For Charlotte Coffield, Black history wasn’t something she would pull from a closet shelf and dust off for one month each year and talk about it to White audiences. Every month was Black History Month. Charlotte didn’t need to open a book or go to a museum to see the faces of the Black men and women who changed their communities and our nation for the better. All Charlotte had to do was find the nearest object where she could see her own reflection. Charlotte Annieperry Coffield died September 11, 2024. She was 91.

Charlotte lived her entire life in a suburban Washington, D.C., community called Lyttonsville. For most of its history, Lyttonsville was Silver Spring, Maryland’s, other side of the tracks. Founded in 1853 when a free Black man, Samuel Lytton, bought a four-acre farm, the community became one of more than 40 rural all-Black enclaves or hamlets in segregated Montgomery County, Maryland. Lyttonsville is a liminal space in-betwixt and between Black and White, suburban and rural, North and South. Charlotte Coffield’s story parallels the community’s history and then became an indelible part of Lyttonsville’s history as she dedicated the last years of her life to preserving it.

Growing up in Lyttonsville, Charlotte lived in a home without running water and in a neighborhood with no paved streets. She attended a two-room “colored school” and like many Black people in Washington and its suburbs, she found a career in the federal workforce.

Charlotte worked as an assistant to Dr. Boyce Williams in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Williams was hearing impaired and Charlotte learned sign language to communicate with him. Charlotte became the first American Sign Language interpreter in the federal government and she pioneered new workplace tools for hearing impaired people. Charlotte’s work earned wide acclaim and Gallaudet University awarded her an honorary doctorate.

After she retired, Charlotte dedicated her life to activism and to undoing decades of erasure of Lyttonsville’s history and people by local historians, historic preservationists, and government agencies. The final chapter in Coffield’s life involved uplifting the story of the Talbot Avenue Bridge, an old railroad bridge that connected Lyttonsville with Silver Spring, a sundown suburb where Black people couldn’t buy homes, see movies, or eat in restaurants.

That’s the abridged version of Charlotte’s story, one that might have been suitable for a Washington Post obituary, had the newspaper that had no qualms extracting her knowledge of Black history for its readers bothered to write one. There was much more to Coffield’s story and her immersion in Black history as a subject and a way of life. I first met Charlotte Coffield in 2016 when I interviewed her for my research into gentrification and erasure. We exchanged information in dialogues about history and public policy. In 2018, we became collaborators to celebrate the Talbot Avenue Bridge’s centennial and efforts to ensure its commemoration after its demolition. What follows draws from my interviews and collaborations with Charlotte, my friend and my teacher.

Family and Community

Charlotte Coffield’s father Earl was born in North Carolina. He and his family moved to the Washington area in the 1920s. Her mother, also named Charlotte, was born in Virginia. Her mother’s family — the Deloatches — had lived in Montgomery County since the turn of the twentieth century. The had settled in a Black enclave called “The Pines” that straddled the District of Columbia-Maryland line.

One of Charlotte’s grandmothers cleaned a White family’s home across the tracks. “She was working in that house when she had a stroke,” Charlotte recalled. “But she walked from here across the bridge to get to work and then she walked back in the evenings after she’d finished cleaning their houses and taking care of their kids and washing and ironing and all of that and then she would come home and do whatever she had to do at the house here.”

She walked through Lyttonsville’s unpaved streets and across the Talbot Avenue Bridge. “It wasn’t a short walk but she did have a stroke while she was working over there. She stayed paralyzed until she passed,” Charlotte said.

Earl Coffield, worked as a chef for the National Park Seminary for Girls before going to work as a landscaper for the army’s Walter Reed Hospital. Charlotte’s mother raised their children.

Though located in the Washington suburbs, Lyttonsville had a very rural and Southern character. Earl Coffield raised hounds for hunting and he trained them for White hunters as a side hustle.

“People, we helped each other. We worked with each other. If one family had something, if one family ate, the other family would eat,” Charlotte explained. “My father was a hunter and a fisherman and he would go out and come back with tub loads of fish and the neighbors would come in and help clean, the guys would help clean the fish and so forth and they all went home with fish.”

Charlotte’s older sister Gwendolyn’s first job was cleaning houses for White families. She became an acclaimed educator and activist. After she died in 1996, Montgomery County named Lyttonsville’s community center after her.

Charlotte’s family stories wrapped around church (they attended the Pilgrim Baptist Church), work, and play. Everyone in Lyttonsville was family, by blood, marriage, and the bonds forged by community building. “This is my Reverend Quarles and his wife, from the Pilgrim Baptist Church. He’s from Orange, Virginia. He was married to my grandmother’s sister,” Charlotte said while holding a family photo.

Snapshots of Life and History

There had been cameras in the Coffield family since at least the 1930s. In a couple of interviews, Charlotte supplemented her answers to my questions by showing me photos. “That’s my mother. And this is Earl Coffield, her husband. And this is Gwen as the baby. So this was taken in nineteen thirty-one. I can date it by her because she was born in thirty-one,” Charlotte said in one interview. “This was taken outside of the house that was right here, after they moved from the Pines.”

Charlotte inadvertently became a documentarian after her parents gave her a camera when she was in elementary school. “I first started doing photography with a little Brownie camera. So I would take pictures of people and do the weddings and receptions and things like that,” Charlotte said. A friend convinced her to join a photography club.

In time, Charlotte found herself getting paid to be on both sides of the camera. “It got me into the modeling,” she recalled. “It got me into the Inter-American Travel Agents Society. I got on the board of directors with that, traveled all over the world with them at their expense. Through that camera, you know, that camera just seemed like one thing would lead to another to another.”

The Washington Afro-American newspaper archives include several photo features published in the 1950s with Charlotte posing in them.

Charlotte’s photos and memories make up a large part of Lyttonsville’s accessible history as a thriving community with people, not tokens or survivals of a nostalgic Black past viewed through a White lens. Getting Charlotte to talk about her photos unlocked family and community history, like the trips to Sparrow’s Beach that her sister Gwen organized.

“Sparrow’s Beach,” Charlotte began. “We had no beaches or no place to swim around here and my sister Gwen, she was assistant superintendent of the Sunday school over here and she would organize these trips to the beach during the summer. Take the kids on a bus and get them to the beach.”

During Jim Crow, there were only two beaches for Black people in the Washington metropolitan area. “Sparrow’s and Carr’s were right there side by side together. They were the only two beaches that we could go to. Later on there was a beach in Baltimore called Wildwood or something like that,” Charlotte explained.

There were baseball games in the local sandlot and in other Black enclaves. “Where the [later Rosemary Hills Elementary] school is was the site of the Linden Black Sox baseball diamond. And we would go there for our weekend entertainment for the baseball games and so forth and this team played other African American teams around the county like Ken-Gar, Sandy Spring, and so forth,” Charlotte explained as she shared the photos she took.

Lyttonsville thrummed with life. The community repeatedly resisted displacement efforts dating to the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1950, county leaders began planning to rezone and redevelop Lyttonsville. One goal, wrote a county planning official to a nearby White citizens association, was to “stave off any of the disasters which might easily occur in your neighborhood,” including “racial problems.”

The zoning changes and federally funded “urban renewal” over the next 30 years reconfigured Lyttonsville. Industrial encroachment expanded and longtime residents like the Coffields were forced to sell their property to the county. Some, like Charlotte and her sister, remained in Lyttonsville, in new homes.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, Lyttonsville had beaten back the real estate speculators, county planners, and transportation agencies that had tried to erase the community. And then came the historians and preservationists.

A Museum and an Old Bridge

“Silver Spring would not exist — could not exist the way it did — without the help of the people who were living right next door to you,” Coffield recalled telling community leaders after the 2002 release of a documentary film. “Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb” whitewashed Silver Spring’s history and all but erased Lyttonsville and its people.

“The people from this community worked in Silver Spring. They worked in private homes and they worked in the stores there, in the back rooms, and the laundry and places like that,” Coffield said. “But they were not really an integral part of the community. We did not live in downtown Silver Spring.”

The film galvanized support for a more inclusive Siler Spring history, or at least a way to tell Lyttonsville’s story. Charlotte Coffield led the resistance to the documentary’s erasure by coordinating the creation of a Lyttonsville history exhibit inside the community center. Along with another lifelong resident, Patricia Tyson, Charlotte collected photos and artifacts.

“It was hard for Patricia Tyson and myself to get people to give up photographs and what have you and they tried to tell me, ‘Well, you’re the only one who had a camera in the community,’” Charlotte recalled. “So from that, once we got it started and started putting up pictures, then other people said, ‘Oh, I have some pictures.’ And then the pictures started coming in.”

One photo in the exhibit on a lower shelf showed the Talbot Avenue Bridge. It was the only piece of Lyttonsville’s built environment that had survived urban renewal. It was sacred space and when state officials announced that it would be demolished, Charlotte and a coalition of neighbors from both sides of the tracks mobilized to celebrate its history. I curated a pop-up museum on the bridge and in September 2018, more than 300 people attended a centennial celebration.

Awareness of the bridge’s role in local civil rights history and Lyttonsville’s position in local history enabled residents and local leaders to begin describing Silver Spring as a “sundown suburb.” Charlotte recognized the changes. “I think that they see things in a different light now than they did back in the day when I came through,” she said. “When I came through, it was during the segregated era there and now that’s changed and as we have said before, that African American people could not own homes and they could not live there unless they were working in someone’s home there. Now that has changed and so people are looking at things a little but differently.”

The rebuilt Talbot Avenue Bridge opened in 2024. Charlotte’s daughter Myra and Patricia Tyson were among the first people to officially cross. Charlotte’s smiling face was there, in spirit; by then, she had been living in an assisted care facility. Four months later, Charlotte died and her funeral procession crossed over the bridge on the way to her final resting place.

Note: This post originally was commissioned by a national magazine as a 2025 Black History Month essay. The magazine’s editor lost the draft and the essay was not published.

© 2025 D.S. Rotenstein

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