Historic Cemeteries and the Regulatory Void: The Struggle Over Bethesda’s Moses Cemetery

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cultural Heritage Laws and Policies, Political Economy, and the Community Importance of Archaeological Sites", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC are a special regulatory environment where much turns on the action of a state-level, intercounty commission formed in 1927 and responsible for regional planning. The disdain for African American communities in planning the DC suburbs is still raw in memory, and the traces of displaced people remain in place names, archeology, and especially cemeteries. In the last 10 years, Moses Cemetery (ca. 1911-1950) in Bethesda, Maryland focused conflict over the historical erasure of African Americans through techniques of governing, and the cemetery, understood as heritage, created a flashpoint. Opponents and descendants took legal action to stop the sale of the land containing the cemetery, won in court, and the decision was overturned on appeal. This has significant repercussions for the legal ability of descendants to intervene in cases without legal standing, which perpetuates the harm to African American communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Cultural Heritage Laws and Policies, Political Economy, and the Community Importance of Archaeological Sites

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow