Tag Archives: racism

How I became an anti-racism activist

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In 2011, I started down a path towards becoming an anti-racism activist and I began dedicating my professional work to showing how historic preservation is implicated in erasure and the production of racist histories & commemorative landscapes. My work began in Decatur, GA, and Silver Spring, MD.

This video segment is from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital’s Gateway,” recorded April 13, 2019. It includes my explanation to a Silver Spring audience for how and why I became an anti-racist.

https://youtu.be/Ox3_gFjW1h8

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Protestors deface Silver Spring “monument”

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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

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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

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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

 

Solutions for a racist city

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A colleague invited me to Decatur, Georgia, to take her public history class on a test run for the walking tour I designed for the National Council on Public History 2020 annual conference. I began last week’s session in my colleague’s college classroom with an introduction to how I began my research in Decatur. I described documenting more than 130 teardowns over three years, African American families packing their lives onto U-Haul trucks for moves away from the city, and erased Black history.

At the end of the introduction we had a brief discussion with questions from the students, the professor, and a college administrator. One person asked me how Decatur could address is racism problems.

I thought for a moment and replied, “I don’t think it can.”

Classroom, February 7, 2020.

Continue reading →

Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit

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Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit
By David S. Rotenstein
Panel, Historic Preservation and Public Folklore: Successes, Challenges,
and Failures in Responding to Community
American Folklore Society 2019 Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland
October 17, 2019

INTRODUCTION

I began exploring displacement, gentrification, and erasure eight years ago this weekend. My unanticipated trip down this research road began when I spent all of Wednesday October 19, 2011, documenting the demolition of a small home in Decatur, Georgia. That led me to inquire about the property’s history. What I learned there led to questions about the neighborhood’s housing history and where the suburban neighborhood’s African American residents were going. Those queries moved me to ask how history and historic preservation are produced in that neighborhood; in the city of Decatur; and, in comparable suburbs throughout North America.[1]

Along the way, through two states and the District of Columbia, and nearly 200 interviews later, I met lots of people whose families have called Decatur, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington home for generations. I befriended people like Veronica, Charlotte, Patricia, Harvey, and Elmoria who navigate spaces where their stories have been erased and marginalized. They are places where the histories of white supremacists have been memorialized in commemorative landscapes and historic preservation plans. My friends will die in these places never knowing what it is like to be fully part of the communities they call home. 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

The census and resistance

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In 1968, Congress held hearings on the violence that erupted after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s April assassination. Testimony by Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield exposed how fraught the U.S. Census is with regard to communities of color. Mayfield’s candid testimony about how some of Washington’s African American residents responded when the census taker knocked on the door is worth considering as the current U.S. President plays political games with the 2020 Census.

District of Columbia Chairman of the City Council John Hechinger recognized Mr. Rufus “Catfish” Mayfield, who was identified as a “District of Columbia citizen.” Mayfield’s statement began, “Thank you, members of the Council, brothers and sisters. Usually I don’t go with prepared speeches. They say I am an uncut diamond in the rough, but I am letting you know I am going to school and trying to sharpen up and attack things a little harder.”

Mayfield continued,

See, you have robbed the black male of his masculinity and his dignity. And until this is restored, the man has no alternative but to strike out. I tell you now, that you had better take another census on bow many black people are In the District of Columbia, because I know when I was growing up, I got tired of hiding in the bed when the census showed The way it goes now, when the census taker comes around they can have eight children and she is putting one in, the bed and putting another one -In the closet. And that census taker comes in there, “How many children you got?” two. I tell you there  are black people out there.

You know what a judge told me, he said, “Mayfield, this Is coming down to a civil war. But let me tell you something, you people can’t win’ because you don’t have the troops.” I tell you, take another count.

I think that we have to rid ourselves of the go-called classification of black people into categories. There is only one kind of black people, or there should be only one kind of a black person, and that is a proud black person. But the way It goes now, you are classified. It Is upper middle class, middle class, and the lower Negro. (Vol. 2, Rehabilitation of D.C. Areas Damaged by Civil Disorders.: Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the District of Columbia,Subcommittee on Business and Commerce, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session on Apr. 18, 30, May 20, 28-29, 1968. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1968, p. 401)

 

 

Montgomery County Historical Society BOOM exhibit is a dud

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If I were mounting an exhibition to tell the story about Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1950s, there would be lots of material from which to choose: the Cold War, suburbanization, and civil rights would certainly be in the mix. But how would I choose to tell the story about the Black experience in Montgomery County during that eventful decade?

One place I wouldn’t look for inspiration is the Montgomery County Historical Society’s exhibit, BOOM: The 1950s in Montgomery County. My latest article in The Activist History Review tackles the exhibit’s deficiencies.

There are many stories about African American entrepreneurialism, education, consumer choice, housing, religious life, and sports that would be solid candidates for some sort of exhibit featuring artifacts, texts, and photographs. How would I select the most compelling stories to tell? Continue reading →

The ghosts of covenants past

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What do longtime residents in the Washington metropolitan area think when they encounter signs with the name of a real estate firm with a long and complicated history. On River Road, just south of Bethesda’s Macedonia Baptist Church, there was a home for sale in early 2018 and a sign out front caught my eye as I was driving to a meeting at the church.

The real estate firm whose signs are found throughout Bethesda and Chevy Chase is one of several established by W.C. and A.N. Miller and their successors to subdivide land, build homes, and then sell them. The firm’s website traces its history to 1912; Maryland incorporation records show that one entity affiliated with its founders —the W.C. and A.N. Miller Development Co. — was formed in 1942.

I wonder if this firm (and its 20th century contemporaries still in business today) has ever been called to answer for its decades of discriminatory suburban residential development and the lingering effects those practices that are found throughout Montgomery County?

Typical W.C. and A.N. Miller racial restrictive deed covenant. This one was filed in 1947 for the sale of a residential property in the Sumner subdivision near Macedonia Baptist Church.

In the mid-1940s, the firm subdivided former agricultural properties southwest of River Road and began selling home sites. Each sale included this racially restrictive covenant: “No part of the land hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by or sold demised transferred conveyed unto or in trust for leased, or rented, or given to negroes or any person or persons of negro blood or extraction or to any persons of the Semitic race blood or origin which racial description shall be deemed to include Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians and Syrians except that this paragraph shall not be held to exclude partial occupancy of the premises by domestic servants ….”

More than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948, the Miller firm was still under fire for discriminatory housing practices. In the 1950s, open housing advocates repeatedly described the company’s role in housing discrimination in the Washington metropolitan area. Some of those accounts were memorialized in 1959 before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

 

When the District of Columbia was accepting bids for urban renewal in the city’s Southwest, people in 1961 queued up to testify in opposition to a Miller-affiliated firm receiving a construction contract. The chief claim was the Miller firm’s discrimination against “minority and racial groups,” the Washington Evening Star reported.

Washington Post headline, October 26, 1961.

Historians who study twentieth century housing and discrimination aren’t the only people who can see the contemporary signs and connect them to Montgomery County’s racialized housing past. Harvey Matthews, an African American man who grew up on River Road in the 1950s, still has strong memories of the firm and its founders more than half a century after his family was displaced.

Harvey Matthews, November 2017.

“I can’t think of any home that through my teenage days that a black person owned that W.C. Miller built,” Harvey said. “I think that was one of his codes of not selling his homes that he built to black families.”

Even if the Millers did sell to African Americans, income inequality and area African Americans’ inability to accumulate wealth would have prevented many from even considering living in a Miller subdivision. “Black folks had less because they didn’t really have to deal with W.C. Miller. We couldn’t afford any of his homes or nothing like that,” Harvey recalled.

The company’s discrimination against African Americans, Jews, and others wasn’t just limited to home sales, Matthews explained. “He [Miller] didn’t hire blacks to do any of his painting or any of his home remodeling or building his homes while he was building his homes.” Harvey also said, “Every once in a while we thought that we could do some of his labor work and that was rare because he didn’t maintain a black workforce or blacks in his workforce back during that time.”

This is the history of housing and suburbanization in Montgomery County. It’s a history with which there has been no reconciliation, no reparations, and no justice for the survivors like Harvey Matthews and the other children of Montgomery County’s African American communities.

Note: Originally published on the Save Bethesda African Cemetery Facebook page.