While researching African American communities in Montgomery County, Maryland, I visited several historic Black cemeteries and photographed the cultural landscapes and grave markers. This slideshow is a sample from that research.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
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?
Is there a new version of “The Plan” contemporary legend circulating in Bethesda, Maryland?
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Bethesda Beat screen capture.
A new report commissioned by the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is getting a lot of buzz. The report was prepared after Montgomery County Council President Nancy Navarro read one of my articles and called for the name to be changed at E. Brooke Lee Middle School. Why? Because Lee was the political boss and real estate speculator behind creating the Silver Spring sundown suburb. The current discussion about Montgomery County’s school names all stems from my 2017 article yet despite many calls and emails from parents, educators, and student journalists since its publication, not a single MCPS official has contacted me.
Among the gems in the new report:
Perhaps the most astonishing thing in the entire report was the recommendation that Silver Spring’s Frank L. Hewitt Sr. was a candidate to have a school named in his honor. According to a table appended to the narrative report, Hewitt was an “industrious and gifted businessman” whose contributions to social equity included collaborating with S. Brooke Lee:
Pushed for residence [sic.] locating in Silver Spring, finding places where people can live in the city. Along with E. Brooke Lee, important in the development of Silver Spring, MD’s modern residential infrastructure.
Yes, Hewitt was industrious. Like Lee, he was a prolific real estate speculator and community builder. He did indeed help found the Silver Spring Armory [segregated] and the Silver Spring National Bank [did not lend to African Americans, as my information to date shows]. As for the many individual house lots and residential subdivisions he sold, Hewitt, like Lee, attached noxious racially restrictive covenants. Here’s an example from a 1908 deed to a lot in R. Holt Easley’s subdivision prohibiting people of African descent from owning or renting it:
And here’s another one, this time executed in 1923:
Yep, let’s scrub E. Brooke Lee’s name and his Blair kin from the facades of Montgomery County’s schools and replace them with “industrious and gifted businessmen” like Frank L. Hewitt.
UPDATE: Read a more substantive review that I provided to several DC area reporters.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein
River Road Moses Cemetery site, Bethesda, Maryland.
The results of research into the history of Bethesda, Maryland’s River Road Moses Cemetery are presented in this report first released to the dispersed descendant community and government agencies in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. Now that all of the known stakeholders have a copy of the report, I am releasing it to the general public.
Some key findings presented in the report and deriving from the research:
When I transmitted the report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, the agency that owns most of the site, I offered recommendations for pursuing historic preservation and for working with the descendant community. Continue reading
Thank you for sharing your report. It illustrates how exhaustive and extensive your research has been. For me, the connection to both the River Road community and thereby the cemetery has brought about an investigation of sorts into how I am, who I am. — Geneva Nanette Hunter, September 2018
Over the past week I have emailed and delivered copies of the research that I conducted into the history and historical significance of the River Road Moses Cemetery. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the River Road Moses Cemetery is the final resting place for several hundred formerly enslaved and free people of African descent.
River Road Moses Cemetery site, Bethesda, Maryland.
The work initially was requested by the leadership of Macedonia Baptist Church and its activism partners operating as the “Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition.” At some point in August 2018, the church and its activism partners decided to pursue alternative research strategies in their efforts to preserve the site. Curiously, this so-called coalition never informed me about its decision. After almost a year of documentary research and oral history interviews, I completed the report and transmitted it to members of the descendant community, the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, and the Montgomery County Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office.
The research traces the cemetery’s history and the history of the Montgomery County, Maryland, African American hamlet where it relocated in 1911 from Northwest Washington, D.C. Founded in 1880 by a local subordinate order of a national African American benevolent organization, gentrification and anti-Black land use policies displaced the Washington graveyard and ultimately the entire community where it was established. Half a century later, the same forces erased the River Road community.
The D.C.-Md. Black Borderlands.
Because much of the story takes place in what are now Washington’s Chevy Chase and Tenleytown neighborhoods, there is a substantial amount of research on African American suburbs (planned and unplanned communities) that emerged in these spaces starting in the early 19th century. Collectively, these communities in Washington and Maryland comprise an area I am calling the “DC-MD Black Borderlands.” I introduced this concept earlier this year in a talk hosted by the D.C. Public Library and I will be presenting it in a paper at this year’s D.C. History Conference.
A “lost” 19th century Washington African American cemetery was one of several unanticipated discoveries. The cemetery’s location has now been mapped by the District’s Historic Preservation Office. “Your research adds needed data to the available information on this community,” wrote District Archaeologist Ruth Trocolli.
1899 letter to the proprietors of the Hebbons Cemetery. Courtesy of the District of Columbia Office of the Surveyor.
In addition to the descendant community, I also provided copies of the report to three Bethesda historians whose work first documented the cemetery and the River Road community after Montgomery County embarked on rewriting the sector plan where they are located. I cannot thank them enough, along with the descendant community, and the many archivists in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia who assisted me in this research.
Want to read the report the report? Click the link below:
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
Last month I contacted the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) archives with a query related to one of my projects. My query was in two parts. The first related to locating the source of photographs owned by the agency and which were reproduced in a book written by a longtime Montgomery County Parks Department historian based on his work for the agency and using agency materials. The photos published in the book contained no source citation beyond “MNCPPC Archives.”
Screen capture from Dwyer, Michael. Montgomery County (2006, Arcadia Publishing), page 45.
The second part of my query involved records related to the acquisition of properties to assemble a county park near Silver Spring. My request to the M-NPCPPC archives reads,
Records related to the acquisition of properties for the Northwest Branch Park. I am interested in records and correspondence related to complaints filed by property owner HYSON and his legal representative. The M-NCPPC acquired two parcels adjacent to Hyson’s in the 1950s (these are identified as “Parcel A” in Plat No. 4453 filed February 1956) and the M-NCPPC acquired Hyson’s property in 1972 (recorded in deed Liber 4325, folio 465, etc.). The tracts comprising “Parcel A” in the 1956 plat were partly recorded in the following deed, 1) Liber 2295, folio 302 (Wheeler to M-NCPPC, December 1956). The parcels were acquired forUnit 4 of the Northwest Branch Park.
Two weeks after submitting my query, I received an email from the Montgomery County Parks Department’s public information and customer service manager with a request that I immediately remit a $980 payment to cover half of the estimated staff services the agency calculated it would take to answer my query. The email included this letter:
Dumbstruck doesn’t come close to my reaction. I was flummoxed because of the price tag and, perhaps more importantly, how the agency’s response differed from a similar request that I had made two year earlier.
The difference I suspect has to do with the fact that over the past two years I have written articles critical of the agency. Back in 2016, I had not yet written about racially biased historic preservation practices and parks interpretation. I wonder if this arbitrary approach to responding to queries from the public is legal? I have some thoughts about whether it’s ethical. What do some of the journalists reading this think?
Ever since the Washington Post published my op-ed on Confederate monument removal last March, I have gotten quite a few calls and emails from Montgomery County residents about schools named for enslavers and white supremacists. The key passage in my 2017 op-ed reads,
But ditching a century-old memorial — celebrating a period long past, built by people long dead — doesn’t address other, more subtle markers of white supremacy, including the county’s legacy of segregated housing in residential subdivisions and apartment communities …
… One such example is Silver Spring’s E. Brooke Lee Middle School. Established in 1966, the school is named for Col. Edward Brooke Lee (1892-1984), a former Maryland secretary of state and a founder of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Lee was Lincoln confidant Francis Preston Blair’s great-grandson and the scion of a regional political dynasty. History books and academic articles uniformly describe him as the father of modern Silver Spring … As late as 1967, the septuagenarian was calling on residents to reject what he described as “Anti-White laws” that he perceived as a threat to the suburbs he built. “Desegregation is not the answer,” Lee wrote that spring…
Last month I was interviewed twice about Montgomery County’s school names, once by an area magazine reporter and the other time by the editor of the Watkins Mill High School newspaper. The high school student sent me a list of questions and he asked me to respond. His article was published today in the Gaithersburg school’s online paper, The Current.
Much of my interview didn’t make it into the final version. But, some curious comments about post-bellum white supremacists did, notably that their names were not included in the final list of schools that the student believes is problematic. About Montgomery Blair, the student wrote, “Montgomery Blair was not included in this article because there is evidence that Blair, despite growing up in a slave-owning family, never owned slaves himself.” One friend of mine on Facebook wrote about this slippery approach, “I love how Blair escaped the list.”
Reprinted below is the complete list of questions the student sent, along with my answers (in bold).
1. Do you think the county had knowledge of the history of these people before naming a high school after them?
Yes, I do believe that the County was aware that a number of prominent early citizens were enslavers. Add to that the people who came later who also were fervent white supremacists, like E. Brooke Lee (there is a middle school named for him).
2. Do you think that these names are a result of the time period when the schools were named?
Partly, yes. But I also believe that Montgomery County like other places throughout the nation has not fully sought the truth about our history nor have we sought ways to reconcile with a past that includes slavery and Jim Crow.
3. Why do you think the schools were named after people instead of the area in which they reside?
I can’t speak to the specific schools as to why they were named. But, there is a long history in the United States of naming public buildings after prominent white men.
4. Do you think that there was any significance in the choice to name Richard Montgomery High School after a slaveowner to distinguish it as a high school that, at the time, was separate from the “colored” Rockville high school?
Again, I can’t speak to the specifics because I have not researched school names in Montgomery County and the deliberations that went into them. For most of the 20th century, Montgomery County had two school systems: one for whites and the other for African Americans. To the best of my knowledge, none of the African American schools were named for people, e.g., African American community leaders. Instead, they typically were named for the community in which they were located (e.g., Takoma Park Colored School, River Road Colored School, etc.).
5.When the names were chosen do you think people would have realized this fact? And if they did, do you think they would have cared?
For most of Montgomery County’s history, it was a rigidly segregated and mainly agricultural county. The county was ruled by democratic political bosses who fought hard to keep schools, housing, and public places segregated. Because of the county’s culture, until the Cold War, any efforts to seek equity in public spaces would have been resisted. In 1948, for example, a group of more than 1,000 African American residents formed the Citizens Council for Mutual improvement and they petitioned county leaders to improve African American schools, provide water and sewer services to African American communities, and pave streets in those communities. They also asked that the Jim Crow signs be taken down in Rockville. Their requests went unanswered.
6. The current student body at Magruder is 55.6 percent minority. If the student body realized that their high school was named after a slaveowner, what kind of effect do you think it would have?
I think the conversation about the school’s namesake is an important one to have. Changing it is one option; another is adding educational information for students and the community about the school’s namesake. That is a decision that must be made by students and the community that the school serves. The status quo, though, is not preferable since it continues to celebrate an individual and a society that enslaved people and that created conditions for subsequent generations of poverty, discrimination, and diminished opportunities for many Montgomery County residents. As a Montgomery County resident, I see nothing worth celebrating among people who enslaved others. See my answer to no. 7 for more.
7. In your opinion, do you think that it is appropriate for these educational institutions to be named after former slave owners?
Perhaps. We can’t erase history but we can learn from it. For example, what did the enslavers do after the Civil War and during Reconstruction? Did they sell land to formerly enslaved people and enable them to build wealth as neighbors or did they cling to white supremacy and deny formerly enslaved people their civil rights? Many Montgomery County enslavers did the latter. In fact, the Blair family after the Civil War and as Reconstruction was starting bolted from Lincoln’s Republican Party back to the Democratic Party and they not only continued to embrace white supremacy and segregation but they also became active in the colonization movement which sought to relocate formerly enslaved people to Africa or the Caribbean and South America. There is nothing honorable worth celebrating among those people.
RALLY TO SAVE BETHESDA AFRICAN CEMETERY – SUNDAY, NOV 12TH -1:30PM
When: Sunday, November 12, 2017, 1:30—3:30 PM
Where: Macedonia Baptist Church, 5119 River Road, Bethesda, Maryland
For more information, visit the Save Bethesda African Cemetery page on Facebook.
Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, Nov. 1, 2017.
Possible Purple Line substation house. MTA photo.
The Purple Line is a proposed 16-mile light rail corridor. Once completed, it will link suburban communities north of the nation’s capital in Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. First proposed more than a decade ago, state officials breathed new life into the project in 2007 to connect Metro transit stations in New Carrolton and Bethesda as well as the business districts between the two communities.
Planning for the project, including engineering and environmental studies, are underway. Construction could begin as early as 2015 if funding is secured.
Purple Line route. MTA map.
The Purple Line will require multiple support structures and buildings, including 18 power substations, 14 signal bungalows (small buildings with radio and signal equipment), and a nine-story ventilation tower in Bethesda’s central business district. Residents who live along the proposed alignment told the Washington Post that they are concerned about potential impacts from the power facilities known as traction power substations. Continue reading
