Trash and junk are starting to pile up on a government-owned parcel of the Moses African Cemetery behind the Westwood Tower apartments in Bethesda. A discarded mattress, pipes and rolls of toilet paper litter the ground above the graves. The parcel was hurriedly acquired from a private landowner by the Maryland-National Capital Park & Planning Commission in 2017, chiefly to prevent any archaeological study of the cemetery, most of which is under the rear parking lot and side driveway of Westwood Tower.
The Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission owns the Westwood Tower portion of the cemetery; M-NCPPC holds the parcel between that and a private property now being developed as a self-storage facility behind the McDonald's on River Road. Neither government entity will meet with leaders of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, the group says. “It’s no surprise that Parks & Planning still won't recognize the Black Community of Bethesda,” BACC President Marcia Coleman-Adebayo said in a statement. “It was established to make places like Bethesda white.”
BACC continues to seek restoration and memorialization of the cemetery, which was desecrated during the construction of Westwood Tower in the late 1960s. "Ownership, or meaningful control in another form, are the only ways to ensure that the voices of the descendant community are incorporated in the outcome," County Executive Marc Elrich said in urging the two bodies to meet with cemetery advocates.
Photos courtesy Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition
I'd say some one is living back there.
ReplyDeleteNot too long ago, those rolls of TP would have been treated as gold…
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