BACC Calls for an Independent Investigation Into Montgomery County Parks and Planning: The Victims Demand Justice

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

(240) 731-9577

 

Entire Montgomery County Planning Board has Resigned in Disgrace

BACC Calls for an Independent Investigation Into

Montgomery County Parks and Planning: The Victims Demand Justice

 

Bethesda, Maryland, Thursday, October 13, 2022—For seven years the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) has been exposing Casey Anderson’s (et al’s) role in the desecration of Moses Macedonia African Cemetery and the willful exclusion of the descendant and Black communities from the decision making process—with the results being that Parks and Planning issued permits for developers to haul our ancestors off to a landfill and the desecration has escalated. There are living victims here. Now, the entire Montgomery County Planning Board and its chair have resigned in disgrace.

 

We would like to thank everyone who has marched with BACC and supported our efforts to remove these bad actors. We hold, however, that accepting the resignations is incompatible with the severity of the acts these officials permitted. BACC calls for an independent investigation of how these acts were tolerated and who collaborated in the process. The removal of the entire Planning Board is only the first step in dismantling what has long been toxic policies that disproportionately affect the Black community, and that was approved by the County Executive, throughout the entirety of the county’s land use policy administrators.

 

Montgomery County Council President, Gabe Albornoz, said in a press release yesterday, “The Council has lost confidence in the Montgomery County Planning Board and accepted these resignations to reset operations. We are acting with deliberate speed to appoint new commissioners to move Montgomery County forward.”

 

BACC says, NOT SO FAST!  ALL of the County’s agencies that control land use have had a hand in the desecration of Moses Macedonia African Cemetery and the exclusion of the descendant and Black communities from the process. “Over BACC’s strenuous and repeated appeals, the County Council nominated every member of the now disgraced Planning Board, and County Executive Elrich approved them. BACC provided abundant evidence to Marc Elrich for him to reject Casey Anderson’s contract renewal—but he approved it anyway,” said BACC President, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo.

 

BACC has consistently appealed to the county executive, the county council, the planning board, MCHOC, the state’s attorney, the historical trust—all of whom have done nothing to stop the desecration and exclusionary prohibited practices that continue to escalate. 

 

“Montgomery County says it lost confidence in the Planning Board,” said Rev. Dr. Segun Adebayo, Pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church—the sole surviving cultural institution of a once thriving River Road African and Black community. “After years of appealing to county officials to intervene and stop the desecration—to no avail— WE have no confidence in these same county officials. We have tasted the bitter realities of the collusion that continues to allow the desecration. Do you honestly expect us to believe that Mr. Anderson only recently installed a bar in his office?”

 

BACC exhausted all administrative remedies years ago and still our ancestors languish beneath a parking lot—and in a landfill—where county officials permitted them to be carted away like trash.

 

Were the county to replace all of the “bad apples,” the corruption would continue apace: land use governance in Montgomery County is a Jim Crow relic. Its most recent manifestation is Casey Anderson’s Thrive 2050. It must go the way of its chief architect, Casey Anderson. This upheaval in the Planning Board provides an opportunity for the county to own its history of slavery, desecration of Moses Cemetery, industrial scale breeding of African women, rape, torture, lynching, and murder. There is no need to rush to fill a Planning Board that would operate within a systemically racist organization.

 

Mr. Albornoz, we don’t need deliberate speed—we need deliberation—that includes an honest and sober assessment of how we arrived at this sordid state. Absent an independent investigation, we are doomed to replace the disgraced Board with another panel of good ol’ boys and girls that works against the Black community.