Decades later, institutional segregation lives on in Bethesda
by Lily Freeman
D
uring Patricia Tyson’s childhood, rainy days helped define her community. To Tyson, a retired State Department employee, the pitter-patter of droplets didn’t mean cozy afternoons, warm blankets or a sense of calmness. Instead, rainy days meant mud streaking through the neighborhood’s unpaved streets, making the roads so unusable that county workers had to toss gravel into the sludge so that residents could leave their community. Problems in the area weren’t limited to roads. Running water was unavailable. Streetlamps were nonexistent. Almost no residents owned a telephone. And there was no solidarity among the surrounding communities, which were full of wealthy residents who, for the most part, couldn’t care less about this bordering neighborhood. Such a community may sound foreign to many Whitman students, but Lyttonsville, where Tyson has lived for over 70 years, is a mere 15-minute drive from Whitman. Until its demolition in 2019, only the Talbot Avenue Bridge separated Lyttonsville from downtown Silver Spring, where more affluent lifestyles were — and still are — the norm. But there was one major difference between the communities: Lyttonsville, unlike many neighborhoods in the D.C. metro area, had no racially restrictive deed covenants that excluded Black families like Tyson’s from living within its borders. Deed covenants are provisions in legal documents that outline conditions for owning a property. At face value, deed covenants aren’t necessarily discriminatory; they might dictate that property owners may only use school grounds for school-related
reasons or that homeowners can’t use certain hazardous materials to refurbish a property. However, until the late 20th century, real estate companies imposed covenants on communities and properties that barred minority groups from living in parts of cities like Silver Spring and Bethesda. “The saying in Black communities was that you could always find the N—o community on the other side of the railroad tracks, and that seemed to separate most white communities from those who were African American,” Tyson said. “Well, the railroad tracks really did divide us.” Racially restrictive covenants became widespread in neighborhoods across the country after the 1926 Supreme Court case Corrigan v. Buckley upheld their legality. In Bethesda, racial covenants appeared as early as the 1930s, excluding African Americans and, many times, Jews and members of other minority groups. Although the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1948 for state courts to enforce racial covenants, it took decades for the practice to end. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that most of the real estate companies writing discriminatory covenants stopped doing so. A Maryland law took effect Oct. 1 that streamlines the process for residents to remove discriminatory covenants from their homes. In Bethesda, many neighborhoods, including Kenwood, Wood Acres, Chevy Chase and Sumner, still have the old covenants of record, though they’re no longer enforced. “The written word is powerful,” Tyson said. “Even today, even though people can buy wherever they want to, there are still some communities in Montgomery County that are not actually wide open.”
Hate-based exclusion
In the late 1960s, former D.C. resident Max Berry and his late wife, both Jewish, were searching for a house where the young couple could raise a family. They stumbled across a one-story home in Kenwood that, although it stood apart from the neighborhood’s larger houses, Berry thought was “just lovely.” “It looked like an English cottage,” Berry said.
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