Candidates speak in support of Moses African Cemetery at HOC meeting

Several candidates for Montgomery County Council, as well as other members of the community, spoke in support of the Moses African Cemetery at yesterday's meeting of the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission.  Commissioners listened to the remarks, but did not make any public comment regarding the effort to protect the desecrated graveyard, and establish a museum to tell the history of the lost black community in what is today a commercial/industrial area on River Road in Bethesda.

Among the candidates who spoke were yours truly, Robert Dyer; Brandy Brooks, Bill Cook, Ashwani Jain, Meredith Wellington, Jim McGhee, and Ana Sol Gutierrez. Jarrett Smith and Craig Carozza Caviness could not attend, but their comments were read into the record.

Jo Saint George, the Criminal Justice/Legal Redress committee chair for the County NAACP chapter, said it was "disappointing" that private developer Regency Centers sold the Westwood Tower property to the HOC without addressing the cemetery issue. In her experience as an attorney in Arizona, she said, developers would usually respect any cemeteries or graves found on their property, and it was unusual for the local government to bail them out by purchasing a cemetery site. The controversial outcome in the Moses cemetery case suggests "there is possibly not a respect for the lives" represented by the graves, she said.

Gutierrez said she was surprised that the HOC was not taking advantage of the many grants and loans available to preserve and commemorate sites like the Moses African Cemetery. As a legislator in Annapolis, she said she frequently sees such funds being approved for other counties. Gutierrez offered to help the HOC obtain such funding.

Brooks urged commissioners not to continue trying to sweep the cemetery issue under the rug. Cook promised "our voices will only get louder," reciting the names of the commissioners for effect, when he warned that they would go down in history associated with the same racism and greed that led to the original desecration of the cemetery in the late 1960s.

Resident Wendy Hestick testified that the HOC's mishandling of the cemetery reminded her of the agency's poor record at Tobytown, another historic black community which still exists in Potomac. The scandal over the Moses cemetery led to the neglected cemetery at Tobytown being tidied up about a year ago. HOC's record is anything but tidy, however, as some have noted the agency built houses on top of some of that cemetery's graves years ago.

The County only recently was shamed into providing long-requested bus service to Tobytown, as well. Hestick said one problem is that HOC is not accountable to the community, only to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD recently published a scathing audit of HOC's units in the County, where 75% of the apartments inspected failed to meet HUD standards. Shockingly, the County Council ignored the audit when approving HOC's ambitious plans to redevelop the Westwood Tower site, and build a parking garage on top of the Moses cemetery. Well, knowing the County Council, it probably wasn't that shocking.

Will HOC take the leadership steps needed to differentiate itself from the clear record of institutional racism in Montgomery County government? Stay tuned!