Tag Archives: erasure

Eulogy [Updated]

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Earlier this week I got a Facebook message from a friend who lives in Decatur, Ga.: “More construction in Decatur Oakview Rd.”

I am used to messages like this. They have arrived via email, Twitter, Facebook, and text for the past decade. Many of them come from people like my 60-something Decatur friend: the senders are Black, elderly, and many have been lifelong Decatur residents. They include photos of buildings being demolished and the McMansions that replace them. They also include comments about displacement and racism. For years these folks have tried to get relief from city officials and to get their stories told by the press.

Unlike local bloggers, overworked newspaper reporters, and disinterested broadcast journalists, I listened and I wrote. A lot. I earned the trust of a lot Decatur residents while also angering many others invested in the myth of a liberal and progressive city that only exists in their minds and the city’s flashy advertising campaigns.

The site shown in the message I received is located on Oakview Road, between Second and Third avenues, just inside the Decatur city limits. Until last year, it was one of the Oakhurst neighborhood’s few surviving twentieth century commercial nodes. The one-story buildings occupied by a beauty parlor and grocery store had been community fixtures for decades.

Oakhurst Grocery (1529 Oakview Road) and “Purple Building” (1531 Oakview Road), May 2012.
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A Decatur, Georgia, Recap

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Professional accomplishments directly resulting from my research in and about Decatur, Georgia, 2011-2023. No, it’s not a game.

September 6, 2023: “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb.” The Metropole (Urban History Association blog).

April 24, 2023: “Our Missing Middle Housing Didn’t Just Go Missing. It Was Torn Down.” Next City.

August 6, 2022: “Heirs, History, and Land: Recovering and Conserving Black Spaces and Stories.” Featured presentation, Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot Family Reunion and Historical Marker Unveiling, Berry College, Rome, Georgia. (Delivered remotely.)

July 2022: Agnes Scott College is awarded a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant to conduct research, community engagement, and develop curriculum on race and racism in Decatur, Ga. The grant application relied on my research; the institution wrote that if the grant is awarded that the college would seek to hire me as a researcher and adjunct professor. It would have been nice if Agnes Scott College had consulted with me prior to using my name and my credentials in the application. Needless to say, I did not collaborate with Agnes Scott College on its project.

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Silver Spring video shorts: Acorn Park

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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

Silver Spring video shorts: Crivella’s Wayside Inn

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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

Silver Spring video shorts: The Tastee Diner

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In August I got an email from an AmeriCorps Project Change leader asking me to contribute to an upcoming training tour of Silver Spring, Maryland, for new volunteers. The project director and I spoke for about an hour and I agreed to produce three short videos about historic places in Silver Spring where history has been whitewashed.

The September 2, 2021, day-long tour wound through sites on both sides of the D.C.-Maryland line and it included stops at the Tastee Diner, the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn, and Acorn Park.

The clip focusing on the Tastee Diner contrasts the nostalgia-laden histories and historic preservation efforts that omit the popular eatery’s Jim Crow past.

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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

Erasure primer (Vol. 2)

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Two years ago I published a post in this blog illustrating how maps produced by grassroots historic preservation organizations are used to erase communities of color. Yesterday I did a public program on history and historic preservation in Silver Spring, Maryland. For the first time, my slide deck included maps produced by the Maryland Historical Trust, the state historic preservation office, that have erased historically-Black Lyttonsville.

Maryland Historical Trust online mapping system. Screen capture April 14, 2019.

The Maryland Historical Trust maps are from a geographic information system (GIS) layer illustrating all properties documented in the agency’s official record of historic places in Maryland: the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP). The database includes long-form MIHP forms and brief determinations of eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places produced by entities complying with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act:

The Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP) is a repository of information on districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects of known or potential value to the prehistory and history of the State of Maryland. The Inventory was created shortly after the Maryland Historical Trust was founded in 1961, and now includes data on more than 13,000 archeological sites and 43,000 historic and architectural resources. The MIHP includes information about both standing structures and archeological resources. Inventoried properties contribute information to our understanding of Maryland’s architecture, engineering, archeology, or culture. — Maryland Historical Trust website.

Many of the properties in the Maryland Historical Trust’s database in proximity to Lyttonsville are simply platted subdivisions recorded in Montgomery County land records for which histories were written and the existing buildings and landscapes were evaluated for their historical significance. Some of them, like the adjacent “Pilgrim Church Tract,” are completely illegible: “Today, the Pilgrim Church Tract is filled with 16 lots, several of which have been expanded, combined, and resubdivided since the 1960s,” wrote a consultant in 2012 who was working for the agency building the Purple Line light rail. “The area is almost entirely covered by paved parking lots and late-twentieth century warehouses ….” Yet, the space first inscribed in a plat filed in 1892 is visible in historic preservation records and maps.

“Littonville.” Montgomery County Land Records, Plat Book 1, Plat 36.

The MIHP database is the product of decades of grassroots and informal research as well as professional studies done by academics and government agencies, including the Montgomery County Planning Department, the Maryland Department of Transportation, and others. Yesterday’s program was held in Lyttonsville, in the Gwendolyn E. Coffield community center. While the map from the MIHP website was on the screen I asked the people in the audience to find Lyttonsville in it. Though a settled place since 1853 and platted in 1901, Lyttonsville didn’t appear in the MIHP map. Like the maps, books, and programs produced by the local historical society, Lyttonsville was invisible to Maryland’s official historic preservation agency.

Lyttonsville vicinity, Maryland Historical Trust base map screen capture (April 8, 2019) annotated by David Rotenstein.

Maryland Historical Trust map with 1901 Lyttonsville plat overlay. Arrow indicates Lyttonsville.

Erasure: “The practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible” —Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure.’” The New York Times, February 2, 2016.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

Montgomery County Historical Society BOOM exhibit is a dud

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If I were mounting an exhibition to tell the story about Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1950s, there would be lots of material from which to choose: the Cold War, suburbanization, and civil rights would certainly be in the mix. But how would I choose to tell the story about the Black experience in Montgomery County during that eventful decade?

One place I wouldn’t look for inspiration is the Montgomery County Historical Society’s exhibit, BOOM: The 1950s in Montgomery County. My latest article in The Activist History Review tackles the exhibit’s deficiencies.

There are many stories about African American entrepreneurialism, education, consumer choice, housing, religious life, and sports that would be solid candidates for some sort of exhibit featuring artifacts, texts, and photographs. How would I select the most compelling stories to tell? Continue reading →