Last week, the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) invited its Facebook audience to share stories about a donut shop. The society (which really isn’t a society; it’s four boomer building huggers) is short on history and steeped in nostalgia that celebrates the white supremacists who “built” Silver Spring and erases Black history. This post accepts the historical society’s request for “specific memories” of the site.
This is the third of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first two covered Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner and Crivella’s Wayside Inn.
This clip features a site in Silver Spring where the community’s Jim Crow history was erased. The “Silver Spring Memory Wall” is a five-mural installation next to Acorn Park. It is the product of historic preservation and planning decisions made in the 1990s to tell Silver Spring’s history through public art.
Those murals present a nostalgic view of Silver Spring history that glosses over its decades as a sundown suburb. It also intentionally sought to ameliorate the absence of Blacks from public places in the twentieth century by replacing white people with African Americans in a depiction of Silver Spring’s train station in the 1940s.
Silver Spring Memory Wall, B&O Railroad Station mural.
Former Washington, D.C., muralist Mame Cohalan (who died in 2020) recognized that the historic photos she was using were missing Black people. She asked her Montgomery County clients for permission to add some diversity — Black people — into the artwork. The resulting mural erased Silver Spring’s Jim Crow history by inserting Black people into a place and time where they otherwise never would have been found.
1994 Montgomery County Planning Department memo asking permission to add more “cultural diversity” to Memory Wall murals.
This clip tells the Acorn Park and Silver Spring Memory Wall story.
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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
This is the second of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first in this series featured nostalgia and Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner.
This clip visits the site where Crivella’s Wayside Inn operated for several decades in the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, its owners refused to integrate the restaurant’s dining room — even after Montgomery County enacted an open accommodations law. Years of civil rights protests and litigation ensued. Montgomery County later bought the property and demolished the building, foreclosing on opportunities to commemorate the civil rights era and Silver Spring’s Black history. County leaders could have celebrated the life of civil rights icon Roscoe Nix; instead, they rebranded the space “Bottleworks Lane” to commemorate two historic bottling plants nearby.
This clip focusing on Crivella’s tells some of this story.
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© 2021 D.S. 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.
This is a dispatch from deep within the enforced social distancing imposed by the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
In 2006, a Montgomery County, Maryland, homeowner placed a chain across an unnamed and unsurfaced road to restrict access to her subdivision. Known locally as “Farm Road,” the narrow corridor provided access to a small African American community settled during Reconstruction. The Farm Road case became the latest example in the suburban Washington, D.C., county of more than a million people where whites have closed off roads leading to Black homes.
Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission “Address Book.” Addresses crossed out in the right portion of the map are along the “Farm Road.”
Farm Road, 2016.
Though Farm Road has received a lot of attention since 2006, the other cases of exclusionary enclosure in Montgomery County are less well known. This post explores a few other examples that antedate Farm Road.
The Hyson homestead in the Burnt Mills part of Silver Spring and the Jackson family driveway fence are two known precedents that likely represent a much larger sample of episodes where white folks erected barriers to Black spaces. I learned about these two examples during interviews about African American hamlets that I conducted between 2016 and 2018. This post is derived from those interviews and from the limited documentary evidence that survives. Continue reading
Ada Dupree. Photo credit: Edisto Herald.
Ada Dupree (1887-1991) lived a long and consequential life. She moved to the small Florida town of Esto in 1902 at age 15. For the rest of her life, she and her family were among the few people of color in the rural panhandle community near the Alabama border. When she died in 1991 at the age of 104, her family began funeral arrangements in accordance with her wishes: Ada wanted to be buried in the town where she spent most of her life. But some residents in the mostly white community didn’t want her buried in the town’s “all-white” cemetery.
Ada’s story made national headlines and in 1998 former NBC legal correspondent Star Jones recounted the story to introduce her book, You Have to Stand for Something or You’ll Fall for Anything: “Sometimes it takes a story about death to teach you about life ….” Continue reading
Montgomery County’s Confederate statue, July 2015.
Earlier this year The Washington Post published my op-ed on Montgomery County’s decision to transfer a Confederate statue that had stood in Rockville since 1913 to a new owner in the private sector. The day after the Post article ran I began writing the follow-up article on the missed opportunities in that decision and the questionable logic of giving an artifact with strong neo-Confederate symbolism to an organization that celebrates the Confederacy.
I did additional background research on the statue and on the politics and semiotics of artifacts that celebrate white supremacy. For the follow-up article I interviewed Montgomery County Councilmember Tom Hucker and County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett in anticipation of the statue’s eventual move, which occurred July 22, 2017).
And then Charlottesville happened August 11-12, 2017. All of a sudden the entire nation was awash in analytical and opinion articles about Confederate iconography, race, erasure, and the production of history.
By last weekend I had revised most of my initial ideas for how that follow-up article would look and I made the trip out to the Montgomery County statue’s new home at White’s Ferry on the Potomac River. I crossed the river to Virginia and took in the statue’s new setting and I took more than 100 photos.
From the moment I first conceived of the follow-up article I knew that it would focus on two things: the tensions inherent in deciding how to deal with neo-Confederate artifacts that Montgomery County leaders and their counterparts around the nation grapple with and the consequences of re-contextualizing the statue in a space that celebrates the Confederacy.
Relocated Confederate statue in its new home at White’s Ferry, August 2017.
By giving the statue to White’s Ferry, Montgomery County officials relinquished control over the artifact and any messages it conveys. The statue now occupies a prominent position overlooking the ferry ramp and it is one of the first things passengers see as they leave the ferry and enter Maryland from Virginia.
View from the Gen. Jubal A. Early at the ramp to White’s Ferry, August 2017.
It’s private property yet public space. And, instead of being hidden among trees next to the county’s old courthouse, the statue now occupies a more visible space at a historic Montgomery County gateway.
The Activist History Review has published my analysis of the statue’s move and its implications in the wake of Charleston 2015 and Charlottesville 2017: No Country for Johnny Reb or Bobby Lee.
Welcome to Montgomery County, Maryland. River Road and White’s Ferry Road near the entrance to White’s Ferry, August 2017.
© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein
Montgomery County, Maryland, goes to great lengths to promote its communities as diverse and progressive. Yet, actions by such institutions as the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission undermine those assertions with racialized land use policies and historic preservation plans that omit, marginalize, and alienate the county’s communities of color. Patterns apparent over the past 20 years suggest that the agency, which was founded by a white supremacist real estate developer and Democratic Party boss, structurally hasn’t moved very far from its 1920s origins as a machine for building suburbs where power and authority remain concentrated among the white middle and upper classes.
In September 2016, a historic preservation planner with the Montgomery County Planning 
Department’s Historic Preservation Office approached a group of residents from the Lyttonsville community in the lobby of the Montgomery County Council Building in Rockville. The planner and the residents of the historically African American community were there to attend a hearing for the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan.
The planner began speaking enthusiastically about her research in a neighboring community that had been developed by Jewish developer Sam Eig: Rock Creek Forest. She told the Lyttonsville residents that in her research on Eig and the subdivision she found that Eig did not attach racial restrictive covenants to the properties.
The following morning I emailed the planner and asked her about what she had told the Lyttonsville residents. She replied:
What I was telling [Lyttonsville resident] was that Sam Eig developed Rock Creek Forest, without restrictive covenants. He also donated land there for two churches and the Jewish Community Center (?and maybe for the Red Cross). MCHS has information on Sam Eig.
This … is not written in anger. It is written in fury … it is a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain, and are engaged in befouling the rest. — Peter Blake, Preface to God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (1964)
Ellsworth Place Mall, Colesville Road and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.
After more than a decade of false starts involving redevelopment plans and rebranding campaigns, an urban mall in Silver Spring, Maryland, has a new name, new look, and new stores. Ellsworth Place, née City Place, was completed in 1992 in an effort to jumpstart redevelopment in Silver Spring’s central business district. The mall was built as an addition to a historic Hecht’s department store, which was completed in 1947 and which left Silver Spring 40 years later for a new regional mall in nearby Wheaton.
Rebranding City Place involved converting its worn and bland suburban commercial spaces and “re-tenanting,” a process the owner described as attracting more upscale merchants to attract millennials and other new middle class residents moving to Silver Spring.
Montgomery County’s historic preservation law was one hurdle owners had to clear. The former Hecht’s building is a protected county landmark and the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission has regulatory jurisdiction over changes to the building’s exterior. Changes like new entrances, windows, and signage.
Ellsworth Place Mall/Former Hecht’s, Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street facade, September 2016.
[See below for updates to this post]
Teardowns and mansionization are a nationwide problem and Montgomery County has few regulatory controls to prevent property owners from demolishing older homes and building new houses that are out of scale and character with neighboring buildings.
Although Montgomery County has a historic preservation ordinance, not all old homes are historic and there are few tools currently available to residents to prevent speculators from building McMansions like the one under construction in my Silver Spring neighborhood. Continue reading