Tag Archives: racism

A stroll through Schenley Farms

Posted on by
Reply

Last month we signed up for a walking tour of Schenley Farms, a historic subdivision in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. A local historic preservation group organized the tour and charged participants $20 per ticket; a Schenley Farms resident led the tour. Full disclosure: I’m a veteran walking tour consumer and I design and lead tours professionally. We had low expectations going into the tour and 90 minutes after it began and we walked away in disbelief that it was much worse than we anticipated.

This isn’t the place to pile onto an amateur tour guide or the tone-deaf and obsolete historic preservation organization behind the tour. Instead, it’s where I want to reflect on what was in the tour and what was missing.

What the tour had was lots of celebratory history about the wonderful white real estate developers, architects, and homeowners whose names are indelibly attached to the neighborhood. These included former university presidents, food company executives, and a popular amusement park founder.

Continue reading →

Today on City Cast Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh’s racist real estate history

Posted on by
Reply

I’m on today’s City Cast Pittsburgh talking about racism and real estate. One of the takeaways from my PublicSource reporting was that unlike other places, so far the only racial and ethnic exclusions that I have identified in Pittsburgh area deeds exclude Black people from buying and renting homes. All of the deeds with racially restrictive deed covenants that I sampled for the PublicSource investigation were limited to people of African descent.

Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1940 for a Sewickley subdivision.
Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in 1929 for a McCandless Township subdivision.

These examples from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the DC suburbs show a laundry list of racist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic exclusions.

Deed filed in Erie County, Pennsylvania, in 1924 with racial and ethnic exclusions.
Deed filed in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1947 with racial and ethnic exclusions.

I make the point in the City Cast podcast that Pittsburgh’s racially restrictive deed covenants underscore the metropolitan area’s historical and contemporary racism that led to Southern Black migrants dubbing Pittsburgh the “Mississippi of the North.”

Listen to the complete City Cast podcast here:

The Whitewash

Posted on by
Reply

In the spring of 2021, a group of Decatur, Ga., residents approached local institutions with a request for information about the history of Juneteenth in the city. They wrote to the DeKalb History Center and to city officials, including assistant city manager Linda Harris.

Harris replied to an initial query by directing the group to the City’s “Historic Decatur” web page and to a page dedicated to the history of Decatur’s erased Beacon community. It’s curious that Harris would direct someone asking about Black history in Decatur to the “Historic Decatur” page because the information there only discusses white history and Black history is completely absent. In fact, the page is such a clearcut example of whitewashed history that I use in in my lectures, one as recently as August 6, 2022.

Slide used in Black history presentation delivered at Berry College, Rome, Ga., Aug. 6, 2022.
Continue reading →

A Decatur, Georgia, Recap

Posted on by
Reply

Professional accomplishments directly resulting from my research in and about Decatur, Georgia, 2011-2023. No, it’s not a game.

September 6, 2023: “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb.” The Metropole (Urban History Association blog).

April 24, 2023: “Our Missing Middle Housing Didn’t Just Go Missing. It Was Torn Down.” Next City.

August 6, 2022: “Heirs, History, and Land: Recovering and Conserving Black Spaces and Stories.” Featured presentation, Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot Family Reunion and Historical Marker Unveiling, Berry College, Rome, Georgia. (Delivered remotely.)

July 2022: Agnes Scott College is awarded a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant to conduct research, community engagement, and develop curriculum on race and racism in Decatur, Ga. The grant application relied on my research; the institution wrote that if the grant is awarded that the college would seek to hire me as a researcher and adjunct professor. It would have been nice if Agnes Scott College had consulted with me prior to using my name and my credentials in the application. Needless to say, I did not collaborate with Agnes Scott College on its project.

Continue reading →

Memories of Silver Spring’s Doughnut Shop

Posted on by
Reply

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

Continue reading →

Decolonize Decatur

Posted on by
Reply

In 2015, the City of Decatur, Georgia, opened a new Black history “museum” in the Beacon Municipal Complex, the site of two historic African American schools the city demolished two years earlier. The Champion, a DeKalb County newspaper, reported on the complex opening: “The center is built on the site of the historic Black Herring Street, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High Schools. The center includes a museum that features exhibits on the history of the Beacon community.”

There’s much to be said about the “history” presented in the “museum.” The City is proud of its efforts to “preserve” Black history. “Decatur has taken steps in recent years to preserve the history of the Beacon community and to honor its spirit,” one City website proclaims. Some Black residents, however, are outraged by the many gaps and errors in the City’s story told at the Beacon complex.

The Beacon exhibits are the culmination of a century of displacement and erasure that began with the creation of a Black ghetto in downtown in the first decades of the 20th century. It continued with successive stages of slum clearance and urban renewal between 1940 and 1970. And, it continues today with large-scale public-sector redevelopment projects and gentrification. Perhaps no document better illustrates the ways that the City of Decatur has erased Black people and Black history is the 2009 citywide historic resources survey. Nowhere in the voluminous study do the words “Black” or “African American” appear. The survey furthermore found no Black history sites worthy of landmarking and preservation.

Historic Black schools being demolished in Decatur, 2013. A text panel inside the redeveloped Beacon complex reads, “The former school buildings that now house the Beacon Municipal Center are one of the few remaining landmarks of the Beacon neighborhood.”

Continue reading →

Decatur City Schools

Posted on by
Reply

This summer I am teaching a graduate seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation. For the the final day of the virtual residency, I will be re-creating the Decatur, Georgia, walking tour that I did for the 2020 National Council on Public History (virtual) conference.

This version will be a little different because our world has changed dramatically since March. The tour focuses on the intersection of racism, municipal planning, and historic preservation. For this iteration I will be using interviews with Decatur residents that I did between 2011 and 2018.

The clips I am using drill down into how the city’s schools have reinforced structural racism, from Jim Crow segregation to efforts to resist integration to racial curriculum tracking. City leaders have weaponized the school system to create an environment that is hostile to Black children and their caretakers.

In the interviews that I did, I collected accounts of real estate speculators threatening grandparents with children in the schools. The city makes it possible for people to file anonymous tips to report children attending the schools who are not living with their parents inside the city limits. People told me about real estate speculators who approached elderly African American homeowners with unsolicited offers to sell their homes. When the homeowners declined the offers, the real estate speculators threatened to report them to the City Schools of Decatur because grandchildren or nephews and nieces were living with them.

Such reports result in removal of the children from the school system and possible fines and criminal charges for the adults.

This brief clip (which isn’t part of the tour) has one woman telling me about the city’s successful effort to purge her granddaughter from the city’s schools.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Protestors deface Silver Spring “monument”

Posted on by
2

There are 53 public art installations in Silver Spring, Maryland. Only two depict historical figures. One is a mural showing President Harry Truman during a visit to the suburban community. The other is a bronze bust of Norman Lane. Earlier this week, during protests stemming from Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s murder by police, vandals twice defaced the Norman Lane “monument.”

JUTP-Norman Lane

Just Up The Pike, Facebook, June 2020.

Lots of folks know who Harry Truman was. But Norman Lane?

Lane (1911-1987) was an indigent who wandered throughout downtown Silver Spring for much of the 20th century. He was affectionately dubbed the “Mayor of Silver Spring.” In 1991 a local artist dedicated a bronze bust depicting Lane in an alley dubbed the “Mayor’s Promenade” near 8221 Georgia Avenue.

norman-lane-2017

Norman Lane bust, 2017.

Lane was a well-known figure and stories of his exploits are part of Silver Spring’s oral tradition. He was able to walk into many Silver Spring restaurants, get a seat, and eat compliments of the establishment. These same places declined to serve African Americans. Or, if they did, required African Americans to go to back doors for take-out service.

The Norman Lane bust was one of 19 stops along the Silver Spring Black History tours that I gave between 2016 and 2018. I intentionally included Lane’s monument to underscore how effectively Silver Spring has whitewashed its history. While the community celebrates the memory of a colorful character in downtown art and commemorative spaces, there are no similar artworks and spaces dedicated to the community’s notable people of color (African Americans) who contributed to Silver Spring’s history.

2012RoscoeNix

Roscoe Nix. Source: Montgomery County Volunteer Center.

At the Norman Lane site, I talked about Roscoe Nix (1911-2012), the Alabama native and World War II veteran who worked in the U.S. departments of Labor and Justice. Nix frequently is credited with being a pioneer in Montgomery County civil rights history.

Nix served on the Maryland Human Rights Commission as its executive secretary in the 1960s; he was the first African American elected to the Montgomery County School Board (1974); and, he was the Montgomery County NAACP chapter president from 1980 to 1990.

Roscoe Nix Elementary School, 2017.

Though Montgomery County named an elementary school (several miles outside of downtown Silver Spring) for Nix in 2006, there are no monuments, markers, etc. commemorating the events in 1962 that launched Nix’s civil rights career. Nix’s contributions are invisible and the site where he cut his civil rights activism was demolished more than a decade ago.

In early 1962, shortly after Montgomery County enacted a public accommodations law, Nix and several of his white and African American coworkers went to a local restaurant in downtown Silver Spring for lunch. Nix was one of more than 600 Department of Labor employees whose offices had moved to Silver Spring the year before.

Silver Spring at the time was a “sundown suburb” and about 150 to 200 African Americans were among the agency employees relocated to Silver Spring in October 1961.

labor-dept-shifts

The Washington Post, October 17, 1961.

The Washington Post in October 1961 noted,

Silver Spring has a very small Negro population and a recent study by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission showed that some eating establishments will accept Negro patronage and some will not.

The same Post article noted,

While a few of the Negro employes [sic.] are on the professional level a majority hold clerical jobs.

That 1961 move set the stage for civil rights actions over the next five years that helped remove many of the remaining Jim Crow barriers in downtown Silver Spring.

Between April and August 1962, at least four episodes of racial discrimination were documented at Crivella’s Wayside Inn on East-West Highway. Roscoe Nix was the first to file a complaint filed under the county’s public accommodation law.

1962 protest photo

Baltimore Afro-American, May 5, 1962.

The restaurant was the site of several sit-ins and street demonstrations in 1962. Over the next four years, additional complaints and litigation were filed against Crivella’s alleging

CORE team served

Chicago Defender, February 18, 1963.

civil rights violations. The demonstrations were widely covered by Black and white newspapers and they attracted such notables as Washington-based Julius Hobson, a leader in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).

Roscoe Nix’s activism got it all started.

Meanwhile, as Nix was trying to get a meal in one of Silver Spring’s restaurants, Lane was able to get seated in most establishments he entered and he was served — the food was complimentary. In segregated Silver Spring, most businesses wouldn’t take Roscoe Nix’s money and he was unwelcome in their establishments. Lane, who had no money, found comfort and nourishment throughout the community.

A Silver Spring alley was renamed to commemorate Norman Lane’s life.

I can only speculate at this point why Norman Lane’s monument is being vandalized during this period of protest and unrest over white supremacy. I hope it’s because some folks in Silver Spring recognize the irony in the community’s commemoration of a homeless white man instead of a Black civil rights leader.

Lane-Nix Slide

Slide from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital Beltway” by David Rotenstein.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Fenced Out: Enclosure and Racism in Montgomery County, Maryland

Posted on by
2

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 →

E. Brooke Lee’s Silver Spring

Posted on by
Reply

E. Brooke Lee (1892-1984) was a segregationist real estate speculator. Histories of Silver Spring and Montgomery County, Maryland, celebrate his contributions to local politics and economic development while ignoring or minimizing his role in creating a sundown suburb where only whites could own and rent homes.

Though I have written about Lee elsewhere (Washington Post 2017 and “Protesting Invisibility in Silver Spring, Maryland” [2018]), the full extent of his racialized real estate practices remain unexplored. This post is a brief introduction to some of Lee’s real estate holdings and the devices he used to keep Silver Spring white.

Sign for one of Lee’s “restricted” subdivisions in NW Washington. “Restricted” was code for “whites only.” Credit: DC Public Library/National Archives and Records Administration.

Lee and his contemporaries accomplished this through the use of racially restrictive deed covenants attached to the individual properties they owned and sold as well as the residential subdivisions they developed. In Silver Spring’s commercial and public spaces, strictly enforced Jim Crow rules prevented African Americans from shopping in stores, seeing movies, eating in restaurants, and participating in civic events. The segregation buck stopped with Lee, who was a major investor and political boss and who wielded substantial power between 1920 and 1948.

Even after he left public life, Lee continued to exert considerable influence in the policies and practices that reinforced segregation in Montgomery County until 1970.

E. Brooke Lee described civil rights laws as “anti-white laws.” He viewed open housing laws enacted to eliminate discrimination as a threat to the suburbs he created.

After Lee returned to Silver Spring after serving in World War I, he began building on his family’s real estate empire. It dated back to 1840 when Lee’s ancestor, Francis Preston Blair established a sprawling plantation that relied on enslaved labor. Lee had a diverse real estate portfolio. He subdivided and sold commercial and residential lots under his own name as well as through the several development companies he founded in the 1920s and 1930s. These include the North Washington Realty Company and the Fairway Land Company.

Sample of residential subdivisions platted by E. Brooke Lee and his various companies in Silver Spring, 1920-1948.

Collectively, Lee’s real estate transactions comprised the sale and development of hundreds of parcels where African Americans could not live unless they were domestic servants employed by white property owners or tenants. Here is a sample of the racially restrictive deed covenants found in deeds Lee and his companies executed between 1920 and 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive deed covenants were unenforceable in courts.

E. Brooke Lee, Individual

For the purposes of sanitation and health, neither the Grantee, nor its successors or assigns, shall or will sell, grant, lease, rent or convey the said premises to any person of the negro race — E. Brooke Lee and Elizabeth Lee to the Convention of The Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Washington, April 5, 1929. Montgomery County Deed Book 478, p. 475.

North Washington Realty Company

For the purposes of sanitation and health it is agreed by the parties hereto that the property hereby conveyed shall not be sold, leased, rented or transferred to a member of a race whose death rate is greater than that of the white race. — North Washington Realty Company, Incorporated, to Bertha D. King, January 21, 1928. Montgomery County Deed Book 448, p. 409.

Fairway Land Company

For the purposes of sanitation and health it is agreed by the parties hereto that the property hereby conveyed shall not be sold, leased, rented or transferred to a member of a race whose death rate is greater than that of the white race. — Fairway Land Company to Clara V. Peter, March 12, 1929. Montgomery County Deed Book 478, p. 194.

After the United States entered World War II, the Washington, D.C., housing authority seized several of Lee’s subdivisions developed by the Fairway Land Company. The properties were to be developed to provide housing for white defense industry workers. Lee challenged the federal action in court to protect his deed covenants. Though the U.S. agency won the case, the housing remained mainly vacant because not enough white occupants could be found. This happened at a time when Washington area Black families and defense workers struggled to find housing. Read more about the Fairway case in this 2016 blog post and subsequent Maryland Department of Transportation Cultural Resources (CRaB) Bulletin.

Racially restrictive deed covenant, E. Brooke Lee, 1929.

E. Brooke Lee Middle School, Silver Spring. My 2017 Washington Post article describing Lee as a segregationist spurred a 2019 initiative to change this school’s name.

© 202 D.S. Rotenstein