Category Archives: History

Housing Opportunities Commission Statement

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Today I delivered a copy of the River Road Moses Cemetery report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission and I entered this statement into the public record.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES COMMISSION
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN

October 3, 2018

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein. I am a professional historian and ethnographer. I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and I have served on the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and other bodies in my capacity as an expert in historic preservation. I also previously was certified as a Registered Professional Archaeologist.

I have transmitted to you today a copy of a report I prepared for the descendant community affiliated with the River Road Moses Cemetery. Copies of the report and a completed Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties form also were provided to members of the descendant community, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Office, and the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office.

The report, which contains the results of nearly a year of documentary and oral history research, finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery meets four of nine criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The report also finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery site appears to meet three out of four criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property.

I am here today to urge the Housing Opportunities Commission to initiate designation proceedings under Chapter 24A of the Montgomery County Code. I also am recommending that the Commission, along with Mr. Harvey Matthews and other members of the dispersed descendant community in Montgomery County and Washington, as well as experts in African American history and folklife and other members of the community, form an advisory committee to determine the best stewardship for the site that also enables HOC to continue fulfilling its mission to provide affordable housing in Montgomery County.

Currently, advocacy for preservation of the cemetery site is vested with a small group of activists associated with Macedonia Baptist Church. That group does not reflect the breadth of the potential stakeholder population associated with a historic property located in Montgomery County, but which for all intents and purposes was a Washington, D.C., institution. Furthermore, based on the site’s history, it appears that whatever the number of actual interments in the cemetery, the majority likely were District of Columbia residents. This is an important site and an important issue and it deserves the utmost care and respect.

I am willing to meet with HOC staff to discuss this statement and the report and I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

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 →

The ghosts of covenants past

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What do longtime residents in the Washington metropolitan area think when they encounter signs with the name of a real estate firm with a long and complicated history. On River Road, just south of Bethesda’s Macedonia Baptist Church, there was a home for sale in early 2018 and a sign out front caught my eye as I was driving to a meeting at the church.

The real estate firm whose signs are found throughout Bethesda and Chevy Chase is one of several established by W.C. and A.N. Miller and their successors to subdivide land, build homes, and then sell them. The firm’s website traces its history to 1912; Maryland incorporation records show that one entity affiliated with its founders —the W.C. and A.N. Miller Development Co. — was formed in 1942.

I wonder if this firm (and its 20th century contemporaries still in business today) has ever been called to answer for its decades of discriminatory suburban residential development and the lingering effects those practices that are found throughout Montgomery County?

Typical W.C. and A.N. Miller racial restrictive deed covenant. This one was filed in 1947 for the sale of a residential property in the Sumner subdivision near Macedonia Baptist Church.

In the mid-1940s, the firm subdivided former agricultural properties southwest of River Road and began selling home sites. Each sale included this racially restrictive covenant: “No part of the land hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by or sold demised transferred conveyed unto or in trust for leased, or rented, or given to negroes or any person or persons of negro blood or extraction or to any persons of the Semitic race blood or origin which racial description shall be deemed to include Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians and Syrians except that this paragraph shall not be held to exclude partial occupancy of the premises by domestic servants ….”

More than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948, the Miller firm was still under fire for discriminatory housing practices. In the 1950s, open housing advocates repeatedly described the company’s role in housing discrimination in the Washington metropolitan area. Some of those accounts were memorialized in 1959 before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

 

When the District of Columbia was accepting bids for urban renewal in the city’s Southwest, people in 1961 queued up to testify in opposition to a Miller-affiliated firm receiving a construction contract. The chief claim was the Miller firm’s discrimination against “minority and racial groups,” the Washington Evening Star reported.

Washington Post headline, October 26, 1961.

Historians who study twentieth century housing and discrimination aren’t the only people who can see the contemporary signs and connect them to Montgomery County’s racialized housing past. Harvey Matthews, an African American man who grew up on River Road in the 1950s, still has strong memories of the firm and its founders more than half a century after his family was displaced.

Harvey Matthews, November 2017.

“I can’t think of any home that through my teenage days that a black person owned that W.C. Miller built,” Harvey said. “I think that was one of his codes of not selling his homes that he built to black families.”

Even if the Millers did sell to African Americans, income inequality and area African Americans’ inability to accumulate wealth would have prevented many from even considering living in a Miller subdivision. “Black folks had less because they didn’t really have to deal with W.C. Miller. We couldn’t afford any of his homes or nothing like that,” Harvey recalled.

The company’s discrimination against African Americans, Jews, and others wasn’t just limited to home sales, Matthews explained. “He [Miller] didn’t hire blacks to do any of his painting or any of his home remodeling or building his homes while he was building his homes.” Harvey also said, “Every once in a while we thought that we could do some of his labor work and that was rare because he didn’t maintain a black workforce or blacks in his workforce back during that time.”

This is the history of housing and suburbanization in Montgomery County. It’s a history with which there has been no reconciliation, no reparations, and no justice for the survivors like Harvey Matthews and the other children of Montgomery County’s African American communities.

Note: Originally published on the Save Bethesda African Cemetery Facebook page.

Death and displacement

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Concrete grave marker in an abandoned African American cemetery, Montgomery County, Maryland.

My latest article for The Activist History Review explores more than a century of serial displacement in two Washington area neighborhoods with a common connection: Bethesda’a Moses Cemetery.

People who lived in communities destroyed by urban renewal and gentrification frequently frame their narratives about displacement as theft. Their homes, businesses, and churches, they believe are stolen by capitalism. Spaces for the dead are among those stolen and erased.

For the rest of the story, read The Moses Cemetery: Where Serial Displacement Meets History.

© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein

Ada Dupree and the Moses Cemetery: stories linked by race

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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 →

The uses and abuses of diversity in Decatur, Georgia

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Earlier this year, the National League of Cities named Decatur, Georgia, a 2017 winner in its City Cultural Diversity Awards program. The membership organization then gave Decatur a platform on its website to describe the municipal program for which the award was given. The June 2017 CitiesSpeak blog article written was by Linda Harris, an employee in the city’s economic development department and one of the Atlanta suburb’s chief spokespersons. It detailed initiatives that the suburban Atlanta city began after a confluence of events spotlighting race-related tensions forced municipal leaders to confront diversity and inclusion. The CitiesSpeak article described Decatur’s “Better Together”

Decatur Square, 2016.

initiative and its objectives to increase community engagement and to introduce more diversity to spaces where civic issues, from affordable housing to police racial profiling, are discussed and decided.

Gentrification is one word missing from the Decatur article. And, perhaps more importantly, the city’s key role in creating an environment that promotes gentrification, displacement, and inequity is conspicuously absent from the CitiesSpeak essay and other city-produced and promoted narratives about the Better Together initiative. Continue reading →

The hidden costs of relocating Confederate statues

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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

Producing art in spaces of change

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For this year’s Delta Symposium at Arkansas State University I collaborated with two University of Arkansas professors on a panel titled “Producing Art in Spaces of Change.” The panel drew from my work in Washington, D.C., and Decatur, Ga. Dr. Robin Roberts (University of Arkansas Dept. of English) and Les Wade (University of Arkansas Dept. of Theatre) spoke about their work in gentrifying New Orleans neighborhoods post-Katrina. Dr. Richard Burns (Arkansas State Dept. of English and Philosophy) moderated the panel.

Delta Symposium panel (left to right): Dr. David Rotenstein, Dr. Robin Roberts, Dr. Les Wade, and Dr. Richard Burns. Photo courtesy of Richard Burns.

Our panel was about displacement and the creative responses to it that emerge in neighborhoods where it occurs. Here is our panel’s abstract:

Displacement is a violent process that involuntarily separates people from their homes, neighbors, families, and essential social networks. This panel examines artistic production in two Southern cities with histories of displacement and substantial communities of color, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

Both cities in the twentieth century became majority African American and by the turn of the twenty-first century both had begun inverting demographically. In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and subsequent rebuilding efforts were key displacement catalysts. Washington’s historically black neighborhoods are rapidly changing through gentrification.

Two scholars explore artistic production in New Orleans. Robin Roberts drills down into the economic and social changes affecting communities with long histories of Mardi Gras participation and how residents respond to and resist change. Les Wade examines cultural changes in the Treme neighborhood, hard-hit by Katrina and memorialized in popular culture by the HBO series.

David Rotenstein unpacks an urban legend found in African American neighborhoods throughout North America and long associated with the District of Columbia, “The Plan,” and its jump from black homes, churches, and barbershops into the African American press, mainstream white media, and academic literature.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s Delta Symposium. I plan to pitch a paper on heritage tourism in Helena, Arkansas, where contemporary residents are struggling to find the right mix of history and tourism to reboot the local economy.

Cherry Street Historic District, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Abandoned motel, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Cherry Street Historic District, downtown Helena, Arkansas.

Understanding racial profiling

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Gentrified Oakhurst neighborhood in Decatur, Ga.

For more than 30 years I have gone uninvited into many neighborhoods in more than 20 states, first as an archaeologist and later as a historian. Whether it was a wealthy white neighborhood or a poor African American neighborhood, one thing was constant: no one ever looked out a window, saw a suspicious white man, and called the police.

Last week I was photographing “sit-down” restaurants east of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. The District’s seventh and eighth wards have the highest concentrations of poverty in the nation’s capital. Neighborhoods like Deanwood, Anacostia, and Congress Heights since the 1940s have become the city’s sink for African Americans displaced by urban renewal and gentrification. Continue reading →

Screwed blues, screwed journalism

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Last year, Philadelphia City Paper folded after 34 years in print. I read it religiously while I attended the University of Pennsylvania. I was excited when I got a chance to write for the weekly — almost as much as I was when I got my first Philadelphia Inquirer byline four months earlier.

And, I was devastated when I read that it was going out of print.

My disappointment stemmed partly from nostalgia and partly from concerns about the future of local news reporting. As local news reporting organizations are disappearing, so too are their roles informing people and holding public officials accountable for their actions. As a historian, I also was concerned about what the closures meant for online newspaper archives and for what’s popularly known as history’s first draft. Continue reading →