Above photo: March to the cemetery site, Feb. 2017, WJLA.
Bethesda, MD — The Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) called in armed police to remove peaceful protesters from its monthly board meeting on Wednesday. This was the first meeting since County Executive Marc Elrich appeared before the board last month to express his support for Macedonia Baptist Church’s (MBC) efforts to protect Moses African Cemetery in Bethesda. Protesters have peacefully demonstrated every month at these meetings for the last two years trying to stop the desecration of their ancestors.
“It flies in the face of HOC’s mission to support the least of these that their board would bring in armed police to remove people who are truly trying to protect the history and legacy of a poor African community that was annihilated by developers,” said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, MBC’s Social Justice Ministry Chair. “The irony is not lost on us that the largest developer in the county, HOC—as its Executive Director, Stacy Spann, boasted at a recent NAACP meeting—should be perpetuating in death the dispossession of these people who were so abused in life.”
“HOC pays no county, state or federal taxes, yet is the largest developer in Montgomery County?” asked Rev. Dr. Segun Adebayo, MBC’s pastor. “HOC cannot seriously call itself a not- for-profit organization. That is why we support the proposed state legislation that would bring HOC under Montgomery County oversight. We call on County Executive Elrich to audit HOC. Time is up. HOC’s days of quasi-government, Wild West laissez-faire are over.”
Macedonia Trustee, Harvey Matthews said, “I strongly support my pastor’s position that Macedonia Baptist Church is the only institution that represents the descendant community and that Rev. Segun Adebayo speaks for the coalition.”
HOC Chairwoman, Jackie Simon, told activist Lynn Pekkanen that HOC Commissioners would never meet with the Macedonia Social Justice Coalition. During the meeting, Mr. Spann said that he didn’t need to meet with Rev. Adebayo because Spann was meeting with ONE of the hundreds of descendants of the Bethesda burial ground coalition.
“It would never occur to Stacey Spann in a hundred thousand years that the descendant community of Macedonia Baptist Church is dispersed throughout the diaspora and is not embodied exclusively by any single person,” said Dr. Laurel Hoa, of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Montgomery County. “Yet every year on our annual ‘Homecoming Celebration,’ descendants come from far and wide to Macedonia to celebrate their families’ roots. Macedonia remains the only surviving cultural institution that represents the descendant community. Any effort that tries to supplant MBC’s authentic lead role in sanctifying the remains of our ancestors, preserving their history, legacy and contributions, should be seen for what it is—fraudulent line-jumping—to promote their hidden agenda.”
MBS fully supports the position County Executive Elrich asserted during his inaugural address in rejecting incremental change. Those days of incremental change are over.