foreman announced. The court recommended that a school in Somerset County be renamed after Whittington, a request the county honored in 1997.
Mathies knows he has cracked what may be the most resistant industry of all. Somerset County's population is 42 percent black today, the third-highest figure for any county in the state. But the county has rarely hired blacks for upper-level jobs. As of 2007, it had no African-Americans on the payroll in professional, technical or paraprofessional positions, according to a report the ACLU pieced together last year from the county's Equal Employment Opportunity filings.
To Mathies, such is the stuff of daily life. "Walk on in to the county offices right now; you won't see an African-American," he says, digging in to his lunch. "And many of those individuals are related. It has always been that way around here."
Seeing a light
To many residents, Somerset County is a place where people don't need to lock their doors and it's hard to walk down the street without running into a friend.
"In some ways, Somerset County has a difficult reputation, and we have had our issues [with racial inequality] in the past," says Ted Phoebus, 79, the clerk of the county court, who is white and grew up in Princess Anne. "But most of the people, black and white, are wonderful. Things have changed in many ways. I honestly wouldn't live anywhere else."
Neither would Mathies, though he came to that view by a markedly different route.
He was born in Philadelphia, but his mother, Shellie, ended up getting divorced and bringing him back to her native Somerset. She enrolled at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, the historically black college in Princess Anne, to pursue a degree in teaching.
She went on to a lengthy career in the classroom, but in those early years, a doting grandmother raised Craig. "A lot of people in our community are told, 'You're not good enough to do this or that.' I never heard any negativity," he says. "I was also spoiled rotten."
There were racial restrictions in early-1960s Somerset County — blacks were relegated to the balcony at the movies, for example — but Mathies, a cheerful sort, tended to take them in stride.
"They'd sit down there and chunk stuff up at us," he says. "We'd chunk stuff right back down."
Always ambitious, he studied business administration at UMES, but after two years, he left to take a job selling cars. Within four years, he says, he was the first black finance manager for an auto dealer on the Eastern Shore.
He and his wife, Clarice, a teacher in the county schools, had two children, but Mathies says he was also a notorious partier who spent many nights away, having more than a few with his buddies. "I missed a lot of my kids' formative years, and I was maybe one drink away from becoming an alcoholic," he says. Eventually, a lifestyle centered on himself started feeling empty.
"Something inside was missing," he says.
That changed in the early 1990s. One night at a particularly moving gospel concert, Mathies went outside for a cigarette break and found himself sobbing. When the tears finally stopped coming, he remembers, he felt an overpowering sense of uplift and well-being.
"I don't know how to put this, but man, I felt this overwhelming love for everybody," he says. "Once you accept Christ into your life, you feel things you never felt before. We're all supposed to be together when we get to heaven, right? Whatever your ethnicity, you're a child of God. Everything else is secondary."
He stops short of saying his conversion drove him into social activism, but in 1993, Mathies — then vice-president of the local NAACP — decided to take on one of those old local policies that set one class of people over another.
At the time, the Princess Anne charter (like that of many Eastern Shore municipalities) said anyone who owned land or a business in the city could vote in municipal elections, even if they lived somewhere else. The law gave rural landowners — mostly prosperous whites — considerable clout in a town that was, by then, 51 percent African-American.
Mathies, then vice president of the county's NAACP, agreed to be the plaintiff when the ACLU of Maryland filed a federal lawsuit. Neither Mathies nor the ACLU's state legal director, Deborah Jeon, anticipated the outcry it would cause: Several town meetings grew heated, and a handful of the white landowners were so incensed that they put forth a referendum that would have dissolved the town altogether.
"Craig has a low-key approach, but when he believes in something, he does not waver in the face of opposition," says Jeon, who has studied Somerset County for more than 20 years. "That made a big impression on me."
The controversy ebbed "when the town looked at this objectively," Elliott Andalman, an ACLU lawyer, told The Sun at the time. After briefly vowing to fight the matter in court, Princess Anne agreed to repeal the policy.
Victory
That same year, Mathies learned that a friend from his partying days was sick with cancer. He prayed with the man one night, and as the sun came up the next morning, a verse from Luke's Gospel seemed to fill his mind: "And you shall go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous."
To Mathies, it was a clear call to the ministry. He became a pastor in 2002 and today leads the congregation at Zion Baptist Church in Cambridge.
Whether the profession has sharpened his political skills is open to debate, but something about Mathies led Hall to encourage him to seek one of the influential commissioner jobs.
"He's respected in both communities. You can't find a person in this county who has a bad thing to say about Pastor Mathies," says Hall, a UMES professor who first got involved in what he calls "the struggle" in the early 1980s, after reading about the Armwood lynching.
Still, once again, they had to overcome history. In 1986, in the aftermath of a Voting Rights Act lawsuit, Somerset had established District I as a "majority minority" district — one whose African-American population was supposed to be the majority, thus making election of a black commissioner more likely.
Deliberately or not, those who drew up the district included mostly African-American UMES, where students tend to vote in their home districts if they vote at all, as is the case on most college campuses. A year later, a prison, the Eastern Correctional Facility, was added within its boundaries.
Its 3,300 mostly black inmates, of course, are legally prohibited from voting. That leaves commissioner candidates vying for a racially mixed pool of about 1,000 votes — one reason Mathies' predecessor, a white Democrat named James Ring, held the spot for 24 years. (Ring retired from the post this year.)
Mathies didn't campaign that hard, but it didn't matter. Among other strategies, Hall used his pull to ensure that no other African-Americans were on the ballot to dilute the vote. The pastor won by 54 votes.
First and foremost
The local branch of the ACLU says Somerset County has done little to change the demographics within county government, a charge the county has denied.
Michael McCready, outgoing president of the board of commissioners, declined to return messages seeking comment, but he has told the press that, in his view, the county has grown more conscious of such matters and had practiced no racial discrimination during his eight years on the board.
"Before that, maybe so," he told radio station WYPR in July. "But I can't answer for, or undo, what somebody else did or didn't do, or [what] somebody perceived or didn't perceive. … But the last eight years, I would say no."
And progress does continue. Last summer, the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation that will change the way prison inmates are counted in election districts. By the time of the next election in 2014, no misleading "majority minority" jurisdictions should exist in Somerset County.
Until then, Mathies is one of the five people who make the major budgetary decisions and appoint the members of key commissions. "This is a monumental moment," the ACLU's Jeon says. "It has been a long time coming for Somerset County."
For his part, the District I commissioner says he'll approach his historic term in office by being a preacher first, a politician second. He'll keep the African-American community apprised of any and all job openings, he says, but otherwise aims to do no more than to give every constituent a voice, regardless of his or her race.
"I believe I'll be able to get across that regardless of who I appear to be when you look at me, I am first and foremost a human being," Mathies says. "When more people see things that way, this world will be a lot better off."