Tag Archives: History

Where are the pictures?

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I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

The Crawford Grill No. 2 and the danger of a single story [updated]

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Introduction

Most Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents recognize the building on the northwest corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street as the Crawford Grill No. 2. That’s the name that the most visible business in the building went by for half a century and that’s the name that historic preservationists used in 2019 to nominate the property to the National Register of Historic Places.[1]

2141 Wylie Avenue, Pittsburgh. October 2019.

The Crawford Grill No. 2 isn’t a bad name for the building. It fits, considering how long the nightclub occupied the space. But because historic preservationists have focused on the building’s time as the Crawford Grill No. 2 and the people who owned it between 1945 and 2003, there’s a lot missing from the building’s story. The historic preservation narrative, which closely hews to previously published texts documenting the building’s colorful time as an internationally renowned jazz club, conforms to what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”

The “single story,” according to Adichie, flattens experience and they encourage stereotypes: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

This post offers some additional storylines to the three-story brick building at 2141 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. I need to be up front about how I ended up reading the draft National Register nomination for the property. In August 2019 I began a research project stemming from my work on a book about erasure and gentrification in an Atlanta suburb. I had been studying numbers gambling in urban and suburban areas since 2015.

[A quick primer on numbers gambling offsite source]

Numbers slips confiscated in 1930 by Pittsburgh police in the city’s North Side. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 1930.

Histories of the Hill District became essential reading and I took advantage of local archival resources after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2019. While reading some of the Hill District work I went down a research rabbit hole pursuing questions around the intersection of history and folklore in Hill District vice. The light on the other end of the rabbit hole led me to begin conversations with a university press about a book on the history of Pittsburgh numbers gambling rackets. But that’s a story for another place and another time. The remainder of this post focuses on 2141 Wylie Avenue and some of its other stories.

Continue reading →

Welcome to “Mobsburgh”: Morris Kauffman’s last ride

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Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.

The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.

Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.

Wendover Apartments, Squirrel Hill, December 2019.

The Baltimore evening Sun, May 23, 1934. Source: newspapers.com

Continue reading →

Ghosts and gangsters: 1129 Ridge Avenue, “America’s Most Haunted House”

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Screen capture, 13 Creepy Pittsburgh Ghost Stories, www.pittsburghbeautiful.com

While researching organized crime in Pittsburgh I stumbled upon a colossal haunted house story. My work documenting the history of a Pittsburgh family with two generations of bootleggers and numbers racketeers inadvertently led me to 1129 Ridge Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood. The family I am researching was associated with the family that owned 1129 Ridge Avenue for more than 30 years.

By the last decades of the twentieth century, stories attached to the property had earned 1129 Ridge Avenue the dubious title, “America’s most haunted house.” This post, which began as an article for a community newspaper, documents how a modest 1880s home became fodder for decades of contemporary legends. Continue reading →

Frank L. Hewitt Sr. High School?

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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:

  1. MCPS relied on Montgomery History (formerly the Montgomery County Historical Society) as an expert source. There’s only one problem: Montgomery History continues to produce racist and tokenized histories of Montgomery County.
  2. The report has some serious credibility issues. For example, though the authors recognized that Montgomery Blair’s family owned slaves, they highlighted some mitigating information: Blair’s contributions promoting equity included, “Though Blair had attended Democratic Party national conventions as a delegate in the 1840s, he switched to the Free Soil Party and then the Republican Party as a result of his anti-slavery stance. As an attorney, Blair took on a highly prominent Supreme Court case in 1857 when he represented Dred Scott, an African-American citizen who petitioned for freedom from slavery.” I guess they forgot to read any of the histories documenting Blair’s opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation or his staunch white supremacist position that formerly enslaved Africans needed to live somewhere other than the United States (it was called “colonization”). Yes, Blair hated slavery on moral grounds, but he also didn’t want to have people of African Americans living near him.
  3. For a report produced by a public school system, it’s kind of appalling that they misspelled a few historical figures’ names: C. Everett Koop (spelled “Coop” in the report) and Frederick Douglass (spelled “Douglas” in the 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

Mother Jones in Suburban Maryland: Folklore and History

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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 →

Tastee Diner’s secret historic menu

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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

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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

 

 

 

Renaming Montgomery County schools

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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.

The Talbot Avenue Bridge

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The Talbot Avenue Bridge has probably taken on a life of its own — Charlotte A. Coffield, July 19, 2017

It has been a year since I first wrote about Silver Spring’s Talbot Avenue Bridge. In that time, many Silver Spring residents have learned that the bridge is much more than some old metal and wood. Most Silver Spring residents only thought about it as: A) a way to cross the CSX Railroad tracks; or, B) a nuisance (or “junk” as one graffiti tagger recently wrote).

Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Recently lifelong Lyttonsville neighborhood resident Charlotte Coffield has taken to saying that the bridge now has “a life of its own.” Since I first wrote about it last September, the bridge been featured in the Washington Post, in broadcast/local access news stories, a documentary video, a Facebook page, a UK social justice activist’s blog (twice), and now an acoustic guitar tune.

Jay Elvove on the Talbot Avenue Bridge as a CSX train passes beneath, September 24, 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Elvove’s performance capped off a program held Sunday afternoon, September 24, 2017 that was sponsored by the Presidents’ Council of Silver Spring Civic Associations (Prezco). I was invited to speak about the history of Silver Spring as a sundown suburb and the African American hamlet of Lyttonsville. About 50 people attended the program in unseasonably hot 92-degree weather.

Public historian dressed for the occasion. Photo by Jay Mallin.

“Standing here in the center of the Talbot Avenue Bridge, there is no other side of the tracks, ” I began my 30-minute talk. “From the center of this bridge, everywhere is the other side of the tracks.”

Charlotte Coffield talks about Lyttonsville and the Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 24, 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.

The Talbot Avenue Bridge is an endangered site of conscience where the people gathered there last Sunday could hear about its history, take in its visual and aural environments, and touch an artifact that once connected two communities divided by race and the railroad tracks. The newfound social connections to the bridge and attachments add new urgency to the community’s efforts to ensure some sort of preservation, whether it’s in place at the crossing or elsewhere in the community.

Photo of Prezco program participants taken by a passing cyclist. Courtesy of Alan Bowser.

A resident who lives in the formerly all-white community, North Woodside, and who attended the program wrote to me afterwards that she now has, “a great affection for Talbot bridge (that has deepened further upon learning more about its history).” Her comments are typical of what people now tell me when I speak about the bridge and Silver Spring history.

This research and subsequent public interest in the Talbot Avenue Bridge is what I call true public history.

Postscript: I would like to thank Alan Bowser for organizing the program and for inviting me to speak. Alan and Prezco leader Valarie Barr plus nearby residents Charlotte Coffield and Patricia Tyson did most of the heavy lifting to make the program a success.

Talbot Avenue Bridge approach. Photo by David Rotenstein.

© 2017 D.S. Rotenstein