Tag Archives: Bethesda (Md.)

Criminal or collaborator?

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On August 27, 2020, members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) stood in a Bethesda, Maryland, street and chanted that several archaeologists, the Maryland State Archaeologist, multiple Montgomery County elected and appointed officials, and I were criminals and should be arrested.

Tim Willard, a vocal BACC supporter and leader in several county organizations, including the Montgomery County Civic Federation and Montgomery County Green Party, didn’t get the memo (or the video) about the calls to arrest us. BACC posted a video of the demonstration on its Facebook page. One day later, one of the other injured parties’ attorneys sent the group a cease and desist letter. BACC subsequently deleted the video and several others from its Facebook page. One video BACC deleted featured a self-described “peoples archaeologist” describing Dr. Alexandra Jones, a distinguished African American woman archaeologist, as a developer’s “token Black archaeologist.”

Another person who appears to have not gotten the memo is a BACC spokesperson who contacted me in July asking for my assistance in resolving the long-running conflict. The BACC member even connected me with a reporter who subsequently wrote about the Bethesda River Road Cemetery for Washington City Paper.

Text message from BACC member informing me that he has asked a reporter to contact me.

This all leaves me wondering what’s really going on with the #savemosescemetery crowd?

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

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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 Order — to 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 →

Housing Opportunities Commission statement on River Road Moses Cemetery

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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

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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 →

The ghosts of covenants past

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What do longtime residents in the Washington metropolitan area think when they encounter signs with the name of a real estate firm with a long and complicated history. On River Road, just south of Bethesda’s Macedonia Baptist Church, there was a home for sale in early 2018 and a sign out front caught my eye as I was driving to a meeting at the church.

The real estate firm whose signs are found throughout Bethesda and Chevy Chase is one of several established by W.C. and A.N. Miller and their successors to subdivide land, build homes, and then sell them. The firm’s website traces its history to 1912; Maryland incorporation records show that one entity affiliated with its founders —the W.C. and A.N. Miller Development Co. — was formed in 1942.

I wonder if this firm (and its 20th century contemporaries still in business today) has ever been called to answer for its decades of discriminatory suburban residential development and the lingering effects those practices that are found throughout Montgomery County?

Typical W.C. and A.N. Miller racial restrictive deed covenant. This one was filed in 1947 for the sale of a residential property in the Sumner subdivision near Macedonia Baptist Church.

In the mid-1940s, the firm subdivided former agricultural properties southwest of River Road and began selling home sites. Each sale included this racially restrictive covenant: “No part of the land hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by or sold demised transferred conveyed unto or in trust for leased, or rented, or given to negroes or any person or persons of negro blood or extraction or to any persons of the Semitic race blood or origin which racial description shall be deemed to include Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians and Syrians except that this paragraph shall not be held to exclude partial occupancy of the premises by domestic servants ….”

More than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948, the Miller firm was still under fire for discriminatory housing practices. In the 1950s, open housing advocates repeatedly described the company’s role in housing discrimination in the Washington metropolitan area. Some of those accounts were memorialized in 1959 before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

 

When the District of Columbia was accepting bids for urban renewal in the city’s Southwest, people in 1961 queued up to testify in opposition to a Miller-affiliated firm receiving a construction contract. The chief claim was the Miller firm’s discrimination against “minority and racial groups,” the Washington Evening Star reported.

Washington Post headline, October 26, 1961.

Historians who study twentieth century housing and discrimination aren’t the only people who can see the contemporary signs and connect them to Montgomery County’s racialized housing past. Harvey Matthews, an African American man who grew up on River Road in the 1950s, still has strong memories of the firm and its founders more than half a century after his family was displaced.

Harvey Matthews, November 2017.

“I can’t think of any home that through my teenage days that a black person owned that W.C. Miller built,” Harvey said. “I think that was one of his codes of not selling his homes that he built to black families.”

Even if the Millers did sell to African Americans, income inequality and area African Americans’ inability to accumulate wealth would have prevented many from even considering living in a Miller subdivision. “Black folks had less because they didn’t really have to deal with W.C. Miller. We couldn’t afford any of his homes or nothing like that,” Harvey recalled.

The company’s discrimination against African Americans, Jews, and others wasn’t just limited to home sales, Matthews explained. “He [Miller] didn’t hire blacks to do any of his painting or any of his home remodeling or building his homes while he was building his homes.” Harvey also said, “Every once in a while we thought that we could do some of his labor work and that was rare because he didn’t maintain a black workforce or blacks in his workforce back during that time.”

This is the history of housing and suburbanization in Montgomery County. It’s a history with which there has been no reconciliation, no reparations, and no justice for the survivors like Harvey Matthews and the other children of Montgomery County’s African American communities.

Note: Originally published on the Save Bethesda African Cemetery Facebook page.

Death and displacement

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Concrete grave marker in an abandoned African American cemetery, Montgomery County, Maryland.

My latest article for The Activist History Review explores more than a century of serial displacement in two Washington area neighborhoods with a common connection: Bethesda’a Moses Cemetery.

People who lived in communities destroyed by urban renewal and gentrification frequently frame their narratives about displacement as theft. Their homes, businesses, and churches, they believe are stolen by capitalism. Spaces for the dead are among those stolen and erased.

For the rest of the story, read The Moses Cemetery: Where Serial Displacement Meets History.

© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein