This story was published in print in October 2023.

Through the late 1800s and beyond, many communities in the Northeast and Midwest U.S., including some in Montgomery County, employed manipulative discriminatory tactics to enforce racial segregation. From sundown laws to prejudiced housing contracts, these policies robbed Black families of their place in communities across the nation as well as the opportunity to create intergenerational wealth.

Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, “sundown towns” became a phenomenon across the U.S. as a way for communities to retain a white-only population. Predominantly white areas throughout the country used discriminatory laws, intimidation and violence to prevent minority groups, particularly Black families, from moving into their neighborhoods.

While most overt discrimination strategies are often associated with the Deep South, sundown towns were most common in the Midwest and Northeast.

During the 20th century, three such communities emerged in Montgomery County: Silver Spring, Chevy Chase and Washington Grove. Some sundown towns, like Silver Spring and Washington Grove, also incorporated policies similar to redlining — a process in which real estate developers deny financial services such as mortgages and insurance loans to minorities — to discourage minority groups from populating the area.

Some also enacted racially discriminatory housing covenants that explicitly banned Black citizens from purchasing housing properties. Other communities, like Chevy Chase, restricted the racial makeup of their populations by setting extraordinarily high housing prices that the majority of Black citizens couldn’t afford due to centuries of enslavement and economic inequality. In many former sundown towns, white populations still drastically outnumber black populations today, such as in the town of Chevy Chase, which currently has a 92.1% white population.

“These restrictive laws were very prolific around the county, but specifically in communities that are still predominantly white to this day,” said Sheryl Freedman, Lead Teacher of the Leadership Academy for Social Justice at Whitman.

In addition to using legal segregation, some Montgomery County communities located near large Black neighborhoods, such as the River Road community, organized their own groups to forcefully oust Black residents from the area. Many white residents of segregated towns feared that extending freedoms to the Black population would jeopardize their power in their communities, so they turned to violence. Throughout the 19th century, white supremacist groups in Maryland lynched 40 Black residents, including three in Montgomery County: George Peck, John Diggs-Dorsey and Sidney Randolph.

In the 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement grew, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups gained popularity in Bethesda and held routine meetings in several parts of Montgomery County. Klan members included county residents from all walks of life, including local high-ranking businessmen and members of law enforcement. These active Montgomery County KKK chapters frequently terrorized local Black communities mere minutes away from Whitman.

Wendy Kaufman, the president of the Bethesda Historical Society, preserves archives of Bethesda’s history, including documents from this period.

“Local newspapers used to run advertisements for Ku Klux Klan initiations,” Kaufman said. “The Klan even sponsored casual events like bingo parties in downtown Bethesda.”

Klan violence isn’t the only way that white supremacists in Montgomery County displaced and evicted Black residents — seemingly honest town residents and land developers also used manipulative tactics to force Black residents to sell their property.

Prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, lenders could discriminate based on race in their selection process for home purchases. After the law’s introduction, the FHA initially allocated just 2% of funds for home financing projects to Black Americans and maintained rules that favored loan applicants with intergenerational wealth over those with steady monthly earnings, ultimately limiting home ownership to a disproportionately small subsection of Black families. This dynamic in home loans still exists today, continuing to cut off access to home ownership for Black families.

As the FHA’s implementation began, this pervasive style of discrimination resulted in a lack of generational wealth within local Black families and created a cycle that prevented these families from achieving the same educational and economic opportunities as white residents for decades to come.

In 2021, the median income of white households in the county was $142,695, and 76% of white residents held a Bachelor’s degree, while the median income of black households and percentage of black residents who held a Bachelors were just $83,194 and 47% respectively. This inequality has had a major impact on Black individuals’ ability to advance their position in society, said director of the Chevy Chase Historical Society Archive and Research Center Reneta Lisowski.

“When you have a group of people who are unable to access education in the same way white people can, that’s going to impact the jobs they are able to get over lime, which impacts the money you can get,” Lisowski said. “All of these different problems are interconnected.”

Despite significant remnants of segregation in the community today, Montgomery County schools do not teach the full extent of this history consistently. In Nov. 2022, the county piloted the “Week of Remembrance,” a collection of lessons that delved into national and local Black history.

However, the lessons were designed to be taught outside of class time and are not part of the official social studies curriculum. The school system often fails to connect local history to current trends in Civil Rights and race relations, said Lisowski.

“Some of the topics in the curriculum just stop at a certain point,” Lisowski said. “It’s not just about what happened in the past, but addressing what it means going forward.”

With a better understanding of the history that has shaped the Montgomery County community, students are more capable of understanding the centuries of discriminatory treatment and the racial segregation that still lingers today. This insight can allow students to recognize their responsibilities in the community, encouraging them to create change for the better, said Lisowski.

“It’s important to understand what came before you,” Lisowski said, “because you have the ability to take the knowledge of the past to build a better future.”