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67 MARyLAND 12 Seeing the Hollow Robert A. Burt In May 1954, I was in tenth grade at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. There were no blacks among the two thousand students in that school. Insofar as I noticed this fact—and I did, though only fleetingly—I ascribed it to the complete absence of blacks living in my neighborhood of middle-class, single-family homes. I knew that there were prosperous black families nearby. I saw their imposing homes when I took the bus or drove with my father into the District of Columbia down Sixteenth Street, the so-called Gold Coast thoroughfare that led from our suburbs and ended at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And I knew, too, that there were poor black families elsewhere in the District of Columbia—living in neighborhoods that I never saw, though they were only a few blocks from the route that regularly took me downtown. I considered myself a politically aware liberal. Just before the 1952 presidential election, my ninth-grade social studies instructor took a class poll, and I was proud that mine was one of only two votes for Adlai Stevenson. His eloquence and evident intelligence made him my hero, and it was only years later when I read through a volume of his collected campaign speeches that I noticed the complete absence of any mention of black Americans.1 It was not that Stevenson opposed black civil rights. He didn’t acknowledge the issue and I didn’t notice the omission at the time. Then came Brown v. Board of Education. I remember seeing the headline in the Washington Post sitting on our front doorstep and though I was pleased, it didn’t occur to me that the ruling would have any relevance to my personal life. But Brown turned out to touch me directly in a way that I had not imagined. At the beginning of my eleventh-grade school year, in the fall of 1954, about thirty black students suddenly appeared in my high school. Set down among the two thousand white students in the school, this was a small number —but even so, it was a surprising number. Where did these black students come from? I later learned that they all lived in an enclave about a half mile from the junior high school I had previously attended. Their homes in fact were closer 68 De Jure States and the District of Columbia to that school than mine was, but theirs were located down an unpaved road behind the school. If you hadn’t known that this dirt road existed, you would not have seen it from the school or its surrounding network of tidy suburban homes. But now, with my newly gained driver’s license, I drove down this road and found myself, amazed, in what looked like an entirely foreign setting—a setting I had seen only in photographs of the remote rural Southern states. Just a few minutes’ drive from my old junior high, I saw a cluster of small wooden buildings—shacks, really—on each side of the rutted dirt road, what looked like small outhouses behind several of the homes, and refrigerators on the porches of several homes visibly connected to the electric wires that ran overhead alongside the road. The black children playing outside stared at me as I drove slowly through and I self-consciously both looked at them and tried to avoid their gaze. I also learned that this enclave, colloquially known as the Hollow, had been deeded to a group of freed slaves during the Civil War—perhaps even by the direct mandate of Abraham Lincoln. At that time, the property was remote from downtown Washington; in the succeeding years, suburban Silver Spring had sprawled around it, but the authorities of the surrounding county stopped all municipal services at the edge of the Hollow. There were no sewers , no water, no road paving, no trash collection—and no access to the nearby public schools. The residents of the Hollow were entirely separated from and effectively ignored by the carefully groomed suburban community that had grown up around them. Separate but unequal. Brown broke this pattern. Maryland state law authorized racial segregation of its public schools and gave control to county school boards to implement that policy; immediately after the Supreme Court decision, the Montgomery County School Board formally abolished its segregation policy—which led to the enrollment in...

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