Leaders and members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition traveled to Congressman Jamie Raskin's office last week, to protest Raskin's "continued refusal to take congressional action on the desecration, flooding, pouring of concrete on our ancestors, and cover-up of crimes against African people in Moses African Cemetery." Raskin previously visited the site of the burial ground, which is located under Montgomery County government-owned parcels of land on the Westwood Tower property, and directly across the Willett Branch stream from the rear parking lot of Westwood Tower. However, he has refused to meet with the group since or take action at the federal level on the cemetery issues, BACC says.
At Raskin's office last week, the group raised the Juneteenth flag in honor of Pvt. William H.H. Brown, who served with the United States Colored Troops who fought for the Union side in the U.S. Civil War. Brown is among the many former slaves buried in Moses African Cemetery. BACC has also created a video with a Civil War reenactor playing Pvt. Brown. "We told the White Union officers, if they would give us the gun, we would free ourselves," the actor portraying Brown says in the video. "We won our freedom. Now Montgomery County, Maryland is desecrating our sacred remains."
The BACC has called on the public to boycott all official Montgomery County government-sponsored Juneteenth events, in light of our elected officials' inaction on the cemetery matters. It has planned a full program of alternative Juneteenth events it encourages residents to attend instead. See the event announcements below for full details:
Very creative, they just need to come up with a catchy rhyming phrase.
ReplyDeleteWe've seen a few times where rhymes are more effective than (non) merit.
Delete1:56 PM Defending the Democracy and Bolstering the Bureaucracy.
ReplyDeleteIsn't this a county government issue? Raskin is in Congress, not county council.
ReplyDelete7:35 AM Correct. The Education & Culture Committee should get involved.
ReplyDelete@7:35 AM Do you think they even understand there is a difference between federal and local government?
ReplyDeleteThe civic entity they should be taking this up with is the Town of Rockville. That is the location of the cemetery that the benevolent society which owned the graveyard claimed they moved the bodies to when they sold the River Road property half a century ago. Their record-keeping was notoriously poor, as they also claimed to have moved bodies from a cemetery in NW DC when they first started the River Rd one over a century ago, yet neither DC nor Moco had any records of their disinterment and transfer to new graves.
4:26: They never moved the bodies from Moses. If they had, the excavators wouldn't have encountered graves on the site in the late 60s.
ReplyDeleteSkeletal remains can be moved while leaving the grave and assorted grave goods behind. That's assuming the burial society ever properly buried anyone there in the first place. I could easily believe that they never did, they might have just dumped the bodies in the river after the service and re-used the casket for the next poor sucker who trusted them. No human remains have been recovered by archaeologists since the site was sold and the alleged remains relocated. Assuming those scientists are part of a conspiracy to prevent further development shows bad faith in science itself.
DeleteConnie Morella Library on Arlington Rd is closed on Juneteenth.
ReplyDelete5:26: No archaeologist has been allowed to study the site. Montgomery County, which now owns both lots of the cemetery, has blocked all experts from conducting scientific examination of either one.
ReplyDeleteWe know for a fact that there were, and still are, bodies on the site. The architect admitted to the Washington Post that he personally relocated several bodies to a Black cemetery in northeast Montgomery County. This also proved that he and the developer were fully aware that it was a Black cemetery, as he moved them to a another Black burial ground.
But so many graves were encountered as excavation continued that he apparently abandoned that illegal effort. The rest of the remains within the footprint of the apartment tower were then illegally moved into a mass grave at a different location on the property.
Wrong. The site has been studied by professional archaeologists on various occasions, just not by ones in the employ of the protesters. No human bones were found.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame the architect had to do all of the dirty work that was supposed to have been done by the extremely dishonest former owners of the site. It seems that anything the burial society might have done was borderline or extremely illegal when they did it, like allegedly burying remains well past the boundaries of the land they did own. I have to wonder why they were not buried properly in the cemetery bounds in the first place, but the likely answer is that no one was supposed to find out they were dead. Best place to hide a murder victim is in a cemetery or right next to it.
7:54: False. There has never been an archaeological investigation of the cemetery site. Period. You cannot produce documentation of any such study, as none exists because no such work was ever performed.
ReplyDeleteA professional archaeologist was retained by the developer of the self-storage project, but that land is not part of the cemetery, and that person was only observing during excavation and not performing an archaeological study or using ground-penetrating radar or any other method of locating hidden graves.
The actions of the architect simply prove that the later landowner was A) aware that a Black cemetery was on his property, and B) gave the green light to illegally exhume and reinter remains elsewhere on the property so profitable construction of the apartment tower could proceed. The fraternal society selling the land did not exempt successive landowners from following the applicable laws governing graves in the future.
Burials beyond cemetery property lines are recognized as a fairly common occurrence in Black cemeteries of the post-Civil War decades, where boundaries may not have been physically delineated with fencing.
Protestors are claiming that the self-storage area was part of the cemetery, therefore, an archaeologist HAS investigated a disputed portion of the site, and found NOTHING. Where were all of these headstones and skulls they claim are just lying all over the place? I specify skulls because that is the only set of bones that can be reliably identified as human by most laypersons. You will find human-sized long bones, vertebrae, and ribs all over this area because of the vast numbers of deer we have, and unless they are a hunter or an anatomist, most people cannot differentiate between them.
ReplyDeleteNo one is saying that a cemetery had not been there, and the former color of its previous residents is irrelevant. The original cemetery owners claimed they moved the remains to Rockville, which would indeed exempt future owners from laws governing graves, so the protesters should take it up with them or their descendants who benefited from their shenanigans.
Bodies interred outside the limits of a cemetery do not count as being part of the cemetery and never have, that is a ridiculous claim to even make. You don't get to claim property just by burying a body in it. What the burial society was doing was illegal then and now.
New Equity means that they get ownership of that property.
ReplyDelete