Growing up, Carolyn Taylor, 74, of Montgomery Village lived in a three-story, 14-bedroom home built by her grandfather in the historically Black community of Emory Grove on the edge of what is now known as the City of Gaithersburg.
Taylor’s childhood home no longer stands due to Montgomery County’s urban renewal programs of the 1970s. The programs aimed to modernize underdeveloped areas but resulted in shrinking or eliminating the county’s historically Black communities.
“I always say that Emory Grove is not a physical place anymore. It’s a place of the heart,” Taylor said at a Community Development Network of Maryland event Thursday evening.
The event, held at the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Rockville, focused on advancing Black homeownership and highlighted the historic systemic racial disparities that shaped the imbalances in homeownership and wealth locally and nationally. Three members of the county’s historically Black communities – Scotland in Potomac, Emory Grove and Lincoln Park in Rockville – spoke at the event about their experiences with urban renewal, redlining and racial covenants playing out in their communities.
More than 20 attended the meeting including community members and local elected officials such as Rockville Mayor Monique Ashton and City Councilmember Izola Shaw, County Council President Andrew Friedson and councilmember Laurie-Ann Sayles.
“Our community was completely demolished,” Taylor said. “It [was] a beautiful place. It [was] a place of rolling hills [and] trees. When I was a child, most people were farmers. We had livestock. We had our own gardens, plenty of fruit trees and fruit all through the community.”
Freed African Americans founded Emory Grove in 1864. At its peak, the community had about 500 people living on about 300 acres of land, according to the Heritage Emory Grove website.
The community was “self-sufficient,” with a grocery store, doctors, movie theater and baseball park, Taylor said. A tight-knit community, multi-generational families lived under one roof. Religious “camp meetings” hosted thousands during the 1800s in Emory Grove’s park.
Today, only one descendant family lives on Emory Grove Road, according to Taylor. All that’s left of the historically Black community is its church, the Emory Grove United Methodist Church, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary on Sunday.
“When urban renewal came, it took that sense of community away,” Taylor said during the meeting. “There are still people right now who are very bitter that their families had to break up, that they had to move, and they didn’t have the financial structure [or] any kind of generational wealth that could be passed on because the houses were just demolished and a whole new community is there.”
Those who lost their Emory Grove homes moved elsewhere in the county and later had difficulty purchasing single-family homes, Taylor said.
Impacts on the Scotland community
LaTisha Gasaway-Paul, a resident of the Scotland community, also spoke at the event about how she feels when it comes to the county’s history of urban renewal in its historically Black communities.
“At one point there were 80 [communities] and now we have less than 10,” Gasaway-Paul said. “Urban renewal was hard. It wasn’t about losing a home or land. It was about losing who we are and were as a community.”
Gasaway-Paul — a descendant of William Dove, the former slave who established the community in 1880 with a purchase of 36 acres of land for $210 — noted Scotland was a target for redevelopment “under the promise of progress.”
“But instead of the better things coming, it tore us apart. For a lot of us, the trauma runs deep. Families lost homes that had been passed down from generation to generation,” Gasaway-Paul said. “Can you imagine having a home in Potomac? What the worth would mean now if we still had over 500 acres in Potomac, Maryland? That’s generational wealth.”
For Scotland, urban renewal resulted in a community that finds it difficult to fully trust the government, Gasaway-Paul said. That community acutely feels the lost opportunity to build generational wealth.
Looking forward to solutions
Chris Tyson, president of the National Community Stabilization Trust, emphasized at Thursday night’s event the importance of “understanding the past to build a better future.” The nonprofit trust focuses on expanding affordable homeownership opportunities through rehabilitating vacant or distressed homes in communities, according to its website.
In Maryland, 78% of white households and 53% of Black households own their homes, according to Tyson. Statistics specific to Montgomery County were not provided during the event.
“Maryland actually outperforms the nation in homeownership,” Tyson said. “While the [25%] gap between Black and white homeownership in Maryland is less than the national 28% gap, it is still a troubling reflection of the tortured history of state-sponsored discrimination, segregation and exclusion from the government-backed housing finance system.”
To improve Black homeownership rates, groups such as the nonprofit National Fair Housing Alliance are working to eliminate housing discrimination. The alliance offers programs that focus on education and outreach, policy and advocacy and community development, including the Keys Unlock Dreams program. Keys Unlock Dreams aims to have a net of 3 million new Black homeowners by 2030, according to the alliance’s website.
At the state level, the Department of Housing and Community Development is focusing on spreading the word about housing programs provided by the state.
Cat Goughnour, the department’s assistant secretary of Just Communities, highlighted several programs such as the Maryland Mortgage Program. The program provides eligible homebuyers in Maryland with 30-year fixed-rate home loans.
Goughnour said that within the mortgage program, 60% of homeowners are people of color and 90% of those homeowners are Black.
Another state program is the Utilizing Progressive Lending Investments to Finance Transformation or UPLIFT, Goughnour said. The program selects developers to build, sell and rehabilitate affordable housing in targeted neighborhoods and aims to increase homeownership in disinvested neighborhoods, according to the department.
In Montgomery County, the Housing Opportunities Commission, Emory Grove United Methodist Church and Habitat for Humanity joined the county and other partners on a proposed redevelopment project in Emory Grove. County and Emory Grove leaders announced the project in June 2022. A large portion of the project focuses on bringing mixed-income homeownership to the area but also updating the existing community center, pedestrian connectivity and Johnson’s Local Park.
The Heritage Emory Grove project gives Taylor hope for increasing Black homeownership in the county, she said.
“We’re trying to bring in descendants of the community [to the development] but I really don’t know how many are interested in coming back. … We have people all over the country,” Taylor said.
“I think that even if we don’t have those descendants there, [if there is] a community that’s together, it doesn’t the matter [about] race, because the important thing is the mix of people have a feeling of family, have a sense of taking care of each other’s pride, dignity, having respect” for each other, she said.
