Three Silver Spring neighborhoods are teaming up to throw a birthday party for a bridge Saturday September 22. The Talbot Avenue Bridge turns 100 this year and it is slated for demolition next year to make way for a new structure over the Purple Line. For most of its history, the bridge was a vital link connecting historically Black Lyttonsville with Silver Spring and Washington.

Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial celebration being promoted on two “jumbotron” screens in downtown Silver Spring the week before the event.

The celebration at the bridge over the CSX Railroad tracks near Rosemary Hills Elementary School features musical performances by the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices and singer-songwriter Lea. Speakers from all three neighborhoods will talk about their experiences living there. There will be a student art show, African drumming, a libation ceremony, and pies and other sweets contributed by neighbors. County Executive Isiah Leggett will be there to present a proclamation declaring it Talbot Avenue Bridge Day.

Lyttonsville was Silver Spring’s “other side of the tracks” and Silver Spring was a sundown suburb: a place where African Americans could not buy or rent homes and where their money wasn’t welcome in stores, restaurants, and movie theaters.

For a long time, Silver Spring’s Jim Crow history was forgotten and erased. Current residents revel in the community’s rich diversity, yet just 50 years ago Washingtonian magazine published a feature article touting Silver Spring’s benefits as a D.C. suburb. “It’s nice; there’s no colored here,” one resident told writer Judith Viorst.

A lot has changed in Silver Spring since 1967. The collaboration among the Lyttonsville, North Woodside, and Rosemary Hills neighborhoods to celebrate the Talbot Avenue Bridge’s history reflects some of that change.

Even though Montgomery County outlawed discrimination in public places and businesses in 1962 and in housing in 1968, racial bias persisted. Nasty fights over whether to close the bridge or not erupted in the 1980s and 1990s. Some Lyttonsville residents believed their North Woodside neighbors had racial motives in wanted the bridge closed. North Woodside residents claimed they wanted the bridge closed because of traffic.

The Montgomery Times, Sept. 15, 1996.

Those differences surfaced two years ago after details about the bridge’s history emerged in local blogs and in articles by the Washington Post. Since then, the bridge and its history as a civil rights landmark has been featured in locally-produced documentary. Jay Elvove, a retired University of Maryland IT specialist, wrote an instrumental song about the bridge. And, in April, a pop-up museum that I created on the bridge itself attracted about 100 people. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been working with the event planners as a committee member.

Rev. Ella Redfield (right) met at the bridge with program committee member Anna White (left) to discuss the September 22 program.

Centennial celebration emcee Ella Redfield grew up in Lyttonsville and her family has been in Montgomery County for more than a century. The pastor of Wheaton’s New Creation Baptist Church recalls walking across the bridge daily in the 1960s and 1970s to get from her home to work in downtown Washington.

Like more than 30 other African American hamlets in Montgomery County, Lyttonsville had no paved streets, no running water, and no sewers. “When I would go to work my shoes would be muddy. I hated those rainy days because you couldn’t walk the streets without [getting muddy],” Redfield told me in a 2016 oral history interview. “That was the bridge we used. There [were] only a few ways to get to the wider community, you know, to get to the stores, to get to transportation.”

Folksinger Lea plans to use that history in the songs she performs Saturday. “The bridge can be a reminder that we’re coming to seek unity. We’re coming to seek a better way of doing America,” Lea said in a recent interview.

Lea. Photo courtesy of Lea.

Lea sees the symbolism of the “other side of tracks” as a reminder of past injustices and the efforts now to find reconciliation. “I think it’s also an opportunity because you have that imaginary divide or maybe obviously in this case, a physical actual divide” Lea explained. “It’s an opportunity to cross to the other side and discover that there’s a lot of positive in being different.”

The Washington Revels Jubilee Voices at the Josiah Henson Park. Photo courtesy the Jubilee Voices.

Andrea Blackford, a Jubilee Voices founder, agrees. The group performs music drawn from a deep wellspring of African American musical traditions, from Civil War era spirituals to civil rights era gospel and protest songs.

Then as in now, many of the contested spaces and contentions that we have between us are because we don’t understand each other or we have misconceptions and stereotypes about each other,” Blackford said after visiting the bridge for the first time in August. “By continuing to talk about not only the good things but the uncomfortable things that happened then, it helps us to relate to some of the uncomfortable things that happen now. It helps set the record straight.”

The Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial party runs from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday September 22 at the Silver Spring bridge. It is free and there will be parking available at Rosemary Hills Elementary School. The program’s website has a map with directions, updates about weather (rain date is September 29), and information about the bridge and the performances.

© D.S. Rotenstein

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