While it is a lucrative crop, every tobacco harvest represents but a fleeting, pyrrhic victory in mankind’s wider war against nature. The plant coarsens the topsoil, exhausting it of nutrients and transforming it from womb to tomb over time, vomiting up smaller and smaller yields until the crops inevitably fail.

Dry seasons in the antebellum South cut deeply into the profits of plantation owners, leaving them with too many slaves and not enough work to go around. Tobacco growers in Virginia and Maryland addressed this crisis by leasing their surplus labor to craftsmen in Richmond, Washington, DC and Baltimore to learn carpentry, ironwork and fishing. By the time President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 of 1963, Black captains helmed one of every 10 fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay, and there were more Negroes than whites in the skilled trades in the District.

Slaveholders found other ways to redeploy enslaved women, however. An 1808 law prohibiting the international trafficking of Africans had the same effect as a tariff intended to protect local growers from foreign trade. The ban raised the price for homegrown slaves, leading European settlers to do a crude accounting: if the barren soil would not produce ample crops for them to sell for a profit at market, then they would compel fertile enslaved women to bear them slave children who would, like livestock, fetch a tidy sum at auction.

Over the half century that followed the ban on the international slave trade, plantation owners in the Deep South cornered the market by effectively industrializing rape, using violence—or its threat—to coerce Black men with good physiques to impregnate women and adolescent girls and then selling their progeny to other landowning aristocrats across the Deep South.

In 1937, a former slave named Louisa Everett told researchers with the Works Progress Administration that her former owner, Jim McClain, forced her and more than one hundred enslaved people on his Virginia plantation to “mate indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions.” One evening, McClain summoned Louisa and a male slave named Sam, ordered him to undress, and queried Louisa “do you think you can stand this big [man]?” As he spoke, he brandished “that old bull whip … acrost his shoulder,” reminding them both that he “could hit so hard!” Fearful, Louisa answered in the affirmative, and McClain barked that they “must git busy and do it in his presence.”

So profitable was the slave breeding business that some planters abandoned agriculture and stock altogether, adding to slavery’s house of horrors a pinch of The Handmaid’s Tale, erecting twelve-foot-high fences topped with iron spikes to fortify the concentration camps, and often compelling enslaved women to wear hoods during intercourse so that they could not identify their mates who were sometimes related by blood.  The largest breeding farms were on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and in and around what would become the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, which at its height, exported between 10,000 and 20,000 slaves every month to points South and West, raking in windfall profits that far eclipsed that of any other crop.

Worsening matters is that many of the women who were made to breed weren’t women at all but children as young as 10 whose pelvises are simply too narrow for even a small fetus to pass through. Said Robert Stubblefield, the unofficial historian for the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, a historic preservation group in the Washington, DC suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland.

“A lot of them died in childbirth. When they’re that young, their bodies are still developing and they bleed out. We don’t know their names but we know what happened to these young girls and we know that when they died, (the slaveowners) would simply dump their bodies in a ditch or a swamp. But the other slaves, after working all day, would go back and give them last rites and a proper burial.”

From this liturgy of grief and grace was born Moses African Cemetery that was the centerpiece of the River Road community incorporated by freed slaves in 1869. And it is the unearthing of the bones of enslaved children who suffered unspeakable terror in their final days that animates Stubblefield and nearly 50 other activists with the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition to fight the desecration of the graveyard where their remains are interred.

What was once a rural enclave populated entirely by freedpeople and their descendants is today a valuable parcel of real estate in the affluent District suburb of Bethesda. Gone are the colored school, the beer hall and the semi-pro baseball team’s ballpark; in their place is a soaring, cookie-cutter condominium tower, a Sunoco and a McDonalds. All that remains from the River Road community is the unmarked gravesite that property developers continue to excavate and Macedonia Baptist Church, the one-story, wooden house of worship —white as eggshells—that rises like a hallucination from the knoll upon which it was built 105 years ago.

An accountant by training, Stubblefield is a worshipper at Macedonia and a volunteer with the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition that grew out of the church’s social ministry. Practically speaking, the coalition’s mission boils down to persuading Montgomery County’s elected officials to stop the sale of the parcel of land that Moses Cemetery sits on.

By outward appearance, that should be a slam dunk. Montgomery County, Maryland is as deep blue as Montgomery, Alabama is red with two in three voters casting ballots for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. In fact, Maryland has not voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988, and only three times since 1960. And yet BACC’s effort to simply see to it that their ancestors can rest in peace has been met with a veritable blue wall of resistance.

Congressman Jamie Raskin is one brick in that wall. The 62-year-old Democrat represents Maryland’s 8th district which includes Moses Cemetery and Macedonia Baptist. He was elected to his fifth term in Congress in November and is one of his party’s most high-profile lawmakers on Capitol Hill, owing to his position as a ranking member on the House Oversight Committee and his chairmanship of the second trial to impeach Donald Trump on charges that he orchestrated the January 6 attack.

Charming and affable, Raskin would appear to have been plucked straight out of central casting to play the role of a liberal Democrat. Born to Jewish parents, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was editor of the Law Review and served as general counsel for Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition. Raskin’s father was a staff aide for President John F. Kennedy.

Along with Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Raskin was one of a select few lawmakers on Capitol Hill to address thousands of demonstrators who assembled in DC on the first weekend in April for the nationwide “Hands Off” rally to protest the Trump administration. Raskin told protest participants they have “the right to call the president deranged for crashing our economy, destroying $6 trillion of wealth and turning my 401k into a 201k.” Continuing he said:

“No moral person wants an economy-crashing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Addressing a litany of proposals by Trump, he said:

“We say to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, hands off Greenland! That’s an independent country. Hands off Canada! That’s an independent country. Hands off Panama! That’s an independent country. Statehood for Washington, DC!”

Activists with the Bethesda African Cemetery say that Raskin’s defiant stemwinder at the Hands Off! Demonstration is redolent of a speech he delivered in 2020 at Macedonia’s 100^th birthday celebration in which he praised unambiguously BACC’s efforts to protect Moses Cemetery. No one questions whether Raskin can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?

To the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, the answer is a resounding “no.”

Ten days after the November election, a dozen BACC members met with Raskin on a Zoom call to plead with him to host a town hall discussion on Moses Cemetery. It did not go well. According to Stubblefield:

“He was very exasperated. He told us ‘ listen we’re trying to juggle a leadership crisis in the House (of Representatives) and I deal with national issues. I don’t have time to focus on every local issue that comes our way.”

Stubblefield said that a BACC member shot back:

“We’ve shown you how Black cemeteries are being desecrated nationwide; this is a national issue and you have to pay attention to it!

Raskin would have none of it however, causing Macedonia’s pastor, Reverend Dr. Segun Adebayo to say tersely:

“I must admit that I am very disappointed because the way that you are talking right now is why the Democrats just lost the election.”

Clearly stunned, Raskin went silent for five seconds before saying meekly:

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BACC’s President and Reverend Adebayo’s wife, told Black Republic Media:

“BACC has been so disappointed in Congressman Raskin. We assumed because of his reputation that he was going to understand the issues around African American desecration and white supremacy and have a commitment. What we have found instead is that Congressman Raskin has lined up very neatly behind the industrial developer complex in Maryland.”

Raskin’s appearance at Macedonia’s birthday celebration was part of a choreographed dance between the Congressman and the BACC, Coleman-Adebayo said:  Raskin tends to ignore the coalition’s entreaties for a public statement in support of, say, a court’s decision to issue an injunction, until the coalition forces his hand. The BACC’s protest outside Raskin’s birthday fundraiser, for example, left the Congressman demonstrably shaken and pleading with Coleman-Adebayo to call off the picketers and arrange a meeting to discuss the issue. Said Coleman-Adebayo:

“We had about 40 or 50 people outside before the event took place and he called me asking if we could delay it. We had tried so hard to have a meeting and we thought it was unfortunate that the only way we could get any attention was with a public demonstration but that was the state of affairs.”

In his phone conversation with Adebayo at the protest, Raskin referenced his son, Thomas, who committed suicide in 2020 at the age of 25. Adebayo recalled:

“He went on to tell me that he had just lost a child and went on to tell me he couldn’t imagine having a gravesite desecration.”

“So, we had a meeting with him to engage him on how he might work with us and within a week or two it was complete and total silence. . .He refuses to even sign a letter denouncing desecration. . . or even to issue a statement saying that he supported the decision by the Maryland Supreme Court to issue a temporary restraining order against (the developer). This kind of political dishonesty does not sit well with BACC.”

At base, the dispute over Moses Cemetery is rooted in money. Politicians from both sides of the political aisle rely heavily on campaign contributions from developers who are as powerful in Maryland as auto executives are in Detroit, or the tech industry is in the San Franciso Bay area. As proof, Coleman-Adebayo notes that not a single politician at any level of government in Montgomery County has proposed legislation to address the desecration of Moses Cemetery.

Nor is Moses Cemetery an isolated case but part of a pattern in which a bipartisan political class prefers African Americans dead but not necessarily buried. In a 2023 New York Times opinion article, the author Greg Melville wrote:

“More than six million people died while enslaved within the boundaries of today’s United States, according to a recent article by a demographic historian at the University of Minnesota. Yet only a tiny fraction of their graves can be found today, too often lost beneath industrial complexes, golf courses, hospitals and even municipal buildings. Black cemeteries that were established on the land of Black churches or created by Black citizens after emancipation have faced similar struggles.”

If Moses Cemetery has one advantage, however it is BACC, which deliberately functions like a guerilla resistance movement more than some stereotypically quaint historic preservation group that honors Confederate soldiers with an afternoon tea featuring a presentation by some tweed-coated academic. In an email last month, Coleman Adebayo wrote:

“Hi everyone,

As many of you now know, the developers have begun drilling a previously undisturbed portion of Moses Cemetery. Yesterday, our legal team visited the site and were, along with BACC members, disturbed to see changes in the soil. 

BACC women were called “Bit@#$, Cun@#$, and Nig@#$ by the developer’s contract workers. In addition, women were threatened with violence against their persons. A woman was told that “they ‘know where she lives.’ 

Our community can never allow women to be subjected to this kind of vile, violent, barbaric misogyny. Men at the cemetery were threatened with violence and vile name-calling. 

We must fight back!  We will never surrender to fear. Our ancestors fought these backward forces and we will not let them down!”

In a statement written by his spokesperson, Natalie Adams, Raskin responded to BACC’s grievances:

“The historical gravesites of enslaved people are hallowed ground, and Congressman Raskin has long condemned their desecration and worked in Congress to address the problem. He has met with the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) to engage with the group’s concerns and has discussed the issue at length with state and local officials. As the Congressman has shared with BACC, he continues to help lead federal efforts to fund legislation to preserve African American burial grounds and our office stands ready to assist with any possible violations of federal law BACC may bring to our attention.”

Additionally, Adams wrote that Representative Raskin co-sponsored the 2022 African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, which established a program at the National Park Service to provide grant opportunities and technical assistance for nonprofit organizations to research, identify, survey and preserve these historic sites. He continues to push for legislation to fund the preservation act, she wrote in an email.

Coleman-Adebayo and others say that they believe Raskin has ambitions for higher office, perhaps even the White House, for which he would rely heavily on cash donations from Maryland’s developers. And whatever his failings they pale in comparison to Montgomery County’s Executive, Marc Elrich, another Democrat, who has gone so far as to question the existence of Moses Cemetery.

Still, the disconnect between Raskin and his African American constituents mirrors the relationship between Democrats across the country and their nonwhite constituents whose needs are often at odds with that of the party’s big donors.

Emblematic of that tension is Jerry Nadler who represents New York’s 12th district that includes Columbia University. Nadler was one of 14 House signatories to a letter condemning the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil—who has participated in campus protests against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—and has defended Khalil’s constitutional right to free speech.

But Nadler is an avowed Zionist, and similar to Raskin, he damns with faint praise Khalil and other protesters who demand that the U.S. stop the flow of arms to Israel. Instead of capitalizing on Trump’s unpopular fascist and racist policies, the Democrats are squandering an opportunity to rebrand the party as one that is useful.

By all outward appearances, the party’s strategy seems to be to ignore the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition and pro-Palestinian protesters and simply hope that they will go away. Try as they might, Democrats like Raskin and Nadler cannot erase the afterlife of slavery nor Israel’s occupation of Palestine; inevitably, if they have any chance of survival, the Democrats must reinvent themselves as a party this is in full-throated opposition to the Republicans rather than a minority party that merely clutches at its pearls and tsk tsks while the GOP assaults both the Constitution, dissidents and racialized groups.

The duopoly has, in fact, had a good run, keeping alive the pretense that Democrats and Republicans serve different masters for more than 30 years, dating back to Bill Clinton’s decision to recapture the White House by convincing suburban white voters that the Democrats are the more racist of the two political parties.

That strategy worked well enough while the cotton was high. But since the Great Recession 17 years ago it has become increasingly clear to many Americans that their material circumstances continue to decline no matter who is in the White House.  Out of desperation, Democrats like Raskin and Nadler have deployed a kind of Jedi mind trick as a last resort, insisting that a bad economy is a good one, that Israel is the victim rather than a mass murderer, and that Vladimir Putin is the reason why Americans can’t have nice things. The Democrats’ electoral strategy is tantamount to Richard Pryor’s iconic monologue about the wife who discovers her husband en flagrante delicto with another woman. Caught red-handed, he asks her:

Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?

If they want to survive politically, Raskin and Nadler and the rest of their party must come to terms with an electorate that is learning to trust its own eyes and does not like what it sees. Of Raskin, the BACC’s Stubblefield says that he cannot recall, for instance, the Congressman denouncing the police for any of the deaths of several African American men while in custody of Montgomery County police (an assertion that seems to be borne out by a Google search). Said Stubblefield:

“(Raskin)will say ‘I weep for George Floyd but white supremacists have infiltrated the police in the county and he has nothing to say about that. . . The man is anti-Black and this is a mirror into the soul of the Democratic party that pays lip service to us but engages in some of the most covert anti-Black policies that you could imagine and still think they’re entitled to Black folks’ vote…That day is coming to an end.”