Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D) and Ben Cardin (D) of Maryland introduced legislation Tuesday that would remove a white-supremacist senator’s name from Chevy Chase Circle, in the exclusive, wealthy neighborhood he founded more than a century ago.
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The legislation would remove a memorial to former senator Francis G. Newlands, a Democrat of Nevada who advocated abolishing the right of African American men to vote and restricting immigration to White people only; he died in 1917. His name appears on a 60-foot sandstone fountain within Chevy Chase Circle, which straddles the D.C.-Maryland line, and bears the inscription, “His statesmanship held true regard for the interests of all men.”
Van Hollen said Tuesday that "we shouldn’t be memorializing him and the deeply harmful policies he stood for — the legacies of which are still impacting marginalized communities to this day.”
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“Francis Newlands left a complicated legacy — he supported women’s suffrage yet was an unabashed white supremacist,” Cardin said in a statement. “We can study and learn from his life and career, but we do not need a memorial to him and, by extension, the racist views he openly espoused.”
Van Hollen and Cardin’s bill is a companion to a House measure introduced by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) in 2020, which followed a resolution from the Chevy Chase Advisory Neighborhood Commission supporting the removal of Newlands’s name from the fountain in a 5-to-0 vote.
Since the fountain is on federal land, however, local government couldn’t act on its own, and removing Newlands’s name requires congressional action since Congress memorialized him in the first place.
In Chevy Chase, a conundrum spouts from fountain named after a racist senator
The push to rename the fountain has been in the works for years, reaching its apex in 2020 amid a nationwide reckoning with racist and Confederate statues and memorials. Debate in previous years centered on Newlands’s patently white-supremacist views coupled with legislative achievements; descendants acknowledged his offensive racist views but asked that Newlands not be distilled into a one-dimensional figure.
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Newlands, who purchased land that would eventually become Chevy Chase in the 1880s, was known for sponsoring the 1902 Reclamation Act that funded irrigation in the West and for supporting women’s suffrage.
But in 1912, Newlands advocated the repeal of the 15th Amendment, which provided the right to vote to Black men, and unsuccessfully lobbied the Democratic National Convention to include the elimination of Black suffrage in its platform, according to the book “Reclaiming the Arid West: The Career of Francis G. Newlands” by William D. Rowley.
Through his committee assignment overseeing D.C. affairs, he expounded on how he thought Black residents should be educated — that being primarily through industrial training schools, according to Rowley’s book. Newlands explained: “Under the old system of slavery, every plantation was a training school, in which discipline was maintained. The colored race has lost this training, and no adequate training has been substituted for it.”
The racist history of Chevy Chase, long home to Washington’s power players
Long after Newlands’s death, discrimination lingered in the Chevy Chase neighborhoods he founded through racial covenants that prevented Black and Jewish people from buying homes. The Chevy Chase Historical Society noted in a 2014 letter that those restrictions went into place in the years after Newlands’s death but that earlier land deeds during Newlands’s time probably priced out non-White home buyers with the same effect.
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“The plaque and fountain dedicated to Newlands tell no story. They are meant only to honor a segregationist who argued that voting rights won for African Americans as a result of the Civil War should be repealed,” Norton said in a statement Tuesday. “Newlands belongs in the dustbin of history, not preserved on a traffic circle that symbolizes the unity between the nation’s capital and the state of Maryland.”
The legislation calls for turning over the plaque and stones bearing Newlands’s name to his descendants once they are removed.
The Chevy Chase Land Company said in a statement Tuesday that “while we do not agree with Francis Newlands’ past, we acknowledge it and will continue working together to build a more inclusive community for all.” Elissa A. Leonard, chair of the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers, reiterated the village’s support Tuesday, as well.
Randy Speck, chairman of the Chevy Chase Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said he was encouraged to see the legislation finding support in the Senate. He said plans to rename the fountain have been put on hold until Congress acts, seeing that as the first step. .