Court battle over apartments built on African American cemetery begins
The Maryland supreme court heard arguments on Monday from a group of organizers attempting to halt the sale of a local apartment complex that sits on top of a historic African American burial ground.
Members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) packed the court in Annapolis on Monday, where justices heard testimony about the sale of the Westwood Tower in Bethesda, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington DC.
The residential complex was once the Moses Macedonia African cemetery, a gravesite dating back to the 1960s used to bury formerly enslaved people. Organizers have argued that the remains of more than 200 Black people are buried there, the Montgomery County Sentinel reported.
“The Maryland supreme court will determine if Black bodies are still on the auction block in 2023,” the Rev Dr Olusegun Adebayo, a member of the BACC, said in a press statement.
Monday’s testimony is part of a legal battle between organizers and developers over the fate of the property, which includes the apartments and a parking lot. The Montgomery county housing opportunities commission (HOC), which owns the apartment complex,originally attempted to sell the building to private developers in a $51m deal, without prior court approval.
But in 2021, a judge temporarily blocked the sale until lawsuits involving the land had been resolved, saying that “many bodies likely still remain on the property”.
Charger Ventures, the Washingtonbased buyer of the property, pulled out of a deal after the initial sale was blocked, the Washington Post reported.
In 2023, a Maryland appeals court ruled that the HOC could move ahead with the sale of the land, a decision opposed by a coalition composed mostly of descendants of those buried.
“This is one of the most shockingly insensitive and off-base rulings
I’ve seen,” Steve Lieberman, an attorney for the coalition, said to the Post. “The court engaged in a narrow, technocratic ruling and ignored hundreds of years of law that make it clear the courts have an obligation to protect the sanctity of burial places,” he added.
Lieberman added that the question of how to handle burial grounds containing the remains of formerly enslaved people was an issue across the US.
“This same issue is coming up in hundreds of places around the United States,” Lieberman said to the Daily Record. “The whole country is watching this court and what it does,” he said.
The coalition appealed the sale decision to the state’s highest court, arguing that it had wide implications.
On Monday, representatives with the BACC and descendants of those buried in Moses Macedonia African cemetery went to Annapolis.
“We of the faith community are looking to the court to end the dehumanization of African Americans. It has been a privilege to join warriors for justice to fight for the dignity and humanity of our ancestors,” Adebayo added in the press statement.
The coalition, which also includes members of the Macedonia Baptist church, have been working for years to have the cemetery memorialized after a 2017 archaeological study on the land found that the burial site was probably intact under the concrete.
The study, by the archaeology consulting firm Ottery Group, based in Kensington, Maryland, also recommended that no further ground disturbances should be made on the property. Activists fear future development could further dishonor or even damage what is left of the historic site.
The cemetery is also what remains of Bethesda’s River Road community, a historically Black community that thrived for nearly a century untilwhite developers pushed out the remaining Black families in the 1960s.