People, Mar. 19, 1956

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In 1931, after a Negro was lynched in Maryland's Eastern Shore town of Salisbury, the late Baltimore Sage H. L. Mencken, exploding in Baltimore's Evening Sun, hurled a carboy of acid across Chesapeake Bay at the lynchers and their ilk. Sample corrosives: "The Eastern Shore Kultur ... an Alsatia of morons . . . ignorant and ignoble minds." Maryland's state senate recently held a roll call on a resolution expressing "the sorrow of the General Assembly of Maryland over the passing of Henry Louis Mencken." It passed, not unanimously as such resolutions usually do, but by a vote of 22 to 5. Among the five naysayers: four long-memoried Eastern Shoremen. Last week Maryland's house of delegates did better by H.L., shouted through the resolution with no nays recorded.

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