Author Archives: David Rotenstein

Criminal or collaborator?

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On August 27, 2020, members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) stood in a Bethesda, Maryland, street and chanted that several archaeologists, the Maryland State Archaeologist, multiple Montgomery County elected and appointed officials, and I were criminals and should be arrested.

Tim Willard, a vocal BACC supporter and leader in several county organizations, including the Montgomery County Civic Federation and Montgomery County Green Party, didn’t get the memo (or the video) about the calls to arrest us. BACC posted a video of the demonstration on its Facebook page. One day later, one of the other injured parties’ attorneys sent the group a cease and desist letter. BACC subsequently deleted the video and several others from its Facebook page. One video BACC deleted featured a self-described “peoples archaeologist” describing Dr. Alexandra Jones, a distinguished African American woman archaeologist, as a developer’s “token Black archaeologist.”

https://youtu.be/0bzpCVqoqKA

Another person who appears to have not gotten the memo is a BACC spokesperson who contacted me in July asking for my assistance in resolving the long-running conflict. The BACC member even connected me with a reporter who subsequently wrote about the Bethesda River Road Cemetery for Washington City Paper.

Text message from BACC member informing me that he has asked a reporter to contact me.

This all leaves me wondering what’s really going on with the #savemosescemetery crowd?

History is repeating itself at the site of a historic Black cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland

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Moses Order logo, c. 1887.

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.

African Burial Ground Way, New York, New York, 2018.

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. Continue reading →

Decatur City Schools

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This summer I am teaching a graduate seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation. For the the final day of the virtual residency, I will be re-creating the Decatur, Georgia, walking tour that I did for the 2020 National Council on Public History (virtual) conference.

This version will be a little different because our world has changed dramatically since March. The tour focuses on the intersection of racism, municipal planning, and historic preservation. For this iteration I will be using interviews with Decatur residents that I did between 2011 and 2018.

The clips I am using drill down into how the city’s schools have reinforced structural racism, from Jim Crow segregation to efforts to resist integration to racial curriculum tracking. City leaders have weaponized the school system to create an environment that is hostile to Black children and their caretakers.

In the interviews that I did, I collected accounts of real estate speculators threatening grandparents with children in the schools. The city makes it possible for people to file anonymous tips to report children attending the schools who are not living with their parents inside the city limits. People told me about real estate speculators who approached elderly African American homeowners with unsolicited offers to sell their homes. When the homeowners declined the offers, the real estate speculators threatened to report them to the City Schools of Decatur because grandchildren or nephews and nieces were living with them.

Such reports result in removal of the children from the school system and possible fines and criminal charges for the adults.

This brief clip (which isn’t part of the tour) has one woman telling me about the city’s successful effort to purge her granddaughter from the city’s schools.

https://youtu.be/QeUhQKyoJYQ

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Nate’s numbers joints

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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — attributed to Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar store isn’t a cigar store — #Mobsburgh

In our last #Mobsburgh outing we visited with the Mattes family and got to know Israel Mattes,

The Morning Herald, Monessen, Pa. march 6, 1948.

a former Pittsburgh police officer who became a bootlegger and gambler. Here, we are going to get to know his older brother, Nathan.

In this visit, we also are going to look at an important institution found in organized crime: the front business. Nathan Mattes’s story is an ideal window into how racketeers used “legitimate” businesses to hide or facilitate their illegal enterprises. You see, for a few years, he ran his numbers racket out of a downtown Pittsburgh cigar store. Law enforcement’s efforts in the 1940s to end his operation spanned several years and generated sensational headlines in the city’s newspapers. Continue reading →

Welcome to the neighborhood

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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.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Public history

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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.

 

https://youtu.be/Ejrf105uT1E

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.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Infrastructure and Social Justice

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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

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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

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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.

https://youtu.be/Ox3_gFjW1h8

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein