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| Tower crane at self-storage construction site visible behind Mcdonald's on River Road |
Those interesting in participating in tonight's protest are asked to meet up at Ben and Jerry's at 903 Ellsworth Drive in Silver Spring (across from the Civic Building) at 6:00 PM tonight. But if you can't get there that early, just head to the Civic Building at 7:00.
The proposed permanent 2-lane road diet was opposed by 71% of speakers who testified at a Montgomery County Planning Board hearing on March 30, 2023. Over 5000 residents signed a petition opposing the road diet.
Despite the overwhelming community opposition, the Board voted to approve the plan, a vote that was illegal because the commissioners did not receive the required approval of the National Capital Planning Commission. Any changes to the parkway's use, design or configuration must be approved by the NCPC, under the Capper-Cramton Act of 1930. Such approval also requires the NCPC to hold a public hearing, at which residents would be allowed to testify for or against whatever is proposed.
In July, it came to light that Montgomery Parks was seeking to win an award from a non-profit organization for the road diet, and had submitted an application riddled with false statements. A decision in a lawsuit filed by residents over the road diet is also pending.
After public outcry over the steamroller tactics by Montgomery Parks and the Planning Board - the latter's staff recommended approval of the road diet without reviewing the testimony and exhibits submitted by residents less than 24 hours earlier - the Montgomery County Council pretended to block the plan, but did not require Parks to remove the temporary road diet. Now a Council committee is slated to vote on two different versions of the road diet plan November 27.
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| BACC President Marsha Coleman-Adebayo at a 2017 protest regarding Moses African Cemetery |
Today's protest will take place between 12:15 and 2:30 PM outside 9400 Persimmon Tree Road in Potomac. This appears to be a private mansion. According to the website of the Montgomery County Democratic Party, the "Afternoon of Elegance" event will be held from 2:00 to 4:00 PM today.
"Mr. Elrich has not lifted a finger to ensure proper testing is conducted," BACC said in a statement today. "Instead, he slandered Dr Marsha Adebayo, President of BACC, publicly calling her a liar during yesterday's meeting when she spoke about the remains and demanded the return of the bones to the descendant community. By continuing to deny the racism, criminal actions, and disregard for the Black community on River Road by the developers and county agencies, Mr. Elrich has chosen to stand on the side of white supremacy. We will continue to protest at events held by Mr. Elrich until he meets the demands of BACC and/or steps down."
The site in question, directly behind the McDonald's at 5214 River Road in Bethesda, was not part of Moses African Cemetery. But given the reality that property lines of older, unfenced cemeteries - and of segregated Black cemeteries like Moses - in then-rural areas were not always clear or precisely followed in burials, there was a strong concern that there could be human remains on the site. The Montgomery County Planning Board ignored those concerns when it approved construction of a self-storage building on the property in 2017.
Demolition of an auto repair building on the site soon followed, and excavation began on the project in 2020, but it has been beset by delays and interruptions ever since. The developer has not commented publicly on why the project has repeatedly stalled out, and the BACC has maintained a steady campaign of protests and rallies at the site, which have garned local, national and international media coverage. Elrich, the County Council and Congressman Jamie Raskin have all declined to intervene in the dispute, leading BACC to protest at their offices and public appearances.
"Moses Cemetery is located in Mr. Raskin’s district," BACC said in a statement this week, "and we demand that he fight white supremacy in his own backyard as he purports to do on a national level." In the same statement, BACC calls Elrich's inaction on the issue "a clear allegiance to white supremacy." Raskin has said he is deferring to local officials on the matter, and Elrich - who walked in Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington and was active in the civil rights movement - has maintained that he has no legal authority to intervene in the case.
As a result, the BACC says it will rally at Raskin's office at the Rayburn Office Building, Suite 2242, today. Moses African Cemetery is located mostly on the site of the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission-owned Westwood Tower apartments in Bethesda, and on a second parcel Montgomery County purchased on the other side of the Willett Branch stream to prevent cemetery advocates from having a professional archaeological study performed on any part of the cemetery site.
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While the self-storage building's footprint is not within the cemetery boundaries as defined by property records, a frequent issue found in the study of African-American cemeteries has been mistaken burials of remains just beyond the boundary lines of a cemetery, if no physical fencing was present. That potential to find human remains on the site of the self-storage building construction was raised by cemetery advocates during the approval process, but was dismissed by the Montgomery County Planning Board and County Council.
Montgomery County government and its related agencies - Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission, Montgomery Parks, and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission - have moved with vigor to prevent any archaeological study of the cemetery since the controversy moved into their purview during the Westbard sector plan process of 2014-2016. Montgomery County blocked the descendant community's effort to bring in Dr. Michael Blakey, a highly-regarded professor of anthropology and American studies at the College of William & Mary, to conduct forensic studies of the cemetery site. HOC denied all study attempts on the Westwood Tower property it owns, and Montgomery County quickly reached a deal with the owner of the self-storage property to sell the parcel of the cemetery on that land to the County. The landowner had expressed willingness to let archaeological work be performed on that parcel; as new owner, the County did not.
As the self-storage project has creeped forward in fits and starts over several years, the project's developer and the BACC have repeatedly tangled - in words, and in-person during protests at the construction site - over the potential location of human remains. BACC observers have claimed to have seen bone fragments and funerary objects removed from the site. The self-storage developer has denied this, and its hired archaeological expert has stated no such remains or objects have been located on the self-storage site.
But the BACC says Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich was aware of bone fragments being found, and that Elrich accepted the developer's expert's opinion that the bones were not human remains. When Dr. Blakey asked Elrich if he could examine the bone fragments with his own expertise, he was allegedly told that the bone fragments were now missing. Blakey recounted this conversation, and his frustrating experience of being stonewalled by Montgomery County in his efforts to assist the descendant community, in an interview released by the BACC:
"I remember a very patronizing attitude on the part of Parks and Planning," Blakey recalled. "We got ultimately nowhere with our scope-of-work to the public engagement. And the County essentially turned its back on the recommendation that it should proceed on a scientific basis to reveal whether or not remains were throughout the area. I was contacted by the County Executive Marc Elrich. We had, perhaps, at least two telephone conversations. At some point, I had advised with the community that at least the monitoring during construction, that the archaeological monitoring be intensified. It was so weak, so lackadaisical, so few hours were devoted to it, that it was one of these examples of checking off the box. It was not serious.
"Marc Elrich and I talked, and he told me that human remains had been, I'm sorry, that remains had been found on the site. And they had been sent to a laboratory somewhere. And they were discovered not to be by those who were doing the assessment. And I assumed they were people with the kind of expertise I have as a bioarchaeologist, or they may have been forensic anthropologists, to identify human bone from bone fragments.
"I did not necessarily trust the situation myself at that point. I'd like to see! And so I asked Mr. Elrich if I could observe and examine those remains, and in so doing, my assessment might be trusted. And at some point along in the conversation - I think he was going to go back - and then we had a second conversation, as I roughly recall.
"They were not sure, his understanding was, that the archaeologists nor he were sure of where the remains were. And that's suspicious.
"I was not afforded the permission to those bone fragments. The question is, 'What are you hiding? What are you afraid of?' The way to allay distrust is transparency. Complete, utter transparency. There's no reason not to have that in a trustworthy situation. And so one would think [this] situation not trustworthy.
"The treatment of the descendant community in Bethesda was equivalent to calling them the N-word. Racism is about so many kinds of degradations, of exclusion, and 'white hoarding,' as someone put it, of things that don't belong to them. And maybe in this case, in the case of Moses Cemetery, the term 'dismissal' is appropriate. The Black community's humane interests were just dismissed.
"Why should African-Americans and their allies concerned about this most human of concerns - as an anthropologist, I can tell you, the treatment of the dead, the burial of the dead, funerary stewardship, is a deeply human need - why should they be protesting out in a McDonald's parking lot, outside a construction fence, when the parameters of the cemetery can be known? When it's possible - let's just take the example of my [potential] examination of the skeletal remains - they can be assured of whether those are, or are not, human remains that have been uncovered?
"Their sensibility as human beings has been dismissed. That's what you do to an N-word. That is the N-word in action," Blakey concluded.
Speakers at Sunday's protest will include BACC President Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and BACC members Josh Silvers, Krista Chan and Dr. Karen Wilson Ama'Echeful; Dr. (Rev) Julianne Robertson, Assistant Pastor, Allen Chapel, AME Church; Dr. (Rev) Segun Adebayo, Pastor, Macedonia Baptist Church (the Bethesda church that is the last physical remnant of the lost Black community on River Road that existed from the end of the Civil War until the 1960s); poet and activist Robert Stubblefield of the Democratic Socialists of America; Paul Pumphrey of the Black Alliance for Peace; Denise Young from WPFW 89.3 FM; and Baba Mosi Matsimela, President, UNIA-ACL Division 330.
Organizations joining the BACC in solidarity at the event will be the Maryland Poor People's Campaign, the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the Montgomery County Green Party.
Free ice cream from Ben & Jerry's in Silver Spring will be served at Sunday's protest.
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| This looks like a tactical police SUV with rear gun ports, but it's actually a news vehicle, a helpful reporter told me. Even the media is becoming militarized! |
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| Warby Parker boarding up as the event begins nearby |
