This is rich: the local historical society responsible for whitewashing Silver Spring, Maryland’s history and creating decades of monochromatic celebratory products is angry about a property owner erasing the color from his vintage Googie building.
Last week, the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) invited its Facebook audience to share stories about a donut shop. The society (which really isn’t a society; it’s four boomer building huggers) is short on history and steeped in nostalgia that celebrates the white supremacists who “built” Silver Spring and erases Black history. This post accepts the historical society’s request for “specific memories” of the site.
I recently spent a couple of days in Silver Spring, Maryland. A filmmaker brought me back there to be interviewed for a documentary she is making about Black history in the DC suburb.
Yesterday morning I revisited Silver Spring’s “Heritage Trail” — a group of nine eight historical markers placed throughout the central business district. Researched and designed by the Silver Spring Historical Society, the markers tell a nostalgic and whitewashed version of Silver Spring’s history. That history omits Black history and it celebrates the stories of the segregationists who created dozens of residential subdivisions with racially restrictive deed covenants and who owned the downtown businesses that discriminated against Blacks.
One of the historical society’s markers is located at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Bonifant Street. Across Georgia Avenue, there is a newly opened Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. The restaurant opened in a storefront once occupied by a well-loved Indian restaurant.
In 2020, when local media announced the new Popeye’s location, the president of the Silver Spring Historical Society made the rounds on social media complaining about the new restaurant. He and his classist comments quickly became fodder for Twitter ridicule.
As I was photographing the marker across from the Silver Spring Popeye’s it hit me: wouldn’t it be a terrific idea if the restaurant honored the Silver Spring Historical Society’s “contributions” by introducing a new menu item? It would be made with all white meat and served on white bread with mayonnaise. They could call it The Jerry.
This is the third of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first two covered Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner and Crivella’s Wayside Inn.
This clip features a site in Silver Spring where the community’s Jim Crow history was erased. The “Silver Spring Memory Wall” is a five-mural installation next to Acorn Park. It is the product of historic preservation and planning decisions made in the 1990s to tell Silver Spring’s history through public art.
Those murals present a nostalgic view of Silver Spring history that glosses over its decades as a sundown suburb. It also intentionally sought to ameliorate the absence of Blacks from public places in the twentieth century by replacing white people with African Americans in a depiction of Silver Spring’s train station in the 1940s.
Silver Spring Memory Wall, B&O Railroad Station mural.
Former Washington, D.C., muralist Mame Cohalan (who died in 2020) recognized that the historic photos she was using were missing Black people. She asked her Montgomery County clients for permission to add some diversity — Black people — into the artwork. The resulting mural erased Silver Spring’s Jim Crow history by inserting Black people into a place and time where they otherwise never would have been found.
1994 Montgomery County Planning Department memo asking permission to add more “cultural diversity” to Memory Wall murals.
This clip tells the Acorn Park and Silver Spring Memory Wall story.
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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
In August I got an email from an AmeriCorps Project Change leader asking me to contribute to an upcoming training tour of Silver Spring, Maryland, for new volunteers. The project director and I spoke for about an hour and I agreed to produce three short videos about historic places in Silver Spring where history has been whitewashed.
The September 2, 2021, day-long tour wound through sites on both sides of the D.C.-Maryland line and it included stops at the Tastee Diner, the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn, and Acorn Park.
The clip focusing on the Tastee Diner contrasts the nostalgia-laden histories and historic preservation efforts that omit the popular eatery’s Jim Crow past.
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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
In 2017 I was deep in oral history interviews with residents of Lyttonsville, a historically Black community in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had just organized a public event meant to draw attention to murals that erase the Black experience and uplift the stories of white supremacy.
Protesting Invisibility, Acorn Urban Park, Silver Spring, Maryland, June 2017.
Protesting Invisibility, Acorn Urban Park, Silver Spring, Maryland, June 2017.
Shortly after the event in Acorn Urban Park, a lifelong Lyttonsville resident mentioned a photo collage she saw in a Silver Spring bank branch. She asked if I had seen it and I replied that I had not. I asked her to describe it for me.
The woman explained that it showed Black folks in Silver Spring who “never existed” in her community. She said that like the murals in Acorn Park, it creates a false sense of history by placing Black people in spaces in a time when and where they never would have existed. I asked her what was so troubling about the image. She replied,
It could be [bank] is making a statement about American history in a special way. However, it is strange to have a beautiful photo there in the midst of Silver Spring’s history. When I went to the bank and saw it, I was shocked, but so pleased because most photos of my people are not shown in the public.
Bank photo collage, photographed in 2017.
After our initial conversation, I went to the bank to photograph the collage. After seeing it for myself, I then exchanged emails with the Lyttonsville resident who brought it to my attention:
I wish I knew who the people were because it looks like a photo from the early 1900’s. I don’t know that the photo in that day was color. I have seen photos of our race like this, but always black and white. My grandmother and grandfather would have dressed like this. So, it is authentic, but I don’t know who they are or where they are from.
Dressing up has always been very important to African Americans, until the 60’s. Even when they were enslaved, a head covering for women was very important. Should they have escaped to freedom, they were going to dress. The hats in this photo are authentic and so is the pose. This had to be a church portrait or something important connected to “family.”
There is a fine line between appropriation and celebration. Nostalgia runs deep in Silver Spring and in many communities. It’s tempting to exploit nostalgia to connect national brands with the communities where their branches are located. But what are the impacts of haphazardly selecting images and throwing them together in a visually appealing presentation that has no connection to reality or to the people in the community?
The Silver Spring Historical Society frequently posts about nostalgia-laden murals in the community.
It’s difficult to heal trauma without truth-telling. You have to uncover and acknowledge what has been done wrong before you can fully move forward. — Rev. Mark Sills, NPR, October 11, 2020.
Starting in 2016 members of the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) began attending my public programs (lectures, walking tours). They regularly monopolized discussion times with long-winded and disruptive comments about how their organization wasn’t racist.
In early 2018, I was invited to speak in Takoma Park, Maryland. Almost on cue, the Silver Spring Historical Society’s Marcie Stickle and Mary Reardon launched into their speeches during the Q&A. The City of Takoma Park recorded the program and posted it on YouTube. The recording captures the embodiment of white fragility in the Silver Spring Historical Society members. The clip below is from that recording.
What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. — Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).
In my measured opinion, Silver Spring and other places like it will never heal, never move forward without community truth-telling and without abandoning the safe places where folks declare that they are not racists.
There are 53 public art installations in Silver Spring, Maryland. Only two depict historical figures. One is a mural showing President Harry Truman during a visit to the suburban community. The other is a bronze bust of Norman Lane. Earlier this week, during protests stemming from Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s murder by police, vandals twice defaced the Norman Lane “monument.”
Just Up The Pike, Facebook, June 2020.
Lots of folks know who Harry Truman was. But Norman Lane?
Lane (1911-1987) was an indigent who wandered throughout downtown Silver Spring for much of the 20th century. He was affectionately dubbed the “Mayor of Silver Spring.” In 1991 a local artist dedicated a bronze bust depicting Lane in an alley dubbed the “Mayor’s Promenade” near 8221 Georgia Avenue.
Norman Lane bust, 2017.
Lane was a well-known figure and stories of his exploits are part of Silver Spring’s oral tradition. He was able to walk into many Silver Spring restaurants, get a seat, and eat compliments of the establishment. These same places declined to serve African Americans. Or, if they did, required African Americans to go to back doors for take-out service.
The Norman Lane bust was one of 19 stops along the Silver Spring Black History tours that I gave between 2016 and 2018. I intentionally included Lane’s monument to underscore how effectively Silver Spring has whitewashed its history. While the community celebrates the memory of a colorful character in downtown art and commemorative spaces, there are no similar artworks and spaces dedicated to the community’s notable people of color (African Americans) who contributed to Silver Spring’s history.
Roscoe Nix. Source: Montgomery County Volunteer Center.
At the Norman Lane site, I talked about Roscoe Nix (1911-2012), the Alabama native and World War II veteran who worked in the U.S. departments of Labor and Justice. Nix frequently is credited with being a pioneer in Montgomery County civil rights history.
Nix served on the Maryland Human Rights Commission as its executive secretary in the 1960s; he was the first African American elected to the Montgomery County School Board (1974); and, he was the Montgomery County NAACP chapter president from 1980 to 1990.
Roscoe Nix Elementary School, 2017.
Though Montgomery County named an elementary school (several miles outside of downtown Silver Spring) for Nix in 2006, there are no monuments, markers, etc. commemorating the events in 1962 that launched Nix’s civil rights career. Nix’s contributions are invisible and the site where he cut his civil rights activism was demolished more than a decade ago.
In early 1962, shortly after Montgomery County enacted a public accommodations law, Nix and several of his white and African American coworkers went to a local restaurant in downtown Silver Spring for lunch. Nix was one of more than 600 Department of Labor employees whose offices had moved to Silver Spring the year before.
Silver Spring at the time was a “sundown suburb” and about 150 to 200 African Americans were among the agency employees relocated to Silver Spring in October 1961.
The Washington Post, October 17, 1961.
The Washington Post in October 1961 noted,
Silver Spring has a very small Negro population and a recent study by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission showed that some eating establishments will accept Negro patronage and some will not.
The same Post article noted,
While a few of the Negro employes [sic.] are on the professional level a majority hold clerical jobs.
That 1961 move set the stage for civil rights actions over the next five years that helped remove many of the remaining Jim Crow barriers in downtown Silver Spring.
Between April and August 1962, at least four episodes of racial discrimination were documented at Crivella’s Wayside Inn on East-West Highway. Roscoe Nix was the first to file a complaint filed under the county’s public accommodation law.
Baltimore Afro-American, May 5, 1962.
The restaurant was the site of several sit-ins and street demonstrations in 1962. Over the next four years, additional complaints and litigation were filed against Crivella’s alleging
Chicago Defender, February 18, 1963.
civil rights violations. The demonstrations were widely covered by Black and white newspapers and they attracted such notables as Washington-based Julius Hobson, a leader in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
Roscoe Nix’s activism got it all started.
Meanwhile, as Nix was trying to get a meal in one of Silver Spring’s restaurants, Lane was able to get seated in most establishments he entered and he was served — the food was complimentary. In segregated Silver Spring, most businesses wouldn’t take Roscoe Nix’s money and he was unwelcome in their establishments. Lane, who had no money, found comfort and nourishment throughout the community.
A Silver Spring alley was renamed to commemorate Norman Lane’s life.
I can only speculate at this point why Norman Lane’s monument is being vandalized during this period of protest and unrest over white supremacy. I hope it’s because some folks in Silver Spring recognize the irony in the community’s commemoration of a homeless white man instead of a Black civil rights leader.
Slide from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital Beltway” by David Rotenstein.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Jerry McCoy, founder, president, and 20% of the Silver Spring Historical Society membership recently saw a refrigerator magnet in a local CVS. He took a picture and posted it to the SSHS Facebook page with the caption: “#norespect — feeling disappointed at CVS Pharmacy.”
Jerry’s feelings appear to be hurt because the magnet’s maker didn’t include Silver Spring in the places depicted. Boo-hoo.
What about all of Silver Spring’s African American residents who for decades have complained that McCoy’s whites-only histories and historic preservation advocacy has excluded — erased — the Black experience in Silver Spring and the people who were/are part of it? Add to that, histories, placemaking initiatives, and historic preservation products that uncritically celebrate the white supremacists who founded Silver Spring.
Perhaps folks who want anti-racist histories and historic preservation in Silver Spring should adopt the hashtag, #norespect and share it each time Jerry and his merry band of building huggers posts something.
Earlier this year I tweeted about the Montgomery County, Maryland, Parks Department’s whitewashed description of Silver Spring founder Francis Preston Blair’s property. The county owns a small slice of that property and it is called “Acorn Park” for the 19th century gazebo located there. Blair had built the gazebo in the property he had called “Silver Spring.”
Most histories produced by the local historical society and county agencies describe Blair’s farm as a “summer retreat” or estate. The Montgomery County Parks Department’s Acorn Park website read, “Blair and his wife Eliza established a 300-acre summer estate called Silver Spring.”
Screen capture from the Acorn Park website taken in early 2019.I was disappointed that more than a year of lobbying Montgomery County agencies to correct the park’s whitewashed history appeared to have achieved nothing,.
I took to Twitter in April 2019 to ask why Montgomery County’s Parks Department was still describing Blair’s property as a “summer estate.”
https://twitter.com/iVernacular/status/1117737377127182336
Two weeks later and with no direct response to my tweet, Acorn Park’s website was updated with a new description for Blair’s property: “[Blair] established a 300-acre plantation at the spring.
Acorn Park website screen capture, August 9, 2019.
It’s a start. But I’m wondering why the agency removed the direct narrative link to Silver Spring’s founding as a plantation where enslaved people worked, lived, and died to build Blair’s wealth that was then used to build the Silver Spring community. I guess the image of a plantation and the extended Blair’s family white supremacist real estate practices that made Silver Spring a sundown suburb until c. 1970 aren’t consistent with the community’s contemporary image and branding as a liberal and progressive haven.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein