(Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
Today I want to discuss something different. It’s a story about my high school, Walt Whitman High School.
Recently, three Whitman students were charged with spray-painting the n-word and a noose on the school. It was the second time this year someone vandalized the school with that word. Several students have been punished over the past years for using the word on social media. Perhaps most insidiously, a former Whitman student affiliated with white supremacist group Identity Evropa was charged in 2019 for distributing racist posters.
Since the most recent racist graffiti incident, several Black members of the school community — which is 67 percent white, and only 4 percent Black — have created an Instagram page to share their stories of discrimination at the school. I recommend you read it before this article; it is no coincidence, given the school’s demographics and its treatment of minority students, that it has earned the less-than-affectionate nickname of “Whiteman.”
In any school, such an influx of racist incidents would be seen as an indictment of the surrounding area and its culture. Yet Whitman is in deep blue Bethesda, Maryland. It is located in wealthy Montgomery County, and thus has no shortage of educational resources. U.S. News and World Report has consistently placed it among the best public high schools in the country.
So, how does a school in such a well-educated, affluent, liberal area become such a hotbed for racism? That’s the question I’ll attempt to answer in this (as-yet-indefinitely-long) series. To begin to answer that question, we have to go back to the start.
---
Whitman was a boomer; that is, to say, the school owes its existence to the post-World War II baby boom. In the 1940 Census, Montgomery County’s population was recorded as just under 84,000. By 1950, that number had shot up to over 164,000; three years later, the NIH would open its downtown campus. By 1960, the county’s population had quadrupled from just two decades before, swelling to over 340,000 residents. (The county’s population has since tripled to over a million, according to current Census Bureau estimates, but even that took four decades.)
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, located downtown, was the area’s only high school in 1940. With the influx of population, Montgomery County — and Bethesda, in particular — needed more schools. In 1956, Walter Johnson High School in Rockville opened its doors. Six years later, Whitman opened.
Bethesda itself has long been a hub for federal government workers, owing to its proximity to the nation’s capital. When Whitman began holding classes in 1962, the federal workbase was vastly white, due to President Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 order to segregate U.S. government workplaces. It would be years before President Lyndon Johnson would codify “affirmative action” within the American political dictionary.
The white supremacy of the federal government did not end at hiring practices. Between the 1934 introduction of the fixed mortgage rate and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, about 98 percent of affordable housing loans went to white families, according to a 2019 county council report. During this time, only 2 percent of loans went to non-white families, according to the report.
----
The existing Black community in Bethesda, although vibrant, was too left behind in the post-war economic boom.
Just two miles away from Walt Whitman lies the Westbard Shopping Center. With a Georgetown Bagelry, Whole Foods and sushi place, it’s a common lunch spot for Whitman students.
It was also built on a Black neighborhood.
“When I travel around the country and people ask where I was born, I tell them, ‘Bethesda,’ ” Harvey Matthews, a Black man who grew up in the neighborhood, told The Washington Post in 2017. “And they say, ‘There were black people in Bethesda?’”
It’s not hard to see why many would make that assumption; today, around 4 percent of Bethesda’s population is Black. But as white workers flooded into the city — mirroring the nationwide trend of “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs — that community gave way to urban development. 94 percent of all new houses built in Montgomery County from 1949 to 1958 were built in Bethesda, Rockville or Wheaton. And with white families more likely to receive federal loans, so too were they more likely to occupy these new homes.
One of the most horrific anecdotes of Bethesda’s suburbanization comes from the Moses Cemetery, formerly located in Westbard. In the 1960s, businessman Lazlo Tauber purchased the land the Black cemetery sat on, hoping to develop the area. Rumors of bodies being displaced, and “bags of bones” being moved from the burial site, persisted for decades.
Today, we still have no formal record of what happened to the bodies in the cemetery. What we do know, however, is that the site is currently occupied by a parking lot.
----
Montgomery County Public Schools officially desegregated in the mid-1950s, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board. Yet, for all intents and purposes, the county as a whole remains segregated — if not by law, then by design.
You can see the hallmarks of a discriminatory housing system in the county’s current boundaries. The county’s 1st legislative district — which includes Bethesda and Potomac, and stretches up to Poolesville — is upwards of 70 percent white, according to a 2019 county council report. No other district within the county is even half white.
Today, Bethesda is a liberal bastion. But its population boom was only possible because of a system that did not treat Black lives as if they mattered — both in looking for a place to live, and a place to die. Absent any change, that system has continued to this day, and will continue to do so.
Politics and Prozac is a sporadically-updated blog about journalism, elections, and their consequences. The author, Arya Hodjat (Whitman Class of ‘16) is a graduate in journalism and political science from the University of Maryland. You can reach him at aryahodjat11@gmail.com, or on Twitter @arya_kidding_me. Until next time!