News & Events

A historic Black community in Montgomery County, Maryland Hawkins Lane, Bethesda, MD. Photo by Neile Whitney 2025. Driving up Hawkins Lane in Chevy Chase, Maryland, still gives a sense of what this small kinship community must have been like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This kinship community was founded by James H. Hawkins in 1893, when he bought three acres of land that had in until 1867 belonged to a white farmer named James Hawkins. Residents in the late 20t

A historic black community in Montgomery County, Maryland Macedonia Baptist Church, Bethesda, MD. The heart of the River Road communities: Clipper Road, Dorsey Road, Crows Hill In the 1900 U.S. census, John and Martha Clipper and their six sons and two daughters lived in Bethesda, Maryland next to George Clipper (his son? 27 years apart in age) and George’s wife Lucy and their three children. The adult men were working as day laborers. Apparently the census takers had stopped

The Rock Spring Club was one of the hotels that were built near the C&O Canal and employed local Black residents.

The River Road/Crow Hill community of about 33 families ( (Roberts 2017) was located in Bethesda, MD about where the McDonald’s is now.

Miller's Flats was a small residential neighborhood in Bethesda Maryland.

The Alabama community in Poolesville is a mystery. We believe existed somewhere on W. Willard Rd.

The Pine Top community on Riffle Ford Rd. was linked to the Brownstown community in Germantown.

The community’s first church, Potomac Grove Colored Church, was built on Violettes Lock Road in 1893 by a community formed by workers at the local stone quarry, near the C&O Canal.

Book talk, Jason Green, Feb. 23, 2026 at peoples books in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The Brownstown community was founded in 1868 by William Brown, who bought ten acres here.

A short history of the Big Woods historic Black community in Maryland the 1800s.

The historic Black community of Sugarland, was founded in 1871 in Poolesville, MD.

What happened to them? What could they do and where could they go when they had nothing, and may not have known where to go and how to get there? Learning about our historic Black communities in Montgomery County, MD.

You are warmly invited to join us at a panel on Saturday at the Poolesville library.

MoCoLMP is naming & mapping enslavers & enslaved in 1860s Montgomery County, MD, and researching their connections to the 110 named historic Black communities that sprang up around them.

Linden-Lyttonsville in Silver Spring underwent significant urban renewal in the 1970s. We talk with a historic descendant about its effects.

Suzanne Johnson of the Sugarland historic Black community in MD remembers the self-sufficient community and the delicious food they made.

Map plantation sites, collect oral histories, research sites of slave markets, study reparations and more....

By the 1800s over 500 enslaved persons worked 25,000 acres of farms, orchards, quarries, and ironworks....

Touring the sites of the Tulsa Race Massacre & John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park.