Euel Lee
Farm labourer; defendant in the Worcester County murder case · active 1931-1932
A Black farm labourer, aged about 59 or 60, known also as Orphan Jones. He worked for Green K. Davis, a farmer near Berlin in Worcester County, was discharged after an argument about wages and was reported to have said he was still owed a dollar and meant to 'get even'. On 11 October 1931 Davis, his wife and their two daughters were found killed with an axe, kerosene thrown over the floor in an apparent attempt to burn the house. Lee was arrested the following day at Mrs. Martha Miller's boarding house in Ocean City by Chief of Police Robert Allen, with property of the Davis family in his possession; he was removed to Baltimore to escape a mob at Snow Hill. Defended by Bernard Ades of the International Labor Defense with David Levinson of Philadelphia and Eli Schwarzblatt of New York, he was convicted at Towson on 20 January 1932 by an all-white jury after 34 minutes and sentenced to hang. The Court of Appeals reversed in July 1932 because Black men had been systematically excluded from Baltimore County jury lists — a decision that eventually put Black names on every jury list in Maryland. Retried before a jury drawn from panels that included Black men, he was convicted again on 29 September 1932 and sentenced to death a second time in late October.
In the record (1)
1931 · 1931-10-12
On the night of Monday 12 October 1931 Euel Lee is taken "in the negro section of Ocean City, Md.", and by Tuesday a mob of two thousand is round the Snow Hill jail.
Green K. Davis, his wife Iva and their daughters Elizabeth, 15, and Mary Lee, 13, were found shot and axed in their beds at Taylorsville, on the Berlin-Ocean City highway, on Monday 12 October 1931. The Milford Chronicle of 16 October: "Early Monday night the authorities received word that a man answering the description of Jones had been arrested IN THE NEGRO SECTION OF OCEAN CITY, MD. SHERIFF PURNELL AND STATE'S ATTORNEY CHILD went to Ocean City and returned with the prisoner" — with $70 including gold pieces, rings and a pocketbook identified as the Davis family's. The Washington Times of 13 October, from Snow Hill: "Angered by failure of Pocomoke county authorities to obtain a confession from Orphan Jones, 55-year-old negro... a mob of 2,000 persons surrounded the county jail here this afternoon and demanded lynching of the negro." He was moved to the Baltimore city jail. On 18 November the Washington Times reported "a company of State militia, traveling in three busses, and a detail of 25 State policemen" escorting him to Cambridge for trial, "as much to protect [Bernard] Ades as to guard Lee against mob feeling", after Governor Ritchie promised "the negro would be adequately protected". The Communist Daily Worker, 15 and 16 October, called it "a brazen frame-up", reported the International Labor Defense denied access, and said a deputy warden told its attorney Lee was being "patched up" as he had been "busted up" the day before.
The 1932 pass reconstructed this case from its trials. 1931 has its beginning, and the beginning is an Ocean City story: an arrest in a part of the town the papers name only as "the negro section", made by the county sheriff in person, and a lynch mob two thousand strong twenty miles inland. The case would end by putting Black names on every jury list in Maryland.
International Labor DefenseBernard AdesAlbert C. Ritchie
Source · checked 2026-08-10