by Ria Maheshwari
The Braxton Institute for Sustainability, Resiliency and Joy is excited to welcome voting rights attorney Blair Bowie, Esq. as the Braxton Institute’s newest Community Fellow. Blair is white. She got involved in the Reparations movement upon recognizing her ancestors’ likely support for a system that condoned slavery and acts of racial terror in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
When visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, Bowie perused newspaper advertisements from the late 19th century used to sell humans, track people who had escaped, and sometimes to find family members from whom they had been separated. Bowie was jolted by a classified posting from her ancestor W.D. Bowie — a bounty hunter who had posted for an individual looking for an enslaved person who had escaped from Maryland. Her experience in Alabama moved Blair to become active in the Prince George’s County Memorial Lynch Project and later, she gave testimony at a public hearing for the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ironically, January 25, 2025, testimony was given at Bowie State University, the oldest historically Black university in the nation, in Bowie, Maryland, where both the town and the university bear her family name. It was here that members of the Braxton Institute team heard her arresting story and the groundwork was laid for continuing conversations about repair and the deep inner work that goes with it.
“What was my family’s role in upholding white supremacy in Prince George’s County? I knew little except vaguely that they had been enslavers. What was my family’s role in the racial terror lynchings that happened here? I was being called to do my work at home, to examine my own history and become engaged in the community my family had impacted.”
In her testimony before the Commission, which is “mandated to research cases of racially motivated lynchings and hold public meetings and regional hearings where a lynching of an African American by a white mob has been documented” Bowie identified herself as: “a descendant of a family that for centuries systematically stole land, labor, liberty, and lives from other human beings in Prince George’s County.” She testified:
“I first came to the Prince George’s Lynching Memorial Project after visiting the Equal Justice Initiative National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which seeks to make explicit the direct connections between slavery and our present-day America. I was familiar with this connection on a political, professional, and academic level but I was called home on a personal level by a sign in the Legacy Museum. One section showed sets of classified advertisements from the mid-19th Century. Within the handful I saw an ad offering a $200 reward for the return of man, who ran away from his “owner” in Upper Marlboro, and in this small museum wall, I saw my family name – the ad was posted by W.D. Bowie in 1853.
Who was W.D. Bowie? What was my family’s role in upholding white supremacy in Prince George’s County? I knew little except vaguely that they had been enslavers. What was my family’s role in the racial terror lynchings that happened here? I was being called to do my work at home, to examine my own history and become engaged in the community my family had impacted.
I’ve combed through our old family books, looking for answers. But there are not many specifics to be found. The books barely even mention slavery except to recount wills purporting to pass ownership of human beings like they were sets of silverware. There is hardly much mention of labor at all – the histories focus on real estate holdings, pastimes like horse racing, and political pursuits. They profited and lived well on the backs of invisible and ignored labor. I can’t help but think of the ignored and abused laborers today – migrant farmworkers, undocumented immigrants, gig economy workers with no benefits, Amazon drivers going to the bathroom in buckets – disproportionately people of color - all for the convenience and cheap materialism of others – disproportionately white people…
I may never learn the specifics of if and how my ancestors were involved with these particular incidents of racial terror. And while I want to know and will try to find out as much as I can, I do not necessarily need to know the specifics to understand their role in the systems that created the conditions for these heinous acts. I don’t need to know the specifics of my ancestor’s actions in the past to understand how those conditions persist today. And I don’t need to know the specifics of who they hurt and how to find the means to engage in reconciliation and reparations at both a personal and political level.”
According to the Prince George’s County Lynching Memorial Project, “four documented racial terror lynchings occurred in Prince George’s County: Mr. Thomas Juricks, 1869, in Piscataway; Mr. John Henry Scott, 1875, in Oxon Hill; Mr. Michael Green, 1878, in Upper Marlboro; and Mr. Stephen Williams,1894, in Upper Marlboro.” Bowie played a leading role in researching The Prince George’s County Lynching Memorial Project Community Remembrance Ceremony for Thomas Juricks on April 15, 2023 at Harmony Hall in Fort Washington and is involved with PGCLMP to commemorate other victims. But that isn’t enough for Bowie.
When she is not devoting her leisure time to justice-making, Blair Bowie is a voting rights attorney at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) who is determined to restore voting rights for incarcerated Americans. Bowie works with Restore Your Vote, a program striving to abolish the last remaining Jim Crow law: the disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions.
Now, Bowie is working with her family to foster the uplifting power of education in communities who have been directly harmed by racial terror lynching. Blair and the Bowie Family are taking reparations to a personal level by working towards endowing four scholarships for students attending Bowie State — one scholarship in memory of each of the four Black men who are known to have died through racial terror lynchings in Prince George’s County. Blair and the team at Bowie State have a goal of awarding the first scholarship, named for Thomas Juricks, in the spring semester 2026.