History is repeating itself at the site of a historic Black cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland

Moses Order logo, c. 1887.

Peter Paul Brown must be turning in his grave if he knows about the kerfuffle over one of the cemeteries owned by the Black benevolent organization he founded in 1867. The Philadelphia physician who lived between c. 1822 and 1882 established the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses — the Moses Orderto provide death benefits, healthcare, and other social welfare services for African Americans in a deeply segregated Reconstruction era America. Brown was a skilled entrepreneur and he held tight to his intellectual property and the organization’s name. That name is now the center of a fight over land in suburban Maryland just across the border with Washington, D.C., where activists claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath a parking lot and construction site. 

The site is one of many abandoned and desecrated African American burial grounds throughout the United States for which activists are seeking recognition, protection, and commemoration. One of the best known examples is the cemetery where the African Burial Ground National Monument was established in Manhattan. Massive protests and congressional hearings brought the issue to headlines in newspapers around the nation in the early 1990s.

African Burial Ground Way, New York, New York, 2018.

In 2015, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department began holding public hearings for a new sector plan in a mostly commercial area in unincorporated Bethesda. Planners disclosed that their research had uncovered the likely site of a historic African American cemetery in their study area. It had been documented in old maps and in a local history book but had been mostly forgotten since the 1960s when heavy equipment excavated much of the site to construct a high-rise apartment building and grade a surface parking lot. None of the graves was professionally excavated to relocate the bodies buried there. Continue reading

Where are the pictures?

I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Housing Opportunities Commission statement on River Road Moses Cemetery

Delivered to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission.

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN
February 6, 2019

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein and I am here to speak in support of preserving and commemorating the River Road Moses Cemetery site. The last time I appeared before the HOC in October 2018, I delivered a report I had prepared documenting the site’s history and its eligibility under multiple criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation and the National Register of Historic Places. Today I am here to clear up some misinformation about that report and my statement to the HOC at that time.

The first time I wrote about African American cemeteries and their preservation was in a 1992 article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Attachment A). Since then I have written many articles for academic and popular publications that deal with African American history and historic preservation.

Let those African American graveyards rest in peace. The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

I believe the River Road Moses Cemetery deserves the utmost respect and care so that it will suffer no further disturbances. It should be a space of reflection, reverence, commemoration, and learning to celebrate the lives of the people who once lived in River Road and its affiliated communities. I wholeheartedly support the objectives stated by the many of the people advocating for its protection and commemoration. However, I cannot abide by the methods they are using to smear and demean everyone they perceive as opponents — HOC staff and commissioners, Montgomery County officials, academics who don’t tailor their findings to suit their needs, and ordinary citizens.

HOC protest, November 2017.

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and her allies have a fraught relationship with the truth regarding the cemetery and its many issues. In recent months they have fabricated information about my work and my former association with them. These fabrications have been broadcast on the radio and disseminated in press releases and social media posts. These passionate advocates for preservation and commemoration are now using the same tactics they have accused Montgomery County government, real estate developers, and members of the general public of using in the displacement and erasure of the River Road African American community and the cemetery. Furthermore, their resistance to a more inclusive approach that draws on examples from throughout North America, like the one cited in my 1992 article, involving similarly desecrated sacred sites is puzzling. It’s almost as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel using a sharp multi-edged geometric shape instead of a smooth circle.  The tactics they are using taint the advocacy, diminish its efficacy, and create an unfortunate precedent for future efforts.

In addition to the 1992 article, I have prepared a timeline for the HOC and others to compare against information disseminated by members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition and it is appended to this statement. I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

Download the complete February 6, 2019, handout.

Protestors arrested at the Feb. 6, 2019 Housing Opportunities Commission meeting.

River Road Moses Cemetery report released

River Road Moses Cemetery site, Bethesda, Maryland.

The results of research into the history of Bethesda, Maryland’s River Road Moses Cemetery are presented in this report first released to the dispersed descendant community and government agencies in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. Now that all of the known stakeholders have a copy of the report, I am releasing it to the general public.

Some key findings presented in the report and deriving from the research:

  • The cemetery was never affiliated with the Macedonia Baptist Church. Though the Bethesda congregation has taken the lead on advocating for the cemetery and it is demanding that Montgomery County “give it back” to the congregation, the cemetery had little in common with the church beyond spatial proximity. Furthermore, in my attempts to get historical information from the church’s former pastor, he repeatedly attempted to dissuade me from writing about the church by asserting that the church and cemetery were never related. Throughout its entire history, the River Road Moses Cemetery appears to have been closely affiliated with Rock Creek Baptist Church, a congregation founded in 1872 in Washington’s Tenleytown neighborhood and which was displaced in the early 20th century.
  • The cemetery appears to have been active for a much more limited time (c. 1912-1935) than initially believed (1912-1958).
  • There are likely substantially fewer burials that activists claim. The one-acre tract could have accommodated as many as 800 to 1,000 burials, yet because of the population served and the limited time that the cemetery was active, it is likely that the number of people buried there is substantially less than the 500 claimed by Bethesda activists.
  • The cemetery remained a fully owned and operated satellite of a Washington-based benevolent organization. Though there are significant historical ties linking the cemetery to the River Road community, they were mainly because of spatial proximity and not necessarily because it was a “community cemetery.” As a result, it is likely that more Washington residents were buried in the cemetery than Montgomery County residents.
  • The cemetery and community’s history expose a pattern of anti-Black land use policies that created serial displacement in Northwest Washington in the first decade of the 20th century and which continued as displaced DC residents moved to River Road and were displaced between c. 1935 and 1960. The serial displacement throughline continues today with gentrification in the District and Montgomery County and with Montgomery County’s efforts to “retrofit” its suburbs.
  • The research identified a Washington cemetery (in Chevy Chase) that had been forgotten for more than a century (homes were built on top of it in the 1940s). As a result of my research, the DC Historic Preservation Office was able to map the cemetery’s location.
  • The research identified a previously unknown African American community in what is now Chevy Chase that was founded by free persons of color in the 1810s.
  • The report treats the heavily disturbed cemetery as a traditional cultural property and it contextualizes it among other similar African American cemeteries sealed beneath roads and parking lots as a Blacktop Burial Ground: a vernacular type of historic property that combines an earlier, disturbed African American cemetery with a twentieth century parking lot covering its surface.

When I transmitted the report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, the agency that owns most of the site, I offered recommendations for pursuing historic preservation and for working with the descendant community.  Continue reading

“Black lives matter, alive or dead”

“Black lives matter, alive or dead” — poet Siki Dlanga

South African poet Siki Dlanga and rally organizer Laurel Hoa. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Several dozen people participated in a rally and march to support the recognition and preservation of the Moses Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland. The cemetery initially was founded in the 1880s a nearby District of Columbia neighborhood. Continue reading

Ada Dupree and the Moses Cemetery: stories linked by race

Ada Dupree. Photo credit: Edisto Herald.

Ada Dupree (1887-1991) lived a long and consequential life. She moved to the small Florida town of Esto in 1902 at age 15. For the rest of her life, she and her family were among the few people of color in the rural panhandle community near the Alabama border. When she died in 1991 at the age of 104, her family began funeral arrangements in accordance with her wishes: Ada wanted to be buried in the town where she spent most of her life. But some residents in the mostly white community didn’t want her buried in the town’s “all-white” cemetery.

Ada’s story made national headlines and in 1998 former NBC legal correspondent Star Jones recounted the story to introduce her book, You Have to Stand for Something or You’ll Fall for Anything: “Sometimes it takes a story about death to teach you about life ….” Continue reading

A lifeline for the Talbot Avenue Bridge

Now that Silver Spring, Maryland’s, Talbot Avenue Bridge has a new history can it also have a new future?

Last year Montgomery County officials and many county residents learned that the Talbot Avenue Bridge was more than just some old metal and wood assembled in 1918 by the B&O Railroad spanning the CSX Railroad tracks. They discovered its important ties to the county’s civil rights history. Once slated for demolition and replacement to make way for the proposed Purple Line light rail project and closed since April for safety reasons, the bridge’s fate is now undecided.

My research into Silver Spring’s history as a sundown suburb, a place where people of color were unable to live unless they were domestic servants for most of the 20th century, exposed the bridge’s history beyond the Lyttonsville residents I was interviewing for my work. Longtime Lyttonsville residents have deep attachments to the bridge. Residents in the adjacent North Woodside and Rosemary Hills neighborhoods have mixed feelings about the bridge but acknowledge that before last year they knew little about its history. Even County Executive Ike Leggett told me in a recent interview that my research had changed his understanding of Lyttonsville’s history and the bridge.

The bridge is contested space where competing interests now collide. There is the newfound interest in the bridge’s history that is shared by people well beyond the railroad tracks and the neighborhoods the bridge connects. And, there are the compelling arguments originating in those neighborhoods: some folks in North Woodside want the connection closed to reduce cut-through traffic and people on both sides of the tracks make a strong case for keeping the crossing open to vehicular traffic, including emergency vehicles.

Talbot Avenue Bridge, closed approach from the North Woodside neighborhood, June 2017.

Continue reading

Silver Spring’s monument to white supremacy

Silver Spring Armory. Historic American Buildings Survey photo by Bill Lebovich.

In 1998, crews demolished the Silver Spring Armory. Located in the heart of the suburban Washington suburb’s central business district (CBD), the Armory occupied prime real estate earmarked to provide parking for a new urban renewal project.

Built in 1927, the Armory quickly became unincorporated Silver Spring’s de facto city hall and civic center. In 1984, the State of Maryland declared the property surplus and it was transferred to the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission. After rehabilitation work, the building opened as a community center and in 1984 it was listed in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation. Continue reading

Historic preservation shines a light on a dark past

In October 2016, the National Council on Public History published an e-book titled Preserving Places: Reflections on the National Historic Preservation Act at Fifty From The Public Historian. The volume is a collection of invited essays that discuss various aspects of public history published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act.

My essay, “Historic Preservation Shines a Light on a Dark Past,” appears on pp. 18-19.

Historic Preservation Shines a Light on a Dark Past by David Rotenstein on Scribd

Is the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan bad planning?

Residents who will be impacted by a new master plan proposed for a part of Montgomery County, Maryland, asked me to testify at a hearing before the Montgomery County Council. This post contains the testimony I submitted for the official record. A substantially abbreviated version was presented in the hearing session held September 29, 2016.

Montgomery County Council
Public Hearing on the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan
Testimony of Dr. David Rotenstein
September 29, 2016

Good Evening. My name is David Rotenstein. I am a professional historian, a Silver Spring resident, and a former chairman of the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission. I am here to speak against the proposed Greater Lyttonsville Area Sector Plan because of fatal deficiencies in a key area of the plan before you: its treatment of lyttsonville-signhistory and historic resources.

Last Sunday the Washington Post published an article about the Talbot Avenue Bridge. Relying heavily on my work, the reporter interviewed several Lyttonsville residents, two of whom spoke here Tuesday evening, about the bridge’s history and its importance to the community. They told the reporter, and me two months earlier, that the bridge was an important artifact that conveys significant information about Lyttonsville’s past as an African American community segregated from Silver Spring, a community that excluded African Americans from buying property and living there for most of the twentieth century. Lyttonsville was Silver Spring’s other side of the tracks. The Talbot Avenue Bridge, as longtime Lyttonsville residents told me (and the Post), does much more than carry traffic over a railroad. It connects communities and it is a palpable reminder of the Jim Crow segregation that defined Montgomery County social and economic life for a significant period of time. Continue reading