If I were mounting an exhibition to tell the story about Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1950s, there would be lots of material from which to choose: the Cold War, suburbanization, and civil rights would certainly be in the mix. But how would I choose to tell the story about the Black experience in Montgomery County during that eventful decade?

One place I wouldn’t look for inspiration is the Montgomery County Historical Society’s exhibit, BOOM: The 1950s in Montgomery County. My latest article in The Activist History Review tackles the exhibit’s deficiencies.

There are many stories about African American entrepreneurialism, education, consumer choice, housing, religious life, and sports that would be solid candidates for some sort of exhibit featuring artifacts, texts, and photographs. How would I select the most compelling stories to tell?

One of the leading candidates would be the story behind a small recreation building in Takoma Park. Proposed in the early 1950s and completed in 1959, the Heffner Park Recreation Building became a hub for African American youth in Jim Crow’s waning years. It provided a vibrant space for Blacks throughout lower Montgomery County at a time when they were unwelcome in area movie theaters, parks, and the Silver Spring Armory.

Finding a Place to Dance Under Jim Crow

Though today Takoma Park, Maryland, has a reputation as an uber-liberal and progressive city, for much of the twentieth century Jim Crow had a firm grip on the city. Two African American neighborhoods had developed there; one of them was located in the vicinity of where Ritchie and Geneva avenues intersect.

In this space, African Americans built homes in the first half of the twentieth century. They also established a church and in 1921 Montgomery County authorized the construction of the Takoma Park Colored School. It was a community occupied by homeowners and renters who worked for the federal government; in the building trades; as truck drivers and chauffeurs; or, as domestics in private homes. They hailed from Mississippi, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Lee Jordan (1909-1988) was one of the neighborhood’s best-known residents. He moved with his family to Takoma Park from Edwards, Mississippi. After playing baseball in the Negro League for the famed Homestead Grays, Jordan returned to Takoma Park and began working as a janitor in Silver Spring’s Blair High School. He also became active in the Parker Memorial Baptist Church on Geneva Avenue where he was a deacon for most of his life. Jordan is perhaps best remembered for his leadership role coaching and mentoring children in Takoma Park. Takoma Park recognized his contributions in 1981 by naming an athletic field in his honor.

But Jordan was much more than a leader in his church and a respected athlete. He also was a civic leader and a strong voice for Takoma Park’s African American residents. In 1953, the city proposed several new public works projects, including flood control and the construction of a new public works facility on Oswego Avenue in the heart of the community at Ritchie and Geneva avenues.

The Takoma Park City Council received a report in March 1954 from its Public works committee justifying the need to build the Oswego Avenue public works facility. The primary reason was that the existing facility was located in a neighborhood city officials expected ‘would be subject to considerable new development.” In other words, the public works facility might be considered a nuisance and an obstacle to new development along Maple Avenue. The new location was identified by a council member who learned that the lot may be available.

In June 1954, the council received a letter from a resident named Milton Bollman “protesting the City’s proposal to transfer the Public Works Department to Oswego Avenue.” The following month, the council received a several petitions with 120 signatures “protesting the moving of Public Works Department to Oswego Avenue.

Jordan was the first of several residents who who appeared before the city council July 12, 1954. “Lee Jordan, addressed the Council in behalf of the Citizens’ Association of Takoma, protesting to the moving of the Public Works Department to Oswego Avenue.

The public comments were extraordinary: “Mayor Miller addressed the citizens stating that at this meeting the citizens were not usually permitted to speak, but due to the number of citizens present there must be something of importance to be considered, therefore, asked that any citizens wishing to express their problem would be given the privilege.”

The resistance to putting the new public works facility was reported in Washington newspapers. “A delegation of Negro residents of the Mississippi Avenue area presented a petition of 75 signatures protesting a proposal to place the office of public works and its equipment in their locality,” The Washington Evening Star reported in July 1954. “It was said the city trucks and other city vehicles would be objectionable to look at and also would constitute a traffic hazard.”

Though the protests to prevent the municipal nuisance from being built in the neighborhood failed, the city did agree to add an amenity. In March 1954, the municipality acquired a lot on the west side of Oswego Avenue, across from the site where the new public works facility. Four years later, the project to construct Takoma Park’s first recreation building moved forward. “The building to be erected in Heffner Park is not only a recreation building, but will also be used for civic purposes too,” a council member told the full body in July 1958.

The concrete block building was designed by architect Philip W. Mason, who also designed the new public works building. In September 1958, the city awarded the contract to build the new Heffner Park recreation building to Charles Bang of Bethesda. Bang was the lowest bidder at $13,423 and he was required to complete the building within 90 days of executing the contract. Both buildings were dedicated in September 1959.

The Heffner Park recreation building opened more than two years before Montgomery County enacted its open accommodations law [PDF] which made it illegal for businesses to discriminate on the basis of race. Under Jim Crow, Montgomery County’s civic spaces like Silver Spring’s armory along with movie theaters and restaurants were closed to African Americans.

Blacks responded by opening their own establishments and by repurposing existing church halls and schools as weekend movie theaters.Washington’s U Street corridor also offered folks with the resources to dine, shop, and see shows alternatives to segregated Montgomery County. The government-owned Heffner Park recreation building created new opportunities for African Americans living in Lyttonsville, Wheaton Lane, and other nearby African American hamlets.

For Silver Spring’s white residents, the armory in the unincorporated community’s downtown was their de facto civic building, a place for official celebrations, concerts, and dance parties. The armory is fondly remembered among Silver Spring’s white residents and its demolition in 1998 became the catalyst for the the creation of the Silver Spring Historical Society. In many respects, the building’s demolition was the starting point for 20 years of racially biased history and historic preservation in Silver Spring, but that’s another story.

The sock hops, concerts, and radio broadcasts that originated from the Armory in the 1950s and 1960s were memorialized by Silver Spring novelist George Pelecanos. “Many of the famed Milt Grant’s Record Hops were held in the Silver Spring Armory,” Pelecanos wrote in his 2004 novel, Hard Revolution, which was partly set in 1959. “At these events, packed to the walls with kids from local high schools, Stewart saw acts like the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and that wild boy, Little Richard.”

The Heffner Park recreation building was one alternative. Lyttonsville native Patricia Tyson remembers both the armory and the Heffner Park building. “The building was a rather dreary looking site. So, I had no desire to go in it, although I did wonder what was in it. I thought perhaps it was for the National Guard,” she explained to me in 2016. “Never heard about social events being held in it.”

She added,

Of course, in Takoma Park there was a Teen Club on Friday nights for us in the late 50’s until about 1960 or 61. It was called the Heffner Park Teen Club. My sister and I went there every Friday night. Had a great time.

Pastor Ella Redfield’s family has lived in Montgomery County for well over a century. She spent a lot of her youth in Lyttonsville and she fondly recalls the recreation building and the adventures she and her friend traveling between Lyttonsville and Takoma Park. “In addition to the community social stuff, let me tell you about this as well,” Redfield told me in 2016. “We would go to, the teenagers would go to Takoma Park. Now in Takoma Park on Oswego Avenue – that building is still there. It was a community center. A small community center located in this black community in Takoma Park off of Ritchie Avenue.”

We were sitting in Redfield’s church office during that interview and she continued:

So they would have teen club. And they would play music and the teens from the community in Takoma Park would be there and we would go.  And we would have a wonderful time, you know, dancing and having a good time. And teen club was over at ten o’clock so we had two choices. We could walk from – there was no bus; we had to walk from Takoma Park to Silver Spring, to the bus depot in Silver Spring on Wayne Avenue to catch the bus. Or, if we wanted to stop, you know how young people like to stop and eat. If we wanted to go to Drug Fair and eat, that meant we would miss that last bus. And that last bus was eleven o’clock.

So, most of the time we chose to miss the last bus. And we would go into Drug Fair and we would stand there and eat and have a great time. Sometimes for an hour, hour and a half. And then we would walk the railroad tracks back to Linden.

Discussion

Though it played an important role among Montgomery County’s African American residents starting at the end of the 1950s, the Heffner Park recreation building is a prominent point in Silver Spring’s Black Map yet it is fully invisible in white Montgomery County histories like the Montgomery County Historical Society’s BOOM exhibit. Like so much of the county’s and the nation’s Black history, the building and its stories have been erased.

I asked exhibit curator Elizabeth Lay about the exhibit’s erasures. She replied with a question of her own, “Now what do you feel to be erasures?”

I answered her, “Omissions of the Black experience. Minimizations. The fact that you have one panel devoted to school desegregation yet the Black experience in Montgomery County in the fifties and well beyond was much more than Brown v. Board.”

Lay responded, “Oh, that’s true. That’s true. And women’s issues were more than Brownie Wise at Tupperware. I mean we — or, you know, Milt Grant and it’s — we’re telling a lot of stories in a small space. It’s not an erasure. It’s not any more than I’ve erased women’s history.”

I disagree with Lay’s assertion that the exhibit isn’t an erasure. It is a textbook example of erasure using any number of accepted sociological definitions of the process. I’ll pick just one here, from the third edition of Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s book, Critical Race Theory: “Practice of collective indifference to the identity, history, stories, and culture of a group, rendering them invisible.”

Last month I swapped emails about the BOOM exhibit with a local radio reporter who is familiar with how history is produced in Montgomery County. “When MoCo announced that exhibit, it struck me as a sanitization of a time many don’t remember so fondly,” the journalist wrote. “Though I haven’t seen it in person, it seems awfully narrow, not to mention tone-deaf.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

For a more academic review of the BOOM exhibit, read my latest article in The Activist History Review.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

 

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