Bethesda Beat screen capture.
A new report commissioned by the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is getting a lot of buzz. The report was prepared after Montgomery County Council President Nancy Navarro read one of my articles and called for the name to be changed at E. Brooke Lee Middle School. Why? Because Lee was the political boss and real estate speculator behind creating the Silver Spring sundown suburb. The current discussion about Montgomery County’s school names all stems from my 2017 article yet despite many calls and emails from parents, educators, and student journalists since its publication, not a single MCPS official has contacted me.
Among the gems in the new report:
- MCPS relied on Montgomery History (formerly the Montgomery County Historical Society) as an expert source. There’s only one problem: Montgomery History continues to produce racist and tokenized histories of Montgomery County.
- The report has some serious credibility issues. For example, though the authors recognized that Montgomery Blair’s family owned slaves, they highlighted some mitigating information: Blair’s contributions promoting equity included, “Though Blair had attended Democratic Party national conventions as a delegate in the 1840s, he switched to the Free Soil Party and then the Republican Party as a result of his anti-slavery stance. As an attorney, Blair took on a highly prominent Supreme Court case in 1857 when he represented Dred Scott, an African-American citizen who petitioned for freedom from slavery.” I guess they forgot to read any of the histories documenting Blair’s opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation or his staunch white supremacist position that formerly enslaved Africans needed to live somewhere other than the United States (it was called “colonization”). Yes, Blair hated slavery on moral grounds, but he also didn’t want to have people of African Americans living near him.
- For a report produced by a public school system, it’s kind of appalling that they misspelled a few historical figures’ names: C. Everett Koop (spelled “Coop” in the report) and Frederick Douglass (spelled “Douglas” in the report).
Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the entire report was the recommendation that Silver Spring’s Frank L. Hewitt Sr. was a candidate to have a school named in his honor. According to a table appended to the narrative report, Hewitt was an “industrious and gifted businessman” whose contributions to social equity included collaborating with S. Brooke Lee:
Pushed for residence [sic.] locating in Silver Spring, finding places where people can live in the city. Along with E. Brooke Lee, important in the development of Silver Spring, MD’s modern residential infrastructure.
Yes, Hewitt was industrious. Like Lee, he was a prolific real estate speculator and community builder. He did indeed help found the Silver Spring Armory [segregated] and the Silver Spring National Bank [did not lend to African Americans, as my information to date shows]. As for the many individual house lots and residential subdivisions he sold, Hewitt, like Lee, attached noxious racially restrictive covenants. Here’s an example from a 1908 deed to a lot in R. Holt Easley’s subdivision prohibiting people of African descent from owning or renting it:
And here’s another one, this time executed in 1923:
Yep, let’s scrub E. Brooke Lee’s name and his Blair kin from the facades of Montgomery County’s schools and replace them with “industrious and gifted businessmen” like Frank L. Hewitt.
UPDATE: Read a more substantive review that I provided to several DC area reporters.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein
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