Introducing a series of story maps that document how Silver Spring, Maryland, became a sundown suburb.
© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein
Creating the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb
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Category Archives: Silver Spring
Mother Jones in Suburban Maryland: Folklore and History
Photograph shows labor activist Mother Jones in New York City, 1915. Library of Congress photo.
Thanks to the Internet and an endless stream of on-this-day (#OTD) social media posts, ordinary people are never far from history. Such is the case of my friend Glyn Robbins, a UK social justice activist and scholar immersed in housing and labor history and practice. Glyn recently read a post commemorating the anniversary of the death of 20th century labor activist Marry Harris “Mother” Jones (1830-1930).
Mother Jones emigrated to Canada from her native Ireland as a child. As an adult she worked as a schoolteacher and seamstress in Michigan and Chicago. In 1861, Harris married an ironworker and union member George Jones. In the 1870s, she began attending labor meetings and she became increasingly vocal.
Over the next several decades, Mother Jones traveled widely speaking on behalf of workers and supporting their demands for fair wages, hours, and working conditions. For more on Mother Jones, visit the Mother Jones Museum website for a curated collection of links and stories about her life,
“I didn’t know she was buried near you,” he wrote to me on Facebook. “I was told by local labor movement folk that Mother Jones is buried near Silver Spring.” He included a link to an Irish news article titled, “Remembering Irish-born Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones on the anniversary of her death.”
Naturally, I got a little curious. I knew that she had spent her last years in the Washington, D.C., area. But, my familiarity with the Mother Jones story didn’t go too deeply into her personal life. My friend’s message got me to thinking: If Mother Jones did die in Silver Spring, where is the site? Was she really buried here? A warm late fall day and some spare time after doing research at the Library of Congress gave me the cover I need to pursue a little extra-curricular research. Continue reading
Is the Purple Line a pig in a poke?
Purple Line construction sign.
Some Montgomery County, Maryland, residents think they’ve been sold a pig in a poke as far as the Purple Line is concerned. Early on, they enthusiastically supported the 16-mile light rail project linking Langley Park and Bethesda. But after construction started and some of the short- and long-term impacts began appearing, their opinions changed.
Whether it’s the observant Jews who will lose a key walking route to synagogue or the homeowners whose new neighbors include piles of cut trees, trash, and vermin, one thing has become clear ever since construction began in 2017: the new light rail line has a bigger price tag than Maryland transportation officials told people during nearly 30 years of planning.
“Under any circumstances where construction is taking place, you have to expect a level of inconvenience for a window of time,” said Leslie Herrera, a Silver Spring resident whose house abuts the Purple Line corridor in Lyttonsville. Once a big Purple Line advocate, Herrera has soured on the project.
She cites the piles of cut trees, trash, and animals, and unresponsive Purple Line officials as the reasons. “I’ve been to all of the meetings but one and it’s generally the same. It’s generally the same. They say they’ll get back to you. You call, no answer. No call back,” she said while standing near a clear-cut lot next to her home.
Cut trees, debris piles, and trash in the Purple Line clearcut corridor behind homes along Pennsylvania Avenue in Silver Spring’s Lyttonsville neighborhood.
Tastee Diner’s secret historic menu
Tastee Diner, Silver Spring, Maryland.
It’s well known that the most exclusive restaurants have special menus with items reserved for well-heeled and well-connected patrons. These special people dine on dishes carefully prepared by chefs not line cooks. During its earliest years in business, the Tastee Diner had its own special menu of sorts. Not only that, the Silver Spring, Maryland, eatery also had a special cover charge. Entry and seating were free for white folks; the admission price for people of color was astronomically high: it was the color of their skin.
The Silver Spring Historical Society celebrates the Tastee Diner in its books, blog posts, walking tours, and other public programs. The group talks about the community’s nostalgia for the diner and how Silver Spring mobilized to “save” and move the diner when downtown redevelopment threatened it nearly 20 years ago.
Earlier this week the Silver Spring Historical Society posted on its facebook page, “A local high school student will be utilizing SSHS’s collection of materials about Tastee Diner for a school project.”
Silver Spring Historical Society Facebook page screen capture, October 12, 2018.
I wonder if the historical society will tell the high school student about the diner’s special menu, the one with prices that people of color could never pay. I wonder if this exercise in nostalgia economics will include scholarship by historians who have explored Tastee Diner’s special menu, the one that historian Andrew Hurley wrote about in 2002:
Segregated service was by no means exclusive to diners located in the Deep South. Luncheonettes, coffee shops, and diners in the Middle Atlantic and midwestern states resorted to many of the same practices that prevailed in the old Confederacy. Eddie Warner, for instance, ran a chain of diners in suburban Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Warner instructed his employees to notify black patrons that they could not be served inside the diner, but that take-out service was available. Warner made no exception for the African-American cooks and dishwashers he hired periodically. Company policy dictated that they take their meals alone in the back kitchen. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2002, pp. 88-89.
Today’s Tastee Diner clientele looks nothing like its Jim Crow-era predecessors. The restaurant is a popular eatery and meeting place for people of all races and cultural backgrounds — mostly. A decade ago, the Tastee Diner faced and overcame allegations that it discriminated against LGBTQ diners. The discriminatory practices leading to episodes between 2009 and 2011 appear to have been abandoned and mostly forgotten. Yet, when I did Black History tours in downtown Silver Spring, people who recalled them made sure that I mentioned them as we met across from the restaurant.
So who is making sure that Montgomery County students using the Silver Spring Historical Society as an educational resource are getting real history, not fake whitewashed history? How are parents and educators to know whether the history lessons about menus and economies at the historic eatery will include the hidden charges not published in the historic menus.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
Racial restrictive covenants renounced at celebration
I began describing Silver Spring, Maryland, as a “sundown suburb” two years ago in articles and in public talks. My research has identified more than 50 residential subdivisions covering about 10 square miles next to Washington, D.C. that had racially restrictive covenants attached to them between c. 1904 and 1948. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the covenants were unenforceable in the courts, whites used other tools to keep their communities free from African Americans (and Jews): steering, redlining, gentlemen’s agreements, club memberships, etc.
North Woodside is part of the historic Silver Spring sundown suburb. In the early 20th century subdivisions filled in the former farmland east of the B&O Railroad tracks and the Talbot Avenue Bridge. Like many of its counterparts, early landowners attached racially restrictive covenants to their properties prohibiting African Americans from living there — unless they were domestic servants.
David Cox wipes away tears during an emotional statement renouncing his neighborhood’s use of racially restrictive deed covenants.
At the Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial celebration September 22, 2018, a remarkable thing happened. David Cox, the current president of the North Woodside-Montgomery Hills Civic Association made an emotional statement renouncing the anti-Black racism that kept his neighborhood all-white for much of the twentieth century. Cox affirmed North Woodside’s new bonds with the community “on the other side of the tracks,” Lyttonsville, Cox read a resolution unanimously approved by his neighborhood association’s board of directors.
Racially restrictive covenant included in a deed for the sale of a lot in Silver Spring’s North Woodside neighborhood, November 16, 1923.
After reading a racially restrictive covenant attached to a North Woodside deed in 1923, he said, “it is evidence that at one time, people in my neighborhood were interested in keeping it white.” Cox became emotional and as he regained his composure, he said, “My wife says I cry at McDonald’s commercials.He also acknowledged that the practice wasn’t limited to his neighborhood and that it was common throughout Silver Spring. “The tracks between our neighborhood and Lyttonsville were a dividing line between black and white spaces. Racially restrictive deed covenants enabled and perpetuated racial segregation and even after these restrictions were outlawed, the social dynamics caused by such patterns continued.”
Lyttonsville’s Charlotte Coffield (front) and North Woodside’s Anna White.
North Woodside neighbors worked closely with Lyttonsville residents and others to plan and produce the Talbot Avenue Bridge celebration. “Over time, of course, neighborhood change,” Cox said. “And we think North Woodside has changed for the better. I believe our community is a welcoming place.” He added
Over the past several years, our civic association has worked in collaboration with the civic associations of Lyttonsville and Rosemary Hills on issues associated with the bridge … we have advocated together at meetings. I hope we have started to build a level of trust. We want that spirit of trust and connection to continue and desire that it should extend beyond the work we are already doing on these issues to encompass social gatherings such as this centennial celebration.
Thank you David Cox and the people of North Woodside for taking this historic step.
Read the complete resolution here:
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
100 candles: Silver Spring is throwing a birthday party for a bridge
Three Silver Spring neighborhoods are teaming up to throw a birthday party for a bridge Saturday September 22. The Talbot Avenue Bridge turns 100 this year and it is slated for demolition next year to make way for a new structure over the Purple Line. For most of its history, the bridge was a vital link connecting historically Black Lyttonsville with Silver Spring and Washington.
Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial celebration being promoted on two “jumbotron” screens in downtown Silver Spring the week before the event.
The celebration at the bridge over the CSX Railroad tracks near Rosemary Hills Elementary School features musical performances by the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices and singer-songwriter Lea. Speakers from all three neighborhoods will talk about their experiences living there. There will be a student art show, African drumming, a libation ceremony, and pies and other sweets contributed by neighbors. County Executive Isiah Leggett will be there to present a proclamation declaring it Talbot Avenue Bridge Day. Continue reading
The Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial
Several Silver Spring, Maryland, neighborhoods are planning a huge celebration to mark the Talbot Avenue Bridge’s centennial. Slated for demolition in 2019, the bridge is a significant civil rights landmark. The free September 22 event is open to the public and it will include musical performances by the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices and local Silver Spring musicians, drumming, artwork, the Talbot Avenue Bridge Pop-Up Museum, food and much more.
For more information about the bridge and the event and to volunteer or donate to help defray the costs for performers and equipment, please visit the Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial website.
How a bridge closing underscores need for local journalism
Yesterday evening, the Purple Line Transit Partners and Montgomery County’s Department of Transportation closed the Lyttonsville Place Bridge. The six-month closure will allow for the demolition and reconstruction of a new bridge to accommodate the Purple Line light rail.
Though local news outlets have covered the controversial bridge closing for the past several months, not a single journalist has written about Lyttonsville residents’ claims that the bridge closure and a detour using a street closed during urban renewal in the 1970s is environmental racism. And, no journalists have covered the community’s search for a civil rights lawyer to take up their claim that the detour and bridge closing violate the National Environmental Policy Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by introducing impacts to the community that should have been evaluated under the law’s environmental justice requirements. Continue reading
Environmental racism along the Purple Line
Not a single length of track has yet been laid for Maryland’s new suburban light rail line, the Purple Line, yet there already are complaints of environmental racism coming from the historically African American Lyttonsville community. Though much of the environmental/social justice and equity concerns about the Purple Line have focused on displacement once the line opens, virtually no attention has been focused on the externalities communities like Lyttonsville are bearing during the construction phase.
Over the past few weeks, the entity selected to build the Purple Line (Purple Line Transit Partners), the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the impacts of closing the Lyttonsville Place Bridge, a structure spanning the new Purple Line corridor (an abandoned former B&O industrial railroad line) connecting Brookville Road and the Lyttonsville community. Lyttonsville has been partially isolated since April 2017 when the Montgomery County DOT declared the historic Talbot Avenue Bridge unsafe and closed it. If the Lyttonsville Place Bridge is closed (for up to six months, according to transportation officials), that will leave Lyttonsville residents and emergency responders with limited options for entering and leaving the community.
The Past is Prologue
Denise Watkins, facilitator, opens the April 3, 2018 Purple Line community meeting.
Silver Spring’s history is racially biased. Let’s fix it.
Panel discusses “Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb,” September 2017. Left to right, Jerry McCoy (Silver Spring Historical Society), Walter Gottlieb (filmmaker), and Todd Hitchcock (AFI Silver Program Director).
For the past six years I have taken a deep dive into how communities produce history and historic preservation. Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia, are inner ring suburbs with similar development histories and comparable historiographies. In both places, like many others throughout North America, white (oftentimes male) histories and historic places are preserved and narrate while people of color are omitted or marginalized.
I have written about both places here and in history and planning publications. My community’s history is racist. How can I correct it? recently was published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog.. The article recounts my community’s efforts to reframe how history and historic preservation are produced to create a more accurate and inclusive record. Continue reading