Tag Archives: River Road

Housing Opportunities Commission Statement

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Today I delivered a copy of the River Road Moses Cemetery report to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission and I entered this statement into the public record.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES COMMISSION
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN

October 3, 2018

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein. I am a professional historian and ethnographer. I have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and I have served on the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and other bodies in my capacity as an expert in historic preservation. I also previously was certified as a Registered Professional Archaeologist.

I have transmitted to you today a copy of a report I prepared for the descendant community affiliated with the River Road Moses Cemetery. Copies of the report and a completed Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties form also were provided to members of the descendant community, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Office, and the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office.

The report, which contains the results of nearly a year of documentary and oral history research, finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery meets four of nine criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The report also finds that the River Road Moses Cemetery site appears to meet three out of four criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property.

I am here today to urge the Housing Opportunities Commission to initiate designation proceedings under Chapter 24A of the Montgomery County Code. I also am recommending that the Commission, along with Mr. Harvey Matthews and other members of the dispersed descendant community in Montgomery County and Washington, as well as experts in African American history and folklife and other members of the community, form an advisory committee to determine the best stewardship for the site that also enables HOC to continue fulfilling its mission to provide affordable housing in Montgomery County.

Currently, advocacy for preservation of the cemetery site is vested with a small group of activists associated with Macedonia Baptist Church. That group does not reflect the breadth of the potential stakeholder population associated with a historic property located in Montgomery County, but which for all intents and purposes was a Washington, D.C., institution. Furthermore, based on the site’s history, it appears that whatever the number of actual interments in the cemetery, the majority likely were District of Columbia residents. This is an important site and an important issue and it deserves the utmost care and respect.

I am willing to meet with HOC staff to discuss this statement and the report and I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

The River Road Moses Cemetery’s Lazarus act

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Thank you for sharing your report. It illustrates how exhaustive and extensive your research has been. For me, the connection to both the River Road community and thereby the cemetery has brought about an investigation of sorts into how I am, who I am. — Geneva Nanette Hunter, September 2018

Over the past week I have emailed and delivered copies of the research that I conducted into the history and historical significance of the River Road Moses Cemetery. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the River Road Moses Cemetery is the final resting place for several hundred formerly enslaved and free people of African descent.

River Road Moses Cemetery site, Bethesda, Maryland.

The work initially was requested by the leadership of Macedonia Baptist Church and its activism partners operating as the “Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition.” At some point in August 2018, the church and its activism partners decided to pursue alternative research strategies in their efforts to preserve the site. Curiously, this so-called coalition never informed me about its decision. After almost a year of documentary research and oral history interviews, I completed the report and transmitted it to members of the descendant community, the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, and the Montgomery County Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office.

The research traces the cemetery’s history and the history of the Montgomery County, Maryland, African American hamlet where it relocated in 1911 from Northwest Washington, D.C. Founded in 1880 by a local subordinate order of a national African American benevolent organization, gentrification and anti-Black land use policies displaced the Washington graveyard and ultimately the entire community where it was established. Half a century later, the same forces erased the River Road community.

The D.C.-Md. Black Borderlands.

Because much of the story takes place in what are now Washington’s Chevy Chase and Tenleytown neighborhoods, there is a substantial amount of research on African American suburbs (planned and unplanned communities) that emerged in these spaces starting in the early 19th century. Collectively, these communities in Washington and Maryland comprise an area I am calling the “DC-MD Black Borderlands.” I introduced this concept earlier this year in a talk hosted by the D.C. Public Library and I will be presenting it in a paper at this year’s D.C. History Conference.

A “lost” 19th century Washington African American cemetery was one of several unanticipated discoveries. The cemetery’s location has now been mapped by the District’s Historic Preservation Office. “Your research adds needed data to the available information on this community,” wrote District Archaeologist Ruth Trocolli.

1899 letter to the proprietors of the Hebbons Cemetery. Courtesy of the District of Columbia Office of the Surveyor.

In addition to the descendant community, I also provided copies of the report to three Bethesda historians whose work first documented the cemetery and the River Road community after Montgomery County embarked on rewriting the sector plan where they are located. I cannot thank them enough, along with the descendant community, and the many archivists in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia who assisted me in this research.

Want to read the report the report? Click the link below:

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

 

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.

Ada Dupree and the Moses Cemetery: stories linked by race

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Ada Dupree. Photo credit: Edisto Herald.

Ada Dupree (1887-1991) lived a long and consequential life. She moved to the small Florida town of Esto in 1902 at age 15. For the rest of her life, she and her family were among the few people of color in the rural panhandle community near the Alabama border. When she died in 1991 at the age of 104, her family began funeral arrangements in accordance with her wishes: Ada wanted to be buried in the town where she spent most of her life. But some residents in the mostly white community didn’t want her buried in the town’s “all-white” cemetery.

Ada’s story made national headlines and in 1998 former NBC legal correspondent Star Jones recounted the story to introduce her book, You Have to Stand for Something or You’ll Fall for Anything: “Sometimes it takes a story about death to teach you about life ….” Continue reading →