Peter Paul Brown must be turning in his grave if he knows about the kerfuffle over one of the cemeteries owned by the Black benevolent organization he founded in 1867. The Philadelphia physician who lived between c. 1822 and 1882 established the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses — the Moses Order — to provide death benefits, healthcare, and other social welfare services for African Americans in a deeply segregated Reconstruction era America. Brown was a skilled entrepreneur and he held tight to his intellectual property and the organization’s name. That name is now the center of a fight over land in suburban Maryland just across the border with Washington, D.C., where activists claim hundreds of bodies are buried beneath a parking lot and construction site. 

The site is one of many abandoned and desecrated African American burial grounds throughout the United States for which activists are seeking recognition, protection, and commemoration. One of the best known examples is the cemetery where the African Burial Ground National Monument was established in Manhattan. Massive protests and congressional hearings brought the issue to headlines in newspapers around the nation in the early 1990s.

In 2015, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department began holding public hearings for a new sector plan in a mostly commercial area in unincorporated Bethesda. Planners disclosed that their research had uncovered the likely site of a historic African American cemetery in their study area. It had been documented in old maps and in a local history book but had been mostly forgotten since the 1960s when heavy equipment excavated much of the site to construct a high-rise apartment building and grade a surface parking lot. None of the graves was professionally excavated to relocate the bodies buried there.

The cemetery had been owned by White’s Tabernacle No. 39, a subordinate Moses Order founded in Washington in 1876. Displaced by suburban encroachment in 1910, White’s Tabernacle in 1911 bought an acre of land near River Road in a Black enclave founded just after the end of the Civil War. Before the war, the land had been occupied by plantations with enslaved workforces. After the war, the small rural community simply called itself by the name of the road along which its residents had settled. 

When White’s Tabernacle bought its land along River Road, the enclave included Black-owned homes and businesses and one of the county’s “colored” schools. Less than a year after buying the property, White’s Tabernacle began burying its members in its cemetery. Because Congress controlled the District of Columbia government, federal legislation was required to allow the organization to relocate about 192 graves from the cemetery it had owned in Washington since 1881. The bill enabling the relocation was introduced in 1914 and it didn’t pass until 1921, more than a decade after White’s Tabernacle abandoned its original cemetery. 

 By 1924, a new road had been built over the cemetery and there is no surviving evidence that any of the people buried there were relocated to River Road. 

Fast-forward a century to Macedonia Baptist Church. Founded in 1920, the church is the last surviving River Road Black cultural institution. The church’s social justice ministry leader, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, attended the Bethesda planning meetings where county planners mentioned the cemetery. A veteran activist best known for leading a whistleblower campaign against the EPA ending in litigation and a landmark law, Coleman-Adebayo mobilized members of her congregation and local anti-racism advocates.

 They began holding rallies at the cemetery site and protests in local government agency hearing rooms beneath banners that evolved from reading “Bethesda African Cemetery Project” to “Save Moses Cemetery.” 

Starting today’s press conference off with a beautiful rendition of Dr. Karen’s This Is The Scene of a Crime! #SaveMosesCemetery pic.twitter.com/MzblS5yc7e

— Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (@BethAfrCemetery) August 12, 2020

And that’s where Peter Paul Brown comes in. He and the descendants of White’s Tabernacle, along with folks in a dispersed descendant community elsewhere in Montgomery County and Washington, were never really a part of Coleman-Adebayo’s campaign. Instead, Coleman-Adebayo reached out to a small group of church members and allies. She has drawn from a wellspring of urban legends, conspiracy theories, and Wikipedia history to cobble together a story about life, death, and desecration in the River Road community that is untethered from a small but substantive documentary record that tells a different story. 

As a consultant to the activists who formed the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, I researched the history of the White’s Tabernacle cemetery and the people who owned it. My work began uncovering facts that were not consistent with Coleman-Adebayo’s narrative that closely connects her church with the cemetery.  

My research identified a wider descendant community than Coleman-Adebayo claimed. And, my work conclusively demonstrated that the White’s Tabernacle cemetery was more of a Washington-based institution than one closely affiliated with River Road’s residents and Macedonia Baptist Church. Displeased by my documentation, Coleman-Adebayo and her coalition pursued different research partners to document the cemetery and community’s history. 

Among the people I identified as potential stakeholders and descendants were the residents of nearby Cabin John, another formerly rural community once associated with Montgomery County’s African Americans that was being absorbed by suburbanization and gentrification.

 Cabin John also had a Moses Order, the Morningstar Tabernacle No. 88. In addition to a cemetery, the Cabin John Moses order also had a meeting hall. And, historians and archaeologists have documented overlapping memberships among the White’s Tabernacle and Morningstar lodges during the early twentieth century. 

The Save Moses Cemetery crowd never invited the Morningstar Lodge descendant community to be part of their advocacy to save the River Road cemetery. Earlier this year, as tempers flared during coalition protests at a construction site next to the former cemetery site, the Morningstar Lodge descendant community [PDF] wrote to Coleman-Adebayo asking that she discontinue using the “Moses” name. 

“We as descendants of the Morningstar No. 88 lodge of the Order of Moses in Cabin John write to disagree with the narrative being put forth by the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC), regarding the Moses Cemetery on River Road in Bethesda,” they wrote in an August 2020 letter sent to Montgomery County officials. “We note with alarm that the BACC narrative about the River Road Moses Cemetery does not rest in facts but instead relies on incendiary language and false claims.” 

The 2020 request mirrors some of the same control that Brown tried to exert over the name back in the 1870s when White’s Tabernacle was founded in what is now Washington’s Tenleytown neighborhood. Henry White, the local order’s namesake, along with several neighbors formed a subordinate Moses Order without first getting Brown’s consent to incorporate in the District of Columbia using the name Brown had copyrighted. 

Brown sued in federal court. He charged that the Washington order had violated his copyright by using the Moses Order name. Brown alleged that the Washington order “wickedly, maliciously, unlawfully and fraudulently” intended to injure Brown by appropriating the name he created.  

Brown lost his case in 1879 because the court found that a copyright wasn’t the same thing as a corporate charter. It created a rift among Washington’s original Moses Order members resulting in the founding of White’s Tabernacle No. 39 by a splinter group associated with the parties Brown sued. More than a century later, it looks like history is repeating itself in Bethesda, pitting one group laying claim to the Moses name and legacy against another. 

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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