- When you walked along the street some 60 years ago, there were no sidewalks.

This was just a dirt road.

On rainy days, chances are, you find yourself with muddy shoes.

This is Pennsylvania Avenue.

Back in the day, when the neighborhood was mostly Black, much of the community had dirt roadways.

Now, how do I know this?

I lived here.

Hello, I'm Curtis Crutchfield, and this is My Linden, My Lyttonsville, An Untold Story.

- A lot of people, this 94-year-old woman, to take care of.

And thank God that I'm still here.

- To tell this story, I spoke to several dozen people, including lifelong residents, former residents, relatives, and civic activists.

Why tell this story?

I was a child of this community.

It raised me.

At one time, it was the oldest Black community in Montgomery County, but much of it is no more, thanks to a policy called Urban Renewal.

♪♪ - We tell our kids all the time that we may have been poor, but we didn't know we were poor because, seriously, we thought we had money.

We didn't ask for anything, didn't need for anything.

So we felt that we just really had it.

We didn't have to ask for things like can we get this or can we have that or this.

We always had.

- We had support.

We had love.

We had people who built confidence in us, who told us we could do whatever we wanted to do.

It was not only our parents, it was our grandparents, it was our aunts, it was our uncles, it was our cousins.

And there was nothing to stop us.

- Everybody knew each other.

There were two churches, Baptist Church and the Methodist Church.

And you went to one or the other.

And there were some recreational things that people did, but it was a sense of community.

And I think that that's something that we don't have in a lot of places now.

- Linden, it was a community of family and long-time residents so I always felt like we were in a safe place, no matter where we were in the community.

- Dating back to the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, there were dozens of small Black enclaves in Montgomery County, communities like Scotland.

- I've been living in the same community for 84 years.

I grew up here and whatnot.

I've been going away on vacation or visiting somebody.

This is where-- this has been my home.

One stove for the classroom.

Potbelly stove could burn coal or wood in it.

And this was the classroom.

And you had seven grades, one through seven.

And we was all in one room with one teacher.

But to get your running water, you had to come out to the pump-- - Moved up to Scotland, and the first side of it, I just couldn't believe what I saw.

There was one-room schoolhouse that had a Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning sign there.

And it was just rundown with a potbelly stove and one electric light hanging by a wire and an outhouse that was for the school but smelled so badly, I knew that it hadn't been cleaned for a long time.

There was a well there, a hand pump, which I had never seen in my life.

- And there were other enclaves like Emory Grove, Lincoln Park, Tobytown, Ken-Gar, and of course, Lyttonsville, which is more than 170 years old.

- Ours was like a lot of African-American pocket communities in Montgomery County.

We all knew where these communities were, but if you were from out of the area, you'd have to know how to get back into them.

- Into the 1960s, many of these communities remained segregated with substandard housing, but gentrification changed these communities, including Lyttonsville.

If you don't know anything about today's Lyttonsville, it's a middle income neighborhood just minutes from downtown Silver Spring, close to Metro's red line transit center.

In a few years, it will also be just a short walk to a new purple line station now under construction.

- But I'm worried going forward about what happens if it becomes-- when the purple line station opens, there will be more potential customers, more potential demand for expensive housing, and people who live around here could wind up being the victims of that.

- It's named after Samuel Lytton.

As a free Black man in 1853, he bought four acres of land and founded a community that bears his name today.

Yet for many longtime residents, this community is also known as Linden.

- Linden was a very close-knit community.

It had two sides.

We used to call it over in the field on the other side of the railroad tracks and then over on the road on our side.

But we were a close-knit community.

We could go anywhere in that community.

And the people, the families, they looked out for the kids.

- A lot of people didn't have a place to lay their head down.

I done take many, many people in my home, fed many people, loved many people.

- If you came to the community, and you didn't have nowhere to go, she would open the house up.

She would feed and open the house up to.

- Amen, amen.

- I can say that.

I can say-- and without trying to make up anything or trying to preach anything, that's the truth.

She opened her doors to a lot of young people that was kicked out or didn't have nothing to eat or was hungry.

She did feed them.

She did let them stay at the house and sleep and got their self together.

- My name is William Jackson.

And I grew up in Linden.

I came to Linden in 1949.

And I left Linden in 1959.

But in those 10 or 11 years I lived in Linden were the greatest years of my life.

The whole community was like family to me.

Not just immediate family, but the whole community shared with each other, looked out for each other.

- And we had plenty of love.

And when I say love, nobody in the community hurt.

If somebody was short or ran, needed something, sick, people were there to help them.

You don't get that today.

- The name came about in the late 1800s after B&O railroad built a train stop nearby known as the Linden Station.

- Even the people that weren't related to us were still like family.

- Whether you call it Linden or Lyttonsville, today, it's a racially diverse community.

- The neighborhoods make me feel very welcome.

I feel very safe and welcome in this neighborhood.

That's the first thing.

The second thing was when my children were growing up, the school system here was actually great for us, for the children.

- It's friendly.

It's good to raise children.

The schools are good.

They can live in a diverse neighborhood.

They're in between downtown Silver Spring and Bethesda.

It's all right there.

It's convenient.

- And thanks to Maryland's light rail purple line, this is a prime area earmarked for new development.

As the community looks to the future, it has a story to tell of a rich past.

This rich past, however, includes a story of displacement, a story of families and friends uprooted by urban renewal.

- We were very proud of our community and we loved our community.

And I hated-- - Oh, emotions.

- I hated to see it go.

- Yeah.

We try to keep it as long as we could.

- It'll always be in my memory.

- And then it came to the point where everybody was gone.

And I was thinking, basically, my whole family is gone.

- I think it's shameful.

I can say that.

I don't dwell on it so I can't say that it bothers me, but what they did was just shameful and it continues to this day.

- I didn't really understand what was taking place.

All I knew is that we were moving.

I understand what was going on now that I'm older, but it really didn't affect us because we were too young for that.

So nobody told us anything about why we had to move or you didn't realize that your community was being overtaken by urban renewal that didn't renew anything for you.

It just made the other people wealthy.

- Some people have suggested that the displacement of many families in Linden and Lyttonsville amounts to erasure of the Black community displacement.

How did you feel when this community was essentially torn apart?

- It is a different place.

I almost didn't even recognize it a couple of times when I have driven through.

Well, probably one of the reasons was it wasn't but a few homeowners in the community.

People were renting.

And when the landlord wanted their property, there was nothing else for them to do.

I really didn't like the community being scattered.

And the other issue is living conditions in some of these houses.

The houses lack so much.

And then some of them were just downright shacks.

And there were several shacks in Linden.

So it was a good thing that people were able to get better housing, but it was not so good thing when we lost community.

- Salon owner Pam Christian grew up in Linden.

She moved after getting married in the mid 1960s.

- I couldn't wait to move.

I loved Linden, but I couldn't wait to move because we had inside plumbing when I moved.

We had-- I moved to a brand new apartment up in Kensington and we had indoor plumbing.

And see, that's the time when urban renewal came through there and took the people's homes.

And my grandmother and Mr. William Carter and Ellen, Ellen Scott, they were the last ones to leave because that was their home.

And to take somebody away from their homes who never lived in an apartment and stuff, I mean, it was hard for my grandmother.

- While inside the community, there was reverence and support for each other, some white outsiders looked down on Linden and mockingly referred to it as monkey hollow.

- Every once in a while, you have a car driving down Brookville Road, and they would throw things out the window and yell stuff.

But I really didn't understand the monkey holler thing.

I mean, I heard it, but it just didn't resonate because I couldn't really relate to what the negativity was about it.

- They thought it was fun to come down Brookville Road and throw firecrackers at us.

- If you look back on the history of Linden, and look at our generation, see where we're at today from the generation that brought us up, and you want to call us monkeys?

OK, call us monkey.

But look at us, we're successful.

Our parents, they might have struggled, but they made us successful.

- Stella Werner was the first woman to preside over the Montgomery County Council.

She died in 1981, but her personal papers show that lawmakers were engaged in discussions about Lyttonsville.

According to this county manager's report on Lyttonsville presented to the county council in April 1955, there were 111 homes in the area, and 50% were considered substandard, 25% were owner occupied, seven homes had running water, but there were no homes in the area with sewer service.

After surveying the community, the fire marshal said that 26 dwellings should be condemned.

Meantime, this January 1956 council resolution directs the county manager to proceed with street grading in Lyttonsville to prepare for the installation of water and sewer facilities.

Yet, all road grading was to be deferred until WSSC, the water agency, agreed to do the work.

According to records here at Montgomery archives in Gaithersburg, in March 1954, the Public Works Department recommended against providing sewer service for the Garfield Avenue and Brookville Road Corridor because of the cost and because of pending rezoning.

This is Garfield Avenue decades before urban renewal.

You would see houses up and down the street, but change started in the 1950s.

That's when planning officials rezoned this area.

They rezoned the area from residential use to light industrial use.

My family lived here, along with many others, including the Scott, Williams, Doye, and Jackson families.

In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, we all made do without indoor plumbing.

It was the same for families on Brookville Road and likewise for many Black neighborhoods around Montgomery County.

In fact, in the late 1960s, many of these neighborhoods were among the 65 communities identified as quote, "problem areas."

Lyttonsville was on the list as was Stewart Lane, Fairland, Good Hope, Sandy Spring, and others, all would be scheduled for urban renewal.

While the county began addressing substandard housing, this 1968 report noted that social discrimination and a lack of equal opportunities were factors in the poor living conditions.

- Of course, I felt it was negative when I was growing up.

But as you say, we learned to deal with it.

Life takes you a lot of places and you do a lot of things.

Some of it positive, some not so much.

- My name is Michael Kevin Darnall.

I grew up here in Silver Spring, Maryland.

- His late mother, Vicki Turner Darnall, grew up along Brookville Road when everyone knew the neighborhood as Linden.

- Here I am, near the block that she called home as a little girl.

When I was little, my grandmother, my grandfather, my great grandparents, they all lived in Takoma Park, Maryland.

And they would talk about this sort of mythical land called Linden, which I couldn't really place mentally on any sort of map.

But as the years progressed, I learn more and more about it.

And it was this area of Silver Spring that they were essentially ushered out of because of this thing called eminent domain, which I didn't really understand as a child.

But as I've grown up, I've certainly-- I have a better grasp on it.

But I always pictured this big, bustling metropolis that came out of eminent domain.

And as I look around now, I just see some sort of nondescript warehouses and businesses, mechanics, auto parts, tow yard.

So I don't really think that this is exactly what I expected.

But yeah, they often talked about their life growing up here.

I could only imagine how painful it would have been to have left your community like that against your will.

But my people are a resilient people.

And they didn't really speak of it in terms of a painful transition.

If it was painful, that wasn't something that they really shared with me.

But I certainly got the impression that a community was broken.

- See this fire hydrant here on my right?

At one time, there was a water pump here that served the entire neighborhood.

- I don't know how many gallons.

It was a glass, jug.

And that's what we got the water in.

We went to the spigot on Brookville Road, and pumped the water in, put it back in the car, and drove home.

- Well, you saw me at the water pump.

Remember the water pump?

We used to meet at the water.

I can remember the Field, Sis Field, washing greens and things up at the water pump.

People will be mad because they want to get water.

She out there washing greens.

- The original Pilgrim Baptist Church was right across the street here at the intersection of Garfield Avenue and Brookville Road.

The cemetery, the church cemetery, was right adjacent.

And just down the street was the Linden School, the segregated Black school.

This is Brookville Road today.

It used to be filled with houses, but now, it's lined with businesses.

Looking east, you see a remade residential section.

At the southern end of Brookville Road, radio towers are clearly visible just as they were in the 1960s.

- By the 1940s, communities throughout the United States were resisting the placement of large broadcast towers.

And they had the political capital to say no, you're not going to build that here.

People in Lyttonsville didn't have that political capital, so we still see evidence of that expulsive zoning and the industrial uses on Brookville Road and the surviving broadcast tower at WWDC.

- But gone is the trash burning incinerator that sat at the edge of the neighborhood.

The incinerator, similar to these images, spewed pollution for 20 years.

- You smell the pollution going around and everything.

And the parents used to tell us not to go too close to that place because it's not healthy for us because the pollution was so bad around that.

The word "pollution" wasn't even used.

It was garbage, smell of bad odor, the incinerator or something like that.

Whatever area, wherever you're coming from, you could smell it.

You knew exactly where that smell was coming from.

- A lot of smoke.

- Smoke, yeah.

- Yeah.

- And when they burned the dogs.

- Huh?

- When they burned them dogs they killed.

- Oh, my god, yeah.

- That smoke from the dog they killed, that smoke would come up in the air.

And it did something to people, they say it.

- It smelled.

It really smelled.

Some days, it was really bad odor.

- The trash incinerator.

I found a lot of-- I think a lot of why that was built there in the first place was connected to environmental racism, which is rooted in this idea of spatial inequity and residential segregation, which results in low income, marginalized communities of color frequently dealing with increased exposure to harmful environments.

- So in 1944, Montgomery County decided to build one of two trash incinerators in Lyttonsville.

Montgomery County then decided to place its animal control shelter in Lyttonsville.

In the late 1940s, two radio towers were constructed on the edges of Lyttonsville, all intended to create an ugly, uninhabitable place that whites thought African-Americans wouldn't want to live, they'd move, and convert it to wealthier and whiter uses.

Now, you might think that's just conspiracy theory bunk.

Well, in 1923, a real estate evaluator actually came through this area and wrote about all of the development possibilities in Silver Spring and the neighboring suburbs up and down the B&O railroad line.

When the evaluator got to Lyttonsville, here's what he wrote.

"An area of cheap Negro residences, ideal for country estate development or suburban expansion."

So as early as 1923, whites in Montgomery County were conceiving of this space, not as an African-American community, but as a space where white suburbanization can overflow and replace the African-Americans living here.

- The less than ideal living conditions were known to county officials decades before urban renewal.

The federal urban renewal program was designed to remake impoverished communities.

But as the late renowned author James Baldwin described it, urban renewal meant, quote, "Negro removal."

For Jennifer Martin, it means today's generation lost Linden's special sense of family.

- That era is gone.

And I regret that they don't have that.

And I mean, we talk all the time about getting back together and doing something, but I really think that we missed it.

I don't know how to get it back, but I guess that's something that basically, if you think about it, we were robbed because it's nothing like family no matter what we do.

And we could reach out to each other.

But they will never have the camaraderie that we had with each other.

So I am sad about that.

That's a really bad feeling.

- I don't recognize a thing.

It's hard to believe that they changed it so much.

It looks industrial instead of neighborhood where you could take your kids and say, this is where I grew up.

Everybody knew everybody.

And then the fact that you can't take your family where we grew up-- and I can take him to get crab cakes or something like that, but you want to show them something.

And especially, when I lived in Milwaukee, and I say to them, we're going to Washington so you can see the White House but not my house.

- My main finding was that urban renewal on Linden really disrupted the social and cultural infrastructure.

And at times, it displaced long time residents and it contributed to the loss of generational wealth.

I mean, Linden was a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other and helped each other out, and this community was now scattered and social support networks were broken.

- The county has actually treated Lyttonsville fairly badly.

You just mentioned the urban renewal.

It seemed to be conducted in such a way that it drove people away.

But the county also cited an incinerator nearby and a waste dump just on the other side of the street here.

At a time when Lyttonsville residents were getting their water from wells, the placing of the rail yard in Lyttonsville is kind of another example of that.

So I think Lyttonsville has had a history of being on the wrong end of planning decisions that had some reason, perhaps, but the cumulative effect was to really attack the community.

- This is a pattern.

And the pattern is going to get bigger.

Parking planning is now looking at existing neighborhoods and looking at what they call economic concentrations of poverty.

And their solution is to up-zone the apartments and move and integrate them by moving in people who aren't poor.

I think we all know what that means, and with no plans, again, for what to do with the people who live there right now.

So I'm worried that we're looking at a second set of or second wave of urban removal.

- The Montgomery County Planning Board, in its Thrive 2050 general plan, acknowledges that past discrimination has left many communities behind economically and socially.

And that some of these communities suffered from a lack of public investment in sewer, water, and road service.

The plan also reads, quote, "planning decisions and real estate development practices aggravated these injustices for most of the 20th century."

Yet, in recent years, the board has been required by law to consider racial and social equity as it develops master plans.

- We've always taken an approach that centered their community.

And so what I think it did is it formalized some of the work that we were already doing.

So an example would be, since we're here about the Lyttonsville plan, an example would be that we went out early before we even put pen to paper.

And we were talking with the community.

We took into the demographics into context.

And we knew that we'd have to have varied approaches to make sure that everyone was included and also felt that their voices were heard.

And when you think about how you center equity into the process overall, what you're really trying to do is to make sure that people feel that their voices are being heard, and that they're being considered during the process.

And so a big part of that for the planning department was also making sure that there was this educational component because we wanted people to not only understand that their voices were being heard, but we wanted them to leave the process being able to better advocate for themselves.

- Pat Tyson and her sister Teresa grew up here in the late 1940s.

Their father, Lawrence, was a member of the Citizens Council for Mutual Improvement, an advocacy group for African-Americans.

Pat reads from the group's first annual report dated March 1948, which outlined a list of complaints to county commissioners.

- And they said specifically, the delegation asked for immediate attention to school conditions, which were described as deplorable.

Number two, improvement of roads leading to Negro settlements.

Number three, removal of Jim Crow signs on public restrooms, extension of water and sewage lines to Negro communities.

- Urban renewal forced Pilgrim Baptist Church, built in 1914, to relocate to Pennsylvania Avenue on the east side of the neighborhood.

Church cemetery remains were reinterred at Maryland National Memorial in Laurel.

My nephew, Dwight Evans Jr., is here.

He died in 1966.

This is my son, [indistinct].

This is the preacher, Reverend Jackson and his wife.

That's where they lived.

Other relatives are buried here as well, Elise Crutchfield, James Crutchfield, Allene Thomas, and my sister Valerie.

Valerie was just a baby when she died in the early 1950s.

- We moved all the ones from Pilgrim Baptist off of Brookville Road, we moved them over here.

And then we added as much as we could, and then they shut it down.

At least they told us, they didn't have any more land until I came and tried to get Allene here.

And then they said I could put her at the foot of my grandfather's.

So I was able to put three people here since then.

- I imagine that was hard for you.

- Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I was young.

I was not-- but so young.

But it was uncomfortable.

I was very uncomfortable.

But it was something, I think, that needed to be done to protect, to make sure they got in the right resting place.

- Mona Stewart proudly lives on Albert Stewart Lane named after her grandfather who owned several lots in Linden.

- I used to live in that house over there, but my grandfather lived on this side.

And where this house actually is, on the other side of it, you would have found this pump.

My father saved it and turned it into the mailbox.

This area, he owned the lots and so forth.

And it's still named after him.

It's the Stewart Subdivision.

- Stewart remembers when prefab houses were brought in to replace some of the older homes.

When the roads were being paved, and when the prefab houses were brought in, what do you remember about that time?

- Well, we had actually moved over here before, so we came in '63, '64.

None of the roads at that point were paved.

So I know a lot of the folks over on Michigan Avenue on that side, they spoke about the amount of mud and so forth they walked through over here.

None of this was paved in any way.

The circle wasn't here.

So we would come down the hill.

And it wasn't a whole lot of gravel on this side where it would make it more stable.

We moved in the driveway, pretty much mud.

And people walking over to come to the house, we would ask them to remove their shoes because the shoes were caked with mud.

- Myra Coffield grew up in Lyttonsville and still calls it home today.

Have you seen a lot of change?

- There's definitely been a lot of change.

When I was growing up, it was predominantly Black neighborhood.

All the neighbors that I remember growing up were Black.

So it's definitely changed with building new houses and building new houses down the street, low income housing down the street and all of that.

There's been a big change in terms of the diversity.

- Her family has a legacy of civic activism.

And like the Stewart's, was one of just a few families to own property here.

- On the lot where my mom's house is there and the whole cul-de-sac going back to the tree line.

- Her mother, Charlotte, led the neighborhood civic association and was active in local political circles.

And her aunt, Gwendolyn, was so civic minded and so respected that this community center is named in her honor.

- Yeah, it's overwhelming.

It's so incredible to think that you have the family name is on a building.

And that people are so aware of all of the things that she did.

I knew her as my aunt.

And to this day, I live in her old house.

So I'm surrounded by her 24/7.

But it's really great to be reassured that everyone else recognized her for the great person she was.

- The Coffield sisters taught Sunday school at Pilgrim Baptist church, which is now led by Reverend Charles Jackson.

- SINGING: Oh, can't turn around.

We've come this far by faith.

- How many know the Lord has brought you this far by faith?

How many know that he's brought you this far?

Not that you did it yourself.

Not because of your money, not because of your-- this is a new year.

And so we've stated to some of the members that we have missions that we're going to start.

One of them is a youth ministry.

It's to get the young people and being able to communicate and connect with the ways and the, uh, or the ways that the younger people feel and how they want to be able to worship the Lord.

We don't worship the Lord exactly how the young people do, but we worship the Lord.

And so they worship the Lord.

Yes, some people say, well, they sing this or they sing that, but you have to remember what's in the heart of the young people.

We have the same members.

Matter of fact, we have more members now since the pandemic.

We just don't have them all attended in-person worship.

They're online and stuff.

We have members from Jersey, Detroit, New York, Carolinas, which worships with us.

And they're here every Sunday.

They're online every Sunday.

You may join this church or any church of your choice.

- Pilgrim, the original, was a big church, tall, had a nice basement.

They always served food there, had church dinners.

So it was really nice.

We got a lot of trips that we took from that church to Hersheypark, Pennsylvania, York, Pennsylvania.

So we did a lot there.

The church did a lot for the children of the community.

And the people of the community did a lot for-- the church people did a lot for the community and the people there.

- They cooked.

They sold dinners.

My grandma, my mother, that's what they did, Ms. Jeannie.

- Your grandmother.

- And they would cook and sell dinners.

And those who even couldn't buy, they fed them.

But Pilgrim Baptist, it was a church-- it was our church, walking distance.

It was up the street from where you was raised, and we were on Brookville.

But it was the church.

We had Rev.

Cromartie, Rev.

Helms.

- Reverend King-- - Reverend King.

- --ended up being there.

- But of the ones that we grew up with.

- We grew up.

And they was like-- they was family.

They wasn't-- they come to church and come to the house, like we say Sunday, to eat and everything.

It was like, you know.

- But it was an open door church.

At Pilgrim Baptist, Aunt Eula-- she was our cousin, but we called her Aunt Euly, your aunt.

She was the head of the young, of us, the singers.

And I felt good because we actually went on WOL to sing.

- Yeah.

- OK.

So that was a good, positive thing.

And also, we had some great, great singers at Pilgrim Baptist.

- Yes, we did.

- Sis, oh, Sis.

- Sis Field.

- Sis would raise this roof.

- She could sing.

- But we had singing.

We would be-- you could be-- I mean, because you could hear.

You're sitting in your house and you could when the church is going on.

They had [indistinct].

You would hear the singing if you didn't go.

- She made sure that we had these trips.

We would go to Hersheypark or something.

She'd make sure that-- go to the beach.

The neighborhood had picnics and stuff and everything.

Eula Mae, she took care of all that for us.

- Eula Mae, she was the Sunday school director.

- Director.

- Director of Sunday school.

But I bet she didn't realize how important she was to the community.

- Really.

- She was.

- Because, just like Mae was saying, it was a focal point for activities.

- Several former residents returned to Pilgrim, their old church, to tell their stories of growing up in Linden.

- Praise the Lord.

- Praise the Lord.

- And praise the Lord.

- Sisters Lucinda Hall and Wanet Tyson grew up on Garfield Avenue along with William Jackson.

- I didn't realize how much, until I got grown, how much the value meant to me, how much it helped me in my adulthood, mannerism, respect.

And it was just amazing.

- Church was a very, very big part of our growing up.

And the church gave us the belief that we could do what we wanted to do.

We did not feel like we were less than anybody.

We felt like we were the same or all people were the same.

And we had the experience, whether it was through church, a different experience.

It wasn't like-- right in the community, you stayed.

We went on trips.

We were able to go places probably where other people did not go.

When I talked to other communities, they did not do what Linden did.

And my dad, he loved to travel even until he died.

And he took us to Pennsylvania, to Dutch Wonderland, to the Catoctin Zoo in Frederick County.

He took us to the Enchanted Forest.

I believe it's Ellicott City.

So we did not stay isolated.

We were exposed.

- The sisters speak fondly of their father, Luther, who fulfilled his dream of becoming a professional firefighter.

- The opportunity did not present itself in Montgomery County.

Their structure was different.

He started out when he was a young man, 18, 19 years old, volunteering in Prince George's County as a firefighter.

And he was determined that he was going to be a professional firefighter.

He was in his 30s when it finally happened, but he did not stop.

He went on to become an EMT.

He also taught classes at the University of Maryland because that was his love.

That was the example.

The older people from different generations gave us an example of what to follow.

- Very proud.

He was the type of person-- and my sister, one that has the same personality-- that if you want to do something, you make it happen.

No excuses.

You just did it.

It was his lifelong love and he was good at it.

And so yeah, very proud of him.

- Linden had a neighborhood school that closed after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation.

- I was elated because by that time, I was so aware of how uneven our school system was in Montgomery County, how so inferior our Black schools as a whole were in relation to the white schools, how truly segregated we were.

- Staley Jackson, a retired medical doctor, remembers his early days at the Linden School, one of several all-Black elementary schools in Montgomery County.

- One of the things about Linden Elementary School-- one of the things about the segregated schools in those days-- all the communities in Maryland, we had the segregated schools.

But the teachers, the teachers in our school, they were-- those teachers-- I mean, they went all out to make sure we were educated.

- Well, the biggest experience, I guess, or memory is the teachers.

They really cared and were interested in giving us an education with all their limitations, hand-me-down books, some books with pages missing.

But also, in the process, taught us about life, respect for each other, discipline, that type of thing.

- The same teacher who taught my mother also taught my sister Gwen.

So that's how long the teachers stay there.

I had the same teacher from the first grade through the seventh grade because when I moved to the second room, she also moved to the second room.

But the two-room schoolhouse did not have indoor plumbing.

Our playground was the school driveway, dirt driveway.

We had castoff school books from the White schools.

We had books that had writing in it, answers written in, pages torn out.

We had furniture that was all scarred and mocked up, but that's the kind of situation that we grew up under.

The streets were not paved, so we walked the dirt roads to get to school and things like that.

- Going over to Rosemary Hills, when they built it, it wasn't a lot of fun.

I remember of one teacher I had.

We were going to put on a play.

And she told me, well, you can't do that play because it's not for Black people.

That hurt me to my heart.

But it wasn't easy going to the white schools, although there were several of us here going over to Rosemary Hills, but most of the students that grew up with, they weren't there either.

- That all these Black kids coming in and they smelled.

And they were stupid because I don't think we learned anything because the teachers wouldn't teach us at all.

We were sent over in the corner someplace and didn't do anything that whole year.

- Going to school with whites was not something I really look forward to.

It was just the way the principals and so forth, the teachers would treat you, but you'd always find some kind teachers.

But they were are few and far between.

- We went to Woodlin first in kindergarten, and then we went to Rock Creek Forest.

Well, Rock Creek Forest in the winter time would be cold.

And we were standing up against the wall trying to keep warm.

And all of a sudden, you hear this word, the N word, or you're poison, that's what I witnessed.

And then you go home, and I would tell my grandmother, and she would try to explain.

And it's like she put a bandage on.

I felt better.

- Ike's Blue Moon.

- Ike's Blue Moon.

- Yeah.

- That was a beer garden.

- That was a beer garden.

- And then-- - Was that popular?

- Yeah.

- Oh, yeah.

- You had people from Rockville, Kensington, Takoma Park, everywhere.

They came up there to that.

They used to jam up there.

- Oh, my god, yeah.

- They had a band.

- My mother used to work there.

- Yep, her and Ms. Florence Nelson, they cooked.

- Ms. Florence Nelson.

- We had a pride in Linden.

And we used to show it off sometimes.

I'll never forget how we would go to the teen club.

- Teen clubs.

- Staley was in charge of that and everything and used to take us where you'd go and dance, go to other teen clubs, which was the Takoma Park, Kensington, Wheaton, Rockville.

You kind of had a little problem with Rockville because it was like a little jealousy in between that and everything.

And mainly, like I say, that we knew how to dance.

- We had, on Brookville Road, we called it the white building.

And we had a little playground down from that.

They had swings and sliding wood.

That was our hangout.

People from Garfield come up there, people from Brookville Road, and that's where we played and enjoyed each other's time, riding bikes, taking the boy's bikes, going away with it.

Then we would go up to WWDC and start taking the peaches off the tree.

But it was just a community thing that we did together.

Definitely, that's what we did growing up.

So we got to see-- but now, 7:30, we had to be in the house before dark.

And that was in the community.

Everybody knew, OK, 7 o'clock we got to go.

- We had a field up on the hill, up on Brookville Road where we played baseball up there-- - And Walter Reed.

- --and everything.

Walter Reed, where Walter Reed is now, that was our baseball field up there.

Which, like I said, Jeffrey, our cousin, all of them, had these nice bikes that they got for Christmas and everything.

Well, us, girls, we stand around while they playing ball.

And sometime, we would ease off with the bikes and go riding and everything.

- Earlier, we mentioned Black enclaves like Scotland, Ken-Gar, and Emory Grove.

Their stories are similar to Lyttonsville.

Gary Lancaster grew up in Emory Grove and Stewart Town.

He took us on a driving tour of the time all Black communities.

[KING FLOYD, "GROOVE ME"] Baby, oh, sock it to me, mama.

- He lived across the street from Emory Grove Baptist and recalls going to Sunday school every weekend.

He also recalls this water pump at the back of his house, and he remembers Johnson's Park, owned by a relative, a weekend spot for church meetings and baseball games which attracted Negro league ballplayers.

- They were famous because they went on to become Major League Baseball players.

But actually, the local guys were more famous to me like Glenn, Glenn Taylor, and Peggy Campbell.

- Everyplace that was big enough to play baseball, and then we'd go over there and play baseball.

That was our main activity - And we were the only park in the county who had lighting, big lights for the field where the games could take place at night.

And once the county purchased the land, they removed those lights from Emory Grove.

So that was quite a blow for us.

- You told me over the phone that your family had about 20 acres, you all had to sell it?

- Yeah, I had no choice.

They took it.

People have running water now as opposed to not having running water and having outhouses.

So life is much better.

Life became better for a lot of the people here.

They can get a car now.

They got electricity.

They can take a shower.

So things have gotten better.

But you no longer have to run from people who are chasing you.

There was a large Ku Klux Klan organization in Gaithersburg, actually.

- It's November of 2023, and it's Reconciliation Month in Montgomery County.

- SINGING: I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

- I'd like to welcome you before you even get there to North Woodside, which is just across the bridge.

And I want to acknowledge once again that the neighborhood of North Woodside was built on segregation and racism.

But the good news is we can move forward together with our brothers and sisters in Lyttonsville and Rosemary Hills into the future with a new bridge and a new future for all of us together and a new relationship.

- The only way for me to go when I was a teenager to go downtown to maybe the movies on the weekend or the theater or something as a teenager was over the bridge.

- Bridge has served as a lifeline for us for generations.

- This is the new Talbot Bridge under construction.

The old span, torn down for the purple line, was a tangible symbol of segregation that separated Black and white neighborhoods.

- I moved into North Woodside about 15 years ago.

And when I moved in, I didn't know anything about the history of our neighborhoods and their relationship to each other.

I didn't know that Lyttonsville was a historically Black community.

And I didn't know that my own neighborhood had been historically white and had racist deed covenants that prevented people who are Black living in it.

And once I learned that history, the importance of learning about the-- teaching other people about the history so we can understand each other and working to heal the divides from the past and bring us together was very important.

- May 2024, the new Talbot Avenue Bridge is now open.

- This bridge was a barrier for people.

This bridge treated people on one side originally different than people on the other side and it separated communities.

And the Black community could work on this side of the bridge, but people of the Black community could not live on this side of the bridge.

- As a long time resident here in Lyttonsville, this is very historic and very appreciated.

We pray that this bridge will be a bridge of peace, respect, and remembered.

We're breaking down racial barriers that separated good people from each other.

- That's Uncle William.

- There is Jeannie.

Mr. Edward-- Mr. [indistinct].

- Wow.

- They look like-- - I got it.

I got-- - The Coffield Center hosted a special Linden exhibit during Black History Month.

- Either this Francis, Mason or Jeannie.

- That's my mother, Mildred, right there next to her.

- That's your mother?

- Oh, my god, look at mama.

- He wore them well.

- We met Reverend Ella Redfield and longtime Rosemary Hills resident Roger Peyton at the exhibit.

They both support a museum slated to be built at the center.

The museum project is part of the Greater Lyttonsville Zoning Sector Plan, which was spurred by the purple line.

- With this station, something that I didn't realize, was that this was going to increase the speed of gentrification.

And we've already been able to see that.

That might have been inevitable even without the station.

But it's one other reason to have the museum is that Lyttonsville is changing.

There are a number of historically Black communities, small ones, pretty much impoverished, that have been here since 1850s, and nobody knows anything about them.

And I think it's really important that we realize that these are our fellow citizens that have been living here and have been basically mistreated for a very long time.

And I hope that the museum will be able to show how the county mistreated the residents of Lyttonsville in a number of ways.

- I just believe that when you don't know where you come from, it's hard to get to where you need to be in life.

And I think that it will be a tremendous asset to the community so that those who do not know the history of Lyttonsville or Linden, as we called it, they will get a sense of the people in the community and get a sense of the struggles, the trials or tribulations, as well as the joys that we had in the community, because indeed, we did have joy despite our lack and limitation.

- There's supposed to be a museum coming, Lyttonsville museum that make you proud.

And it's going to be here.

- Of course, yeah.

I've heard a little bit about it.

And of course, people are asking me for pictures and artifacts and things like that.

So I'm curious to see how it all comes together.

Yeah, I can't wait.

- To see the connection to the history will be gone.

And we need this museum in order to keep that memory alive.

- While gentrification has changed the fabric of the neighborhood I grew up in, more change is coming.

The purple line, a light rail system running from New Carrollton to Bethesda, will have two stations in the area.

And it's prompted planners to propose new housing and expansion of parks and trails, as well as improvements to area business districts.

My Linden, my Lyttonsville, the untold story.

So why share this story?

I've been asked that question several times.

How or why is Linden any different from other segregated Black neighborhoods back in the day?

I don't know if it was different or special compared to any other community.

The landscape now is different.

Many of the people are different.

Many have died or moved away.

But I know this, while the community I knew is no longer here, it is within me.

It's ingrained in me.

The spirit of family and caring for others came from this community.

And I want my daughter and future generations to know just how special Linden was.

Which is why during Montgomery county's reconciliation month, longtime residents honored their neighbors who passed away.

- Vernon Stewart Jr., Vernel Stewart, Ingrid Stewart, Fleet and Martha Quarles.

- Wood and Marie Young, Lynn Young, Suge Young, George and Daisy Shackleford, Albert and Eula Turner.

- What do you want people today and tomorrow and years down the road to know about this community?

- I'd just like them to appreciate it for its uniqueness, its sort of special place in history in Montgomery County, and just to recognize how far things have come and how people have really thrived despite some really harsh socioeconomic conditions.

People have really thrived in this community.

And I'd just like people to remember that.

- We had a strong sense of community.

And that's one of the things that sort of breaks my heart in the African-American community because while we have-- some of us have achieved so much, and we have risen to a certain level, we have distanced ourselves.

And for me, our integration was the best thing that happened to us.

It was a blessing.

But integration was also a curse because we do not have the community that we had that we had in Linden.

♪ No, no, no, no ♪ ♪ Don't forget about me, no, no ♪ ♪ Remember my name ♪ ♪ Write it in the sky ♪