I was born in Washington DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW in the Shaw community. We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. Not long ago, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.

 

My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950s. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm. 

Georgia Ave was now a busy multi-lane highway, although I noted with satisfaction that the grove of trees that had grown on the old Denley farm was still standing across the highway. Busy commuters were striding past Estelle and me as I tried to get my bearings on a part of the planet that had once been very familiar with me.

The Metro commuters were dividing into two groups though. Most of the white commuters were getting into their late-model cars and SUV’s and heading north to more distant suburban realms. Most of the darker hued commuters were waiting for the traffic light to change so they could cross Georgia Avenue and walk to their homes across the highway.

I couldn’t help but nudging Estelle and pointing out with some pride that the working class still owned Glenmont after all these years.

Back in the early 1950s, our section of Glenmont that stretched along Weller Road was a segregated white working class enclave, in keeping with Maryland’s troubled racial heritage. I was 5 years old when I first peered out the window to see the blinking red light at the top of the Glenmont water tower.

 

Weller Road was still mud and from what I remember, we were just about the first people to move on to the block that intersected Georgia Ave. There was a farm field behind us that was to provide my friends and I with endless supplies of grapes and raw corn and a farm across Georgia Ave where my mom would buy fresh eggs right from the chickens.

Our part of Glenmont (called Glenmont Hills) was built on the foundations of New Deal thinking. My dad went to college on the GI Bill so he could afford to take his family out of inner city Washington DC. Our little house on Weller Road was financed by low interest veteran’s loans. Weller Road Elementary School received federal impact aid because of the large number of government workers in the area (including my dad who worked for the Veterans Administration).

  
Our Glenmont house under construction

As a kid I grew up in a government subsidized world when white working class America was about to see its greatest economic boom. The bulldozers of America were turning woods and fields into cheap subsidized housing for the generation who had survived Depression and WWII. Us kids were to be its beneficiaries even as we watched our favorite creeks and woodlands disappear into sprawling subdivisions.

But of course, whites benefited from these New Deal-style programs far more than anyone else. Many college and universities were still segregated or if not formally segregated, they could be hostile environments for people of color. Housing was still very segregated and the new working class subdivisions like Glenmont Hills or the more famous Levittown were no exception.

Our backyard pool

Estelle and I crossed Georgia Ave and walked down Denley Road to Flack Street and then north toward Weller Road. The tiny little brick bungalows that lined the streets were never architectural masterpieces, but boy, they had been built to last. In fact the neighborhood looked a lot better than when I lived there. 

The original developers (the Gelman Corporation) had knocked down most of the trees so the place could get stifling hot with little natural shade. But now the streets were tree-shaded. The houses had gardens, bushes and unique decorative elements that you just didn’t see when the neighborhood was new.

When we arrived at Weller Road, I took a long look at the house at 2902 where I had lived from 1951-1961. It looked a lot smaller than I remembered, but the successive owners had done a nice job in maintaining it and making useful additions. After snapping a few photos, we turned up Weller Road to the corner of Flack Street where my first babysitter lived. I don’t recall her name, but she was very dark-skinned for someone in segregated Glenmont. Her parents were white.

My mom warned me never to ask questions, which only increased my curiosity. I wanted to ask the sitter about it when she came to our house to care for me, but never worked up the courage. So instead I imagined that she must be Polynesian and created movies in my head of her paddling an outrigger canoe with members of her tribe, or sailing a catamaran across the wide Pacific. My dad had taken me to see Mutiny On the Bounty which fueled my South Sea fantasies.

We continued up the street toward Weller Road Elementary School. I had a couple of fine teachers there, especially Mrs. Godfrey who taught us her native West Virginia mountain songs and helped instill in me a lifelong love of reading. The librarians there encouraged me to visit them and led me to new worlds of wonder through science, history, biography and science fiction books. 

The playground was also pretty exciting when boys divided up into Union and Confederate to refight the Civil War by engaging in general boyish rough housing. Sometimes we retreated to the gullies on the edge of the school property and conducted a kind of trench warfare with dirtballs and other (nonlethal) missiles. I’m proud to report that I always served on the Union side. Where the playground supervisors were during all of this, I haven’t a clue.

Then there was Bootsy with her curly brown hair and her laughing smile. We were both in the first grade and in love. When I wasn’t on duty in the playground wars, she and her little girl posse would chase me into the school courtyard while I pretended to run away. I suppose some cynical adults would dismissively label this “puppy love”, but have you ever listened to a puppy cry when it is lonely and bereft? When Bootsy moved away that summer I was heartbroken.

Those were some of the bright spots, but on the whole I have to say that Weller Road Elementary School in the 1950s was not a great experience for me. The fights, the vandalism, the bullying and the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of the place seemed to dominate my life, especially after Bootsy moved away. I was a discipline problem for a variety of reasons, so the school thought they could mold me into a good citizen by making me a safety patrol.

After a series of fights and various scrapes with the school authorities, Montgomery County Police Sgt. DeVries personally kicked me off the safety patrols and took back my white patrol belt that I had worked so hard to keep white and clean. I was also one of the leaders of a student protest against our incompetent 5th grade teacher, which did not endear me to the principal, but eventually led to the firing of the teacher.

Weller Road Elementary today has a majority black and Hispanic school population. White students make up a minority of its student body. Looking at the school on the hot summer day of my visit, I wondered if they were doing a better job than when I was there. The Weller Road Elementary website projects the image of a caring multicultural learning environment. I hope the reality comes close to the image.

 
Weller Road Elementary Today

We turned away from Weller Road Elementary and headed toward nearby Wheaton High School where I had participated in the local YMCA football, basketball and baseball programs. As we approached the school, three young Hispanic men came toward us with menacing shaved heads and streetwise scowls that were directed not at us, but at the world in general. They sauntered past us as if we did not exist.

It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. Back in my youth, they would have been three surly looking white guys with greasy Elvis Presley ducktail haircuts, black leather jackets and tight jeans that looked like they had been sprayed on. Teenagers in Glenmont used to sit for hours soaking in bathtubs of hot soapy water to shrink their Levis as dramatically as possible.

Ironically my little encounter with the three Hispanic guys was very close to where my friend Jaime had lived. Jaime was Mexican and part of our friendship agreement was that he would teach me dirty Spanish in exchange for my arsenal of gutter English. Colorful language and sexist jokes were an integral part of Glenmont boy culture so I eagerly took on the job as Jaimes’s tutor.

Soon I could repeat various phrases that included “a la chingada” (or something like that). Jaime was vague about the exact English translation, but he assured me that it was very dirty. That was good enough for me. Jaime was probably the only Mexican kid for miles in that sea of Glenmont white faces, but I actually thought he was white. He spoke Spanish and Spaniards were white people, right? I thought he had a good suntan that just persisted over the winter months. God, was I ignorant.

At Wheaton High School I stood in front of the entrance and posed for a picture with my fist in a socialist salute. At the age of 5, I had performed my first political act there, handing out leaflets for Adlai Stevenson on the 1952 election day as my parents did work for the local Democratic Party. Someone there told me I shouldn’t support Stevenson because Adlai was against the H-Bomb. I didn’t know what an H-Bomb was, but if Adlai didn’t like it had to be something bad.

Later in the 1950s when I went to the Wheaton High School football games, the place would be surrounded with souped up ‘55 Chevys and various breeds of hot rod, all driven by guys who looked like they had just escaped from “Rebel Without a Cause” or “Blackboard Jungle”, two popular movies of the time about angry alienated teenagers. It was common “knowledge” among us grade schoolers that the black leather jackets of the guys concealed such weapons as switchblade knives and zipguns. The girls supposedly weighted their purses so they could be swung more effectively in a fight.

We heard dark rumors of “rumbles” at the local teen hangouts. How much of this was actually true? I don’t know for sure, but in my year at Glenmont’s Belt Junior High, gangs of black leather jacketed kids would circle around vicious after-school fights while subsidiary fights broke out among spectators.

I gave those Glenmont gladiatorial games a wide berth.

We turned down Dalewood Drive toward the small woodlot and creek that ran past the Wheaton Recreation Center. Ahead of us two black girls and a long-haired blonde were headed in the same direction with swimsuits and towels. As a kid I had helped build dams to create swimming holes in the creek, but I couldn’t believe kids still did that today. The mystery of the three Glenmont girls would be solved later in our excursion.

The creek began at a storm drain and ended at another storm drain a couple of blocks downstream, but it was our little Grand Canyon. It contained a wildlife population of water striders, whirligig beetles, tadpoles and a few minnows. The dams we built created pools deep enough to swim a few strokes. Then we would break the dams to unleash a torrent of floodwaters on any unsuspecting creatures further down. I learned quite a bit about hydrological engineering there.

The creek was a bitter disappointment—totally overgrown with kudzu vine. I could barely see the water. I had read about kudzu as a budding grade school junior ecologist. It had been introduced into the Deep South for erosion control and had reproduced like cockroaches in a 100-year-old tenement. But what the hell was it doing in Maryland? Ah, global warming, of course. Thanks to ignorance and greed, the kids of Glenmont were being deprived of their own free natural neighborhood water park. What a goddamned shame in this age of “nature deficit disorder.”

As we walked down toward the bridge that leads to the rec center building we heard shouts, cheers and whistles. The mystery of the three Glenmont girls was solved. In place of the tennis courts, the Montgomery County Recreation Department had built a community pool. We walked up to the high fence surrounding the pool and peered inside. People of all shapes, colors and ages were splashing merrily about or relaxing with chips and soda pop.

I had once carried a towel, swim trunks and a quarter to the rec center to get bussed to the Glen Echo Amusement Park pool. It was really an ancestor of today’s water parks with its towering water slide and bubbling fountains. I loved the place.

 Glen Echo Amusement Park was also segregated. If the three Glenmont girls we had seen earlier had tried to enter, only the blonde would have been admitted. The civil rights movement eventually desegregated Glen Echo, but the place closed down soon afterwards. Rumor had it that the local white residents didn’t want blacks coming to “their” neighborhood to ride the roller coasters, eat cotton candy and swim in the pool.

 

 

Glen Echo today is a National Park Service operated arts and cultural center. If you visit Glen Echo, you can ride the restored version of the original Glen Echo carousel and get on board a piece of our Jim Crow history.

Remains of the Glen Echo Pool

I’d seen enough. It was a long hot walk back up Randolph Road to the cool interior of the Glenmont Metro station.

Glenmont had lost some of its woods and fields to suburban sprawl and that saddened me. But the sight of the pool almost made up for that loss. In the Glenmont of the 1950s, vicious racism was just part of the landscape. I had never been comfortable with that kind of bigotry and had secretly cheered on the civil rights movement as it fought to overcome it. But like most kids, I wanted to fit in. So I laughed (weakly) at the steady stream of racist jokes and tried not to wince when I heard the word the word “nigger"—which was often.

21st century Glenmont is a multiracial working class neighborhood. That was the sort of dream I pursued when I later volunteered for Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples' Campaign and the Black Panther Party’s rainbow coalition organizing. Glenmont’s resegregation is always possible, but I don’t think it will ever go back to the Jim Crow days that I remember.

I wish today’s residents of Glenmont well. Hold on to the dream. If America is to have a future, you hold some of the keys to it.