Monthly Archives: June 2018

Time to hang it up Silver Spring Historical Society

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The identities of Blair’s slaves will never be known — Jerry McCoy, In Search of the Lost Souls of Silver Spring (February 2018).

If only the Silver Spring Historical Society had made even the most rudimentary effort to go beyond Ancestry.com and digitized Washington newspapers in its search for people enslaved by Silver Spring founder Francis Preston Blair, they might have been able to learn about Albert, Abraham, Vincent, Henry, Emily, Sarah, Nancy, Olivia, Mary, and Phillis (who married Samuel Lytton, founder of Lyttonsville, in 1859).  The group’s 2018 “Black History Month” posts in a local blog are yet another glaring example of erasure, one of many by the 20-year-old organization.

Maryland State Archives. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS (Assessment Record, Slaves) C1112, 1853-1864.

 

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 →

The Decatur “F-you” fence

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I spent a few days in Decatur this week following up leads derived from interviews I have done over the past year. One of the things that I wanted to see and photograph was a fence that a historic Black church had erected to block access to its parking lot in Decatur’s gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. I learned about the fence in a February 2018 interview that I did with a Decatur native who grew up in the city’s Beacon Community during the second half of the twentieth century.

Thankful Baptist Church parking lot and fence, June 2018.

“Right up there on Mead Road they’ve got a bar and now they’re trying to take over the parking lot on the weekends,” the woman told me in a telephone interview. “I think even when you try to be nice, they take advantage.” 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 →

Montgomery County Historical Society BOOM exhibit is a dud

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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? Continue reading →