Tag Archives: environmental racism

How a bridge closing underscores need for local journalism

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Yesterday evening, the Purple Line Transit Partners and Montgomery County’s Department of Transportation closed the Lyttonsville Place Bridge. The six-month closure will allow for the demolition and reconstruction of a new bridge to accommodate the Purple Line light rail.

Though local news outlets have covered the controversial bridge closing for the past several months, not a single journalist has written about Lyttonsville residents’ claims that the bridge closure and a detour using a street closed during urban renewal in the 1970s is environmental racism.  And, no journalists have covered the community’s search for a civil rights lawyer to take up their claim that the detour and bridge closing violate the National Environmental Policy Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by introducing impacts to the community that should have been evaluated under the law’s environmental justice requirements. Continue reading →

Environmental racism explained in one photograph

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In the early twentieth century, the City of Decatur, Georgia, constructed a municipal trash facility in the heart of the city’s African American neighborhood. The city that long called itself a “City of Homes, Schools, and Churches” could have picked just about any site along its periphery; aerial photographs and historical maps indicate lots of space away from established homes, schools, and churches.

Sanborn fire insurance map portion showing Decatur’s African American neighborhood, c. 1950. The annotations show the trash facility (A); Decatur’s African American school (B); and, the Allen Wilson Terrace apartments (C).

Instead, the facility — which included an incinerator and space for refuse vehicle parking — was built adjacent to the city’s “colored school” and sandwiched into a densely occupied urban neighborhood. The City Manager’s annual report published in 1963 boasted of its facility: “10 collection trucks and 40 employees spend 1280 hours per week in disposing of 360,000 lbs. of garbage and trash weekly for the City of Decatur.” Continue reading →

Environmental racism along the Purple Line

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Not a single length of track has yet been laid for Maryland’s new suburban light rail line, the Purple Line, yet there already are complaints of environmental racism coming from the historically African American Lyttonsville community. Though much of the environmental/social justice and equity concerns about the Purple Line have focused on displacement once the line opens, virtually no attention has been focused on the externalities communities like Lyttonsville are bearing during the construction phase.

Over the past few weeks, the entity selected to build the Purple Line (Purple Line Transit Partners), the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the impacts of closing the Lyttonsville Place Bridge, a structure spanning the new Purple Line corridor (an abandoned former B&O industrial railroad line) connecting Brookville Road and the Lyttonsville community. Lyttonsville has been partially isolated since April 2017 when the Montgomery County DOT declared the historic Talbot Avenue Bridge unsafe and closed it. If the Lyttonsville Place Bridge is closed (for up to six months, according  to transportation officials), that will leave Lyttonsville residents and emergency responders with limited options for entering and leaving the community.

The Past is Prologue

Denise Watkins, facilitator, opens the April 3, 2018 Purple Line community meeting.

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Things that arrive in the spring

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The spring brought new things to Africville, things which were not pretty like flowers, nor sweet smelling like the sea air. The newest things in Africville were suit-wearing, briefcase-toting white men — Leslie Ann Carvery, Africville My Home (2016).

In communities of color, folks know that whenever this happens, bad things follow.

Two Halifax city officials, one holding a rolled plan of Africville, outside an Africville house, prior to demolition of the community. Credit: Nova Scotia Archives, Bob Brooks Nova Scotia Archives accession no. 1989-468 vol. 16 / negative sheet 5 image 25 .

 

Talbot Avenue: a bridge in black and white

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There is no question that the bridge carrying Talbot Avenue over the CSX Railroad tracks in Silver Spring, Maryland, is historic. Two Maryland state agencies, the Montgomery County Planning Department, and the Federal Transit Administration all agree that the small bridge has historic merit and is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The agencies also agree that the bridge needs to be replaced to accommodate construction of a new light rail line connecting suburban Washington, D.C., communities. But do the agencies understand why the Talbot Avenue Bridge is historically significant?

Talbot Avenue Bridge, August 2016.

Talbot Avenue Bridge, August 2016.

Built in 1918 by the B&O Railroad, the bridge carries automobile, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic over the railroad now owned and operated by CSX. The bridge connects the historically African-American Lyttonsville community with early twentieth century residential subdivisions established on the periphery of unincorporated Silver Spring. Lyttonsville was founded in the 1850s by a freed slave free person of color named Samuel Lytton and it became one of several dozen African American hamlets scattered throughout Montgomery County. Silver Spring and its residential subdivisions were a sundown suburb: racialized space where African Americans were unable to live because of racially restrictive deed covenants and where public space and private businesses were governed by strict Jim Crow segregation.

The Talbot Avenue Bridge may be the last surviving historically significant structure in the Lyttonsville community. This post explores the various historic preservation efforts undertaken to document the bridge and the community’s perspectives on the bridge and its history. The reasons why the Talbot Avenue Bridge isn’t better understood and isn’t protected from demolition like other officially designated Montgomery County buildings and structures may be a policy gray area but they are clearly visible in black and white terms.

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