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Elizabeth “Liz” Bobo was the first woman in the state of Maryland to be elected to the office of County Executive, serving as Howard County Executive from 1986 to 1990.
On this day in Maryland history, James William Charles Pennington (born James Pembroke) escaped enslavement from Hagerstown, Washington County. He would eventually become a minister and abolitionist. He wrote “The Origin and the History of the Colored People,” as well as his own memoir “The Fugitive Blacksmith.” Of his enslavement, he wrote “My feelings are always outraged when I hear [ministers] speak of “kind masters”, “Christian masters”, “the mildest form of slavery”, “well fed and clothed slaves,” as extenuations of slavery; I am satisfied they either mean to pervert the truth, or they do not know what they say. The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences to a greater or less extent, warring with the dispositions of men…”