Welcome to the neighborhood

Posted on June 29, 2020 by David Rotenstein

In 1990, a young married couple bought a ranch house in a Decatur, Georgia, neighborhood. I met them 21 years later and they recounted an episode that led them to ask, “What Twilight Zone have we dropped into?”

The story involved one of their new neighbors awakening them the morning after the first night in their new home. He banged on their door at 7:00 a.m. and asked them one disturbing question. In this clip, they tell me about that first day in Decatur.

Note: The couple’s names have been changed and the audio was manipulated to disguise their voices and to remove references to their names and to their new neighbor’s name.

Public history

Posted on June 27, 2020 by David Rotenstein

Ultimately, rendering marginalized communities the subjects of your research doesn’t absolve you of your privilege or complicity in an inherently anti-Black, racist, classist, and ableist system. In fact, it exacerbates the problem — GVGK Tang, History@Work, June 2020

Public history’s activism roots go all the way back to W.E.B. duBois. Over the past month

The author leading a walking tour in Decatur, Ga., Feb. 2020.

historians increasingly find ourselves in the thick of anti-racism movements responding to a white supremacist president; racialized police violence; and, the enduring hold that the Lost Cause has over too many white folks in our nation.

I wrote about my transformation into an anti-racism activist in an earlier post. This post goes back seven years to a plea that I made to the Decatur, Georgia, City Commission. The evening of February 4, 2013, I delivered a report that I had commissioned documenting the city’s racist historic resources survey. And, I asked that city leaders take immediate action to address displacement and the marginalization of the city’s Black residents.

My requests went nowhere. The city moved forward with demolishing historic African American sites and no action was taken to stem displacement. In fact, later that year, in October 2013, the city commission actually rejected a motion to enact a moratorium on single-family home demolitions.

That night in February 2013, I was terrified and angry — the emotions show in my shaking hands and voice. Two weeks earlier, a Decatur builder had filed a false report with the police alleging that I had threatened to kill him; that was his best and only way to silence my writing and speaking on racism, etc. in the city. By that time, my wife and I were one year into a sustained campaign by fragile white Decaturites retaliating against my efforts to shine a light on structural racism there. The racism was facilitating the removal of Black bodies from the city and the erasure of Black history.

Though I had worked in public history since 1984, I think I genuinely became a public historian that night in 2013.

Infrastructure and Social Justice

Posted on June 22, 2020 by David Rotenstein

I recently participated in a Society for Industrial Archeology online program featuring projects with a social justice element. The SIA program titled, “Infrastructure and Social Justice” included a presentation on a Tennessee bridge used during the Trail of Tears and a viaduct in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Infrastructure and racial segregation have a long and fraught history. Railroads and highways frequently created firm boundaries separating racialized spaces. Many cities throughout North America have their “other side of the tracks” or interstate highways that were built to separate Black neighborhoods from white ones. In some places, like Detroit, Michigan; Decatur, Georgia; and, North Brentwood, Maryland, walls and other barricades divided Black space from white space.

Railroad tracks, Decatur, Georgia.

Continue reading →

Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum

Posted on June 16, 2020 by David Rotenstein

Crivella’s Wayside Inn. Tucked away in the 1000-block of East West Highway near downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, this former restaurant was the scene of non-violent civil rights protests between 1962 and 1965. Montgomery County in 2006 bought the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn. After holding listening sessions with members of Silver Spring’s historic Black community, county leaders worked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History to collect stories, artifacts, and design exhibits to tell the story of Silver Spring’s Black communities, from colonial plantations and enslavement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.

That’s what a journalist writing about a new Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum might have written had there been a museum developed in the former Crivella’s space. Instead, Montgomery County officials demolished the former restaurant and erased its history. This post explores a lost opportunity for Montgomery County to confront its segregationist history and seek reconciliation with its African American residents, past and present. Continue reading →

How I became an anti-racism activist

Posted on June 5, 2020 by David Rotenstein

In 2011, I started down a path towards becoming an anti-racism activist and I began dedicating my professional work to showing how historic preservation is implicated in erasure and the production of racist histories & commemorative landscapes. My work began in Decatur, GA, and Silver Spring, MD.

This video segment is from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital’s Gateway,” recorded April 13, 2019. It includes my explanation to a Silver Spring audience for how and why I became an anti-racist.

Protestors deface Silver Spring “monument”

Posted on June 3, 2020 by David Rotenstein

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.

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Monthly Archives: June 2020

Welcome to the neighborhood

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Public history

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Infrastructure and Social Justice

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Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum

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How I became an anti-racism activist

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Protestors deface Silver Spring “monument”

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