A new exhibit on the lost African-American community that existed for nearly 100 years on River Road in Bethesda will open at the American University Museum at 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW tonight, June 11, 2022, with a reception from 6:00 - 9:00 PM. The Bridge that Carried Us Over will chronicle the development of the community, which was formed by slaves freed from the adjacent Loughborough plantation after Maryland emancipation in 1864. Residents were forced out of the community by developers in the 1950s and 60s, and it is now a busy commercial and industrial zone between Ridgefield Road and Little Falls Parkway.
The only remnants of the community left today are the Macedonia Baptist Church at 5119 River Road, and the hidden cemetery that is largely under the rear parking lot of the Westwood Tower apartments on Westbard Avenue. Headstones in the cemetery were bulldozed sometime during the 1950s. Construction workers further desecrated the cemetery during the building of the apartment tower in the late 1960s, and remains found within the footprint of the tower were illegally relocated into a mass grave nearby, according to witnesses. The rest of the graves were paved over for the parking lot; another section of the cemetery is located across the Willett Branch stream directly adjacent to the self-storage construction site behind the McDonald's on River Road.
From the founding of the River Road community, to the contentious struggle to memorialize and restore the cemetery today, the exhibit will cover the full timeline and place this local story in the larger context of the African diaspora. See the exhibit website for more information.
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