About 20 miles of what is now called River Road in Bethesda, Maryland, once stood the Counselman Tobacco Plantation. Following the Civil War, a community of formerly enslaved Black people bought land on both sides of the road and started growing a self-sustaining community.
The Macedonia Baptist Church — a literal church on a hill — remains an eye-catching relic of a once-thriving Black neighborhood, now nestled near a Chase Bank and across the street from an Extra Space Storage.
“Every Sunday, miraculously all these Black people would show up, and I was curious as to why only on Sundays would I finally start seeing a lot of Black people in this area,” Dr. Coleman-Adebayo told The Informer, remembering her first moments on River Road.
Originally from Detroit, Coleman-Adebayo moved to D.C. to accept a position as a professor at American University. She began attending Sunday service at the Macedonia Baptist Church and noticed that much of the Black congregation did not live in the surrounding community.
After becoming a member of the church and then First Lady, she was asked to take up a social justice ministry. Her first assignment was to attend a Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (MNCPPC) meeting and to sign off on a sector plan for the property across the street from her church, where a governmental agency assured her that there was no cemetery.
At first, being unaware of the possible existence of a cemetery, Coleman-Adebayo remembers Harvey Matthews, a former resident, speaking out about the plans.
“[Matthews] said, ‘I’m not sure where you are getting this information from, but there is a cemetery across the street from my church, and I used to play in that cemetery as a child because the parks in Montgomery County were segregated,’” Coleman-Adebayo recalled.
Public spaces in Montgomery County, for example, Glen Echo Park (the park referred to by Matthews), did not become desegregated until a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“A number of our members from the River Road community remembered and spoke at the meeting about not being able to play or even walk through the park,” Coleman-Adebayo told The Informer.
The educator and community leader told The Informer that once MNCPPC staff were faced with questions about the existence of the cemetery and its human remains, they dismissed any further discussion on the matter. Coleman-Adebayo, an experienced whistleblower against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), picked up on a sense that the organization was trying to hide something.
“I told the staff, ‘No, the conversation was not over, because there are members of my church who are unaccounted for,’” Coleman-Adebayo said, “and I wanted to [say], ‘Tell me right now where the members of my church are located.’”
She started researching the history of River Road and the church’s connection to Moses Cemetery, which inspired her to start The Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC).
“This is a fight for land. We believe that this land should belong to the Black community because our family members, our descendants, were buried in this land,” Coleman-Adebayo told The Informer. “If it had been a dog cemetery, a Jewish cemetery, a white cemetery, they would have stopped immediately, but because there were Black people, they decided, ‘What’s more important? Our private business or respecting the remains of these Black people?’”
A ‘Maafa’ Protest to Remember Those Buried at Moses Cemetery
On the Wednesday before Juneteenth, the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition hosted a “Maafa” protest against current developments on the Moses Cemetery through the Virginia-based R.W. Murray Co.
The word “maafa” is a Kiswahili term popularized by scholar Dr. Marimba Ani in 1988 to mean “genocide” or “terrible tragedy.”
Further, it is meant to describe centuries-long atrocities associated with the Trans-Atlantic and East African slave trades, alongside the generational effects of systemic racism.
“Who we are in the context of that fact [the maafa], we are survivors of genocide,” Coleman-Adebayo told The Informer, “and then we can start to need to think about what that means in terms of how we move forward and understand our history as a basis for future strategic planning. ”
The Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition used the term to refer to what is happening at Moses Cemetery, where the remains of formerly enslaved people were either destroyed due to and/or buried underneath new residential developments.
In a celebration ahead of Juneteenth, church members and activists gathered to share traditional African American hymns, prayers, speeches, stories, and recent updates regarding the Moses Cemetery.
Protest participants included members of Macedonia Baptist Church and BACC, as well as reenactors representing the 23rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment. This regiment was known as the first Black troop to fight in direct combat against General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which was organized at Camp Casey in late 1863.
The reenactors were also present to honor members of the historic regiment buried in Mose Cemetery, including Private Charles Brown and soldier H.H. Brown, who was at the Battle of the Crater during the Civil War, said Coleman-Adebayo.
“The same children that were kidnapped from Africa, one, two generations later become the United States Colored Troops,” Dr. Coleman-Adebayo told The Informer.
H.H. Brown was reported to have survived the bloody battle before moving back to Bethesda River Road, having a family of seven, and being buried in the now-disturbed burial site. Meanwhile, Private Charles Brown, also part of the U.S. Colored Troops and buried in Moses, had a similar story to H.H. Brown.
“If you go to Richmond, Virginia, and Maryland, you see plaques to Civil War heroes. But on River Road, they are dismembered,” Coleman-Adebayo said. “[continued quote].”
Captain Edward W. Gantt of the U.S. Navy, a Colored Troops reenactor, led the march through the street to the Moses Cemetery site. As a Howard graduate, he served 30 years of active duty with the Army and Navy before retiring back to D.C.
During the Maafa, he declared that before the first Juneteenth, while the white troops were being celebrated in D.C., the Black soldiers in Petersburg, Virginia, were on steamboats heading to Texas to let the last of the enslaved know they were free
“So when we think about Juneteenth,” Gantt said, “I hope we’ll make the connection that someone who looked just like me was there at the original Juneteenth.”
A Court Fight and Continuing to Raise Consciousness
The disputed land of Moses Cemetery was sold and developed into an apartment complex and parking lot in the 1960s, destroying and building on top of the burial ground.
After learning of the sacred site, members of BACC and other allies took their concerns to court. The plaintiffs— including descendants of those buried in the Moses Cemetery and the Macedonia Baptist Church— brought cases against the land’s owners, including the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County.
On Aug. 30, 2024, the Supreme Court of Maryland issued a landmark ruling in “Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition v. Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County,” finding that the site, currently part of the Westwood Tower Apartments, is likely a burial place for formerly enslaved persons.
The court found Moses Cemetery “was a historic Black burial place,” and “it appears likely that human remains are still interred in the land today, which is currently part of a property known as the Westwood Tower Apartments,” according to a statement posted by the National African American Reparations Commission after the BACC win.
Following this win, the coalition is continuing its fight to protect the rest of Moses Cemetery from further development.
Baba Mosi Matsimela is the former president of the Woodson-Banneker-Jackson-Bey Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).
Six years ago, Matsimela was unaware of the Macedonia Baptist Church or their fight to preserve the Moses cemetery. He originally heard about their cause on WPFW 89.3 FM—which often hosts programs like “What’s At Stake” and “AfricaNow!” — that documented the coalition’s fight to protect the Moses Macedonia African Cemetery. It was then, Matsimela said, that his chapter of UNIA-ACL formed a partnership with Coleman-Adebayo and BACC.
“Anything with the BACC that comes up and we are needed to protest, the UNIA-ACL division #330 comes out and we support because we understand that the fight has to continue,” Matsimela told The Informer.
At the June 17 Maafa, Matsimela offered prayers and a speech dedicated to the ancestors buried in the Moses Cemetery, and in honor of the Juneteenth celebration. He told The Informer he felt the day was significant to “commemorate the struggles of those who have been and are currently.”
“If you look at some things, you could say the Maafa is still going on in some places,” the activist said. “We are doing this because we want to raise the consciousness of people.”
‘Change Starts in Your Community’
Hailing from Bethesda, Maryland, Alexa Sloane told The Informer she grew up right at the end of River Road, but was shocked to learn about the Black community that lived there from the 1860s to 1950s.
“I was born at the end of River Road, lived here, went to Walt Women High School and I never knew about the history of River Road.” Sloane said, “I never knew that there were plantations that lined River Road. It was never taught to me.”
During her time in New York, Sloane participated in organizations that focused on community control of land, anti-gentrification, and stopping private interests from displacing people and culture.
Understanding the high rates of gentrification in D.C., Sloane read the news surrounding the Moses Cemetery and signed a petition made in support. Similar to Matsimela, Sloane heard Coleman-Adebayo on the radio discussing BACC’s preparation for their court date, and decided to work as an organizer.
‘“People forcibly displaced a cemetery where people were buried, and the County is saying that it is more important to build market rate housing than to protect the history of people that live in the County,” Sloane told The Informer.
While she said that people join the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition for various reasons, they are connected by the concern of private insurers taking a higher priority than people’s communities.
“It is really important to get involved at a local level,” Sloane said, “and there is always a movement that’s happening at a local level on your block, and that change starts in your block, and change starts in your community.”
