Incurious and lazy historians

It’s a thing.

One example I’ve been sitting on for a while is the Montgomery County, Maryland, Planning Department’s study of racially restrictive deed covenants and housing discrimination. This screenshot from the agency’s 2023 report shows a discussion of a Black physician’s efforts to buy a home in Silver Spring in the early 1960s.

Screenshot, “Working Draft of the Mapping Segregation Report,” pp. 27-28.

The report’s authors didn’t bother to learn that this home described in their report was still owned by the family and that the doctor’s daughter was married to the son of a Tulsa race massacre survivor and leading voice in Black history: John Hope Franklin.

There’s lots more missing from the report, but that’s a story for another day.

Are there any Black history sites in downtown Silver Spring, Md.?

Earlier this week a Silver Spring, MD, community group hosted a virtual talk on historic preservation in Montgomery County. Eileen McGuckian (a former Historic Preservation Commission chair and president of a countywide preservation organization, Montgomery Preservation) spoke for about an hour and then took questions.

One Silver Spring resident asked McGuckian if there were any Black history sites in downtown Silver Spring. This video clip captures the exchange.

(Video clip is from the Zoom recording posted by Silver Spring Town Center, Inc.)

Spoiler alert: contrary to McGuckian’s answer, there are many Black history sites in the area covered by the question. In fact, the Montgomery County Planning Department recently released a short video about a new marker commemorating one of them:

All the news that’s missing

How can a self-styled publisher/editor/reporter have “One Of The Oldest Women In The World” living in his community of only 20,000 people and not know it?

Or, how did the Washington Post and suburban news outlets miss what the residents in a historically Black community were telling them for years about an old bridge?

I am looking for sources who can speak to the role journalism plays in gentrification and erasure. Have a story? Let’s talk.

Memories of Silver Spring’s Doughnut Shop

Last week, the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) invited its Facebook audience to share stories about a donut shop. The society (which really isn’t a society; it’s four boomer building huggers) is short on history and steeped in nostalgia that celebrates the white supremacists who “built” Silver Spring and erases Black history. This post accepts the historical society’s request for “specific memories” of the site.

Silver Spring Historical Society Facebook post, June 3, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/sshistory/posts/2274102266087989

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Silver Spring video shorts: Acorn Park

This is the third of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first two covered Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner and Crivella’s Wayside Inn.

This clip features a site in Silver Spring where the community’s Jim Crow history was erased. The “Silver Spring Memory Wall” is a five-mural installation next to Acorn Park. It is the product of historic preservation and planning decisions made in the 1990s to tell Silver Spring’s history through public art.

Those murals present a nostalgic view of Silver Spring history that glosses over its decades as a sundown suburb. It also intentionally sought to ameliorate the absence of Blacks from public places in the twentieth century by replacing white people with African Americans in a depiction of Silver Spring’s train station in the 1940s.

Silver Spring Memory Wall, B&O Railroad Station mural.

Former Washington, D.C., muralist Mame Cohalan (who died in 2020) recognized that the historic photos she was using were missing Black people. She asked her Montgomery County clients for permission to add some diversity — Black people — into the artwork. The resulting mural erased Silver Spring’s Jim Crow history by inserting Black people into a place and time where they otherwise never would have been found.

1994 Montgomery County Planning Department memo asking permission to add more “cultural diversity” to Memory Wall murals.

This clip tells the Acorn Park and Silver Spring Memory Wall story.

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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

Silver Spring video shorts: Crivella’s Wayside Inn

This is the second of three posts featuring short video segments produced over the summer for AmeriCorps. The first in this series featured nostalgia and Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner.

This clip visits the site where Crivella’s Wayside Inn operated for several decades in the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, its owners refused to integrate the restaurant’s dining room — even after Montgomery County enacted an open accommodations law. Years of civil rights protests and litigation ensued. Montgomery County later bought the property and demolished the building, foreclosing on opportunities to commemorate the civil rights era and Silver Spring’s Black history. County leaders could have celebrated the life of civil rights icon Roscoe Nix; instead, they rebranded the space “Bottleworks Lane” to commemorate two historic bottling plants nearby.

This clip focusing on Crivella’s tells some of this story.

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© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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

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 Orderto 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

Infrastructure and Social Justice

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.

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Fenced Out: Enclosure and Racism in Montgomery County, Maryland

This is a dispatch from deep within the enforced social distancing imposed by the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

In 2006, a Montgomery County, Maryland, homeowner placed a chain across an unnamed and unsurfaced road to restrict access to her subdivision. Known locally as “Farm Road,” the narrow corridor provided access to a small African American community settled during Reconstruction. The Farm Road case became the latest example in the suburban Washington, D.C., county of more than a million people where whites have closed off roads leading to Black homes.

Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission “Address Book.” Addresses crossed out in the right portion of the map are along the “Farm Road.”

Farm Road, 2016.

Though Farm Road has received a lot of attention since 2006, the other cases of exclusionary enclosure in Montgomery County are less well known. This post explores a few other examples that antedate Farm Road.

The Hyson homestead in the Burnt Mills part of Silver Spring and the Jackson family driveway fence are two known precedents that likely represent a much larger sample of episodes where white folks erected barriers to Black spaces. I learned about these two examples during interviews about African American hamlets that I conducted between 2016 and 2018. This post is derived from those interviews and from the limited documentary evidence that survives. Continue reading

“Black lives matter, alive or dead”

“Black lives matter, alive or dead” — poet Siki Dlanga

South African poet Siki Dlanga and rally organizer Laurel Hoa. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Several dozen people participated in a rally and march to support the recognition and preservation of the Moses Cemetery in Bethesda, Maryland. The cemetery initially was founded in the 1880s a nearby District of Columbia neighborhood. Continue reading