WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU B5
news shows.
But there is nothing quite like
talking to a family member or
someone else whose connection
to the enslaved is not merely
history. It should help us
remember that slavery really
wasn’t that long ago, and that
the dehumanization and
exploitation of those of African
descent continued long after the
Emancipation Proclamation.
Talk of slavery, racism, Jim
Crow has a visceral effect. I’ve
seen it in the squint of my
father’s eyes, how his hands
clench into fists, lips quiver. The
stories will send chills down
your spine.
Dad was born in 1924, in rural
Crittenden County, Ark. Sheriff ’s
deputies would arrest black men
on trumped-up charges and hire
them out to work in mines and
in the fields. He saw a boy who
had been accused of stealing a
soda tied to a wagon and
whipped by the sheriff while
being dragged through the
streets of the black community.
MILLOY FROM B1 His father was a dentist. In
1935, sheriff ’s deputies entered
the dental office and shot him to
death for defying a racial code
that prohibited black businesses
from having white customers.
White people suffering from
toothaches wanted whatever
dentist they could find. And his
dad was killed for not turning
them away, for taking payment
that, according to white
supremacist ideology, should
have gone to a white dentist.The murder of his father
threw an upwardly mobile black
family into poverty. But Dad
persevered. Somehow he
managed to put aside the hate
and live with the sorrow. He
finished high school in St. Louis,
earned a bachelor’s degree at
Tuskegee Institute and a
master’s from the University of
Minnesota.
He and Mom moved to
Shreveport, where they worked
as schoolteachers for more than
35 years. They also owned and
operated a photographic studio
and print shop for 45 years. They
raised three kids, sent us all to
college. Stayed married 64 years,
until Mom’s death in 2014.
The last thing I’d wanted was
for my dad to have to dwell on
the painful subject of slavery
and its racist legacy. I wanted to
put a bright spin on a
remarkable family story. Less
than 200 years after his great-
grandfather arrived in chains,
here he was: successfully retired,
blessed with a sharp mind and
long life. A nice home. Still
driving a car. And both blackand white people calling him
‘sir’ and holding the door open
for him when he entered a
building.
Some things had changed for
the better, he said.
“But the Jews in Germany
thought that, too,” he noted.
“Then Hitler showed up and
everything changed overnight.”
Now, in this country, he was
seeing the same kind of racism
that led to the creation of a
system of enslavement. Self-
avowed white supremacists have
marched through the streets of
several American cities and
towns. The president has made
statements that many of us now
agree are racist. Others have
tried to argue that they shouldn’t
be held responsible for slavery
because they weren’t alive.
But many of us have been
alive throughout its legacy of
Jim Crow laws, redlining,
segregated schools and unequal
treatment in the legal system.
For those like my dad, that
connection to our enslaved
beginning is all too close. And as
we talked about these things, he
had one conclusion:
“I’m glad I’m on the other end
of the life spectrum,” Dad said,
“because I don’t want to go
through that again.”
[email protected] To read previous columns, go to
washingtonpost.com/milloy.COURTLAND MILLOY
Dad’s connection to slavery reminds us
that racism persists long after freedom
BY KEITH L. ALEXANDER
A white bicyclist who attacked
a black motorist in Georgetown
last year following a dispute with
the driver was sentenced Tuesday
to three years in prison.
Maxim Smith, 25, was convict-
ed of assault with a dangerous
weapon and felony assault while
armed for beating the driver in his
head and hands with what pros-
ecutors said was a metal bicycle
U-lock. Prosecutors had argued
the assault was a hate crime be-
cause Smith had repeatedly called
the driver the n-word, but the D.C.
Superior Court jury that heard the
case was unable to reach a unani-
mous verdict about whether the
attack was fueled by racial bias.
Still, at Tuesday’s hearing, pros-
ecutors asked Judge Kimberley
Knowles to sentence Smith to a
tougher punishment — four years
in prison — allowed under a hate
crime enhancement.
“This crime was motivated by
hate and bias and should have no
place in the District of Columbia
or anywhere in this country for
that matter,” Assistant U.S. Attor-
ney Jack Korba said.
Justin Okezie, an attorney for
Smith, said his client is not racist.
He said Smith was under the in-
fluence of alcohol and cocaine on
the night of the incident and re-
quested he be allowed to attend
drug and alcohol counseling in-
stead of jail.
Smith offered his regrets. “I
apologize for my actions. I wasn’t
myself at the time. I should not
have been on the road,” he said.
During his trial, Smith admit-
ted he struck the driver, Ketchazo
Paho, but said he feared for his
safety because Paho had gotten
out of his car and grabbed the
bicycle.
Originally from Ukraine, Smith
was adopted by a Washington
couple when he was 13. He testi-
fied he had learned the n-word
through rap music and growing
up in Washington. Smith testified
that he used the derogatory term
to “emotionally hurt” Paho be-
cause he thought Paho had tried
to strike him with his car.
Their confrontation unfolded
in the overnight hours last August
as Smith slowly biked in the cen-
ter lane of the 3100 block of M
Street NW ahead of a frustrated
Paho, 35, who began honking his
horn.
As Paho passed Smith, police
said, Smith reached out and hit
his car trunk. Paho said he
stopped his car, began to call 911
and grabbed Smith’s bike to de-
tain him as Smith tried to pedal
away.
It was then, prosecutors said,
that Smith repeatedly used the
racial slur and hit Paho in the
head. Paho’s wound required 21
stitches.
Paho did not attend the sen-
tencing, but a prosecutor read a
letter by Paho in which he wrote
that, in addition to the physical
scars, he suffers from post-trau-
matic stress for which he takes
medication.
Smith’s mother and two friends
spoke on Smith’s behalf. They
each said Smith had never shown
hate or racial animosity. One of
the friends, a black man who
declined to give his name outside
the courtroom, told the judge that
he and Smith were best friends for
10 years and that all of Smith’s
friends were African American.
“He doesn’t have any white
friends,” the man said in court.
Knowles rejected the prosecu-
tion’s request to impose a harsher
punishment based on racial bias,
saying she believed Smith’s drug
and alcohol impairment while bi-
cycling fueled the attack. But she
also encouraged Smith to stop
using the n-word.
“I don’t know if you used the
word out of hate or you used it
casually because you have friends
of color and you and your friends
use it among yourselves,”
Knowles said, “but as a Caucasian
male, you have to know walking
up to a stranger and using it isn’t
going to end well. I suggest you
eliminate that word from your
vocabulary.”
In October, Smith has another
trial in connection to a misde-
meanor destruction of property
case involving a black Lyft driver
late last year. Smith was charged
with damaging the window of the
Lyft driver’s car while swerving
his bicycle erratically, striking the
car’s window. He also allegedly
called the driver the n-word.
[email protected]THE DISTRICT
White cyclist who beat
black driver sentenced
BY JONATHAN PITTS
baltimore — Howard Schwartz
says he was never one for re-
searching family history, but after
his mother died six years ago, a
pair of old photographs hanging
on her wall piqued his curiosity.
Who, he wondered, were those
serious-looking, bearded men?
The women in buttoned-up dress-
es, the girls with the braids, the
boys in knee-length trousers?
Beginning with those ques-
tions, Schwartz, a 63-year-old Bal-
timore native who lives in Califor-
nia, developed an extraordinary
chronicle of a clan that emigrated
to Baltimore in waves from a
single village in Russia roughly a
century ago.
In all, several dozen immi-
grants came to Baltimore from
Mlynov, Russia, from 1890 to 1929
— people named Fishman and
Goldseker and Shulman who,
with others from their village and
their descendants, left indelible
marks on their adopted city in
Maryland.
The Mlynov community gave
rise to many prominent citizens,
including doctors, lawyers, rabbis
and politicians.
One was Morris Goldseker,
who came to Baltimore at 16 in
1914, went to work in a pants
shop, and later became a local real
estate tycoon. More than $10 mil-
lion of his estate went toward the
creation in 1975 of the Morris
Goldseker Foundation, one of
Maryland’s largest philanthropic
foundations.
Ellen Shulman Baker, a physi-
cian and NASA astronaut, is a
member of the clan. So was Neena
Betty Schwartz, a renowned en-
docrinologist who died last year.
At Schwartz’s behest, more
than 80 members of the group he
calls “the Mlynov descendants”
will gather in Baltimore this week
for a day of remembering and
honoring their forebears.
“I found first, second and third
cousins, but I came to realize I
couldn’t make sense of my family
without understanding these oth-
er families they knew,” says
Schwartz, who plans to present
his research as part of the celebra-
tion. “So, I expanded to other
people who came from the same
village. And I realized that
Mlynov itself was an extended
family.“This project is actually about
both — a village and a family —
and I’m really looking forward to
getting everyone together.”
In many ways, the migration of
the Mlynov descendants to Balti-
more is a microcosm of the waves
of immigrants, many of them Jew-
ish, that came to the United States
from Europe in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
In Russia, the dominoes began
falling in 1881 with the assassina-
tion of Czar Alexander II, whose
policies toward the Jewish popu-
lation were open-minded for the
time. His son, Alexander III, a
virulent anti-Semite, soon began
a campaign of persecution that
included new laws banning Jewsfrom holding certain jobs, owning
property and living in rural areas.
The moves sparked a massive
wave of emigration. Of the
2.5 million Russian Jews who re-
located to America from 1881 to
1914, most arrived via New York,
but Baltimore drew such mi-
grants by the tens of thousands.
Among them, Schwartz
learned, were the “Mlynov pio-
neers,” Getzel and Ida Fax, a
young couple who arrived in Bal-
timore from the village in western
Russia in 1890 and 1891.
According to a memoir written
by a Schwartz relative in 1982, the
Faxes had owned land near
Mlynov. But when they lost their
right of possession, Getzel
grabbed “the first ticket avail-
able” to the United States.
He found work in Baltimore
and sent for Ida.
They soon moved to a row-
house at 836 E. Pratt St., near
what is now the Star-SpangledBanner Flag House. Their home,
and another house at 104 Albe-
marle St., became landing places
for the dozens of men, women and
children who came from Mlynov
in three major waves, the first
from 1890 to 1909, the second
from 1910 to 1914, and the third
from 1920 to 1929.
The Dembs and Fishmans,
Schwartzes and Grubers, Gold-
sekers and Roskes who arrived
during those years helped estab-
lish a communal life in the neigh-
borhood — a part of town that
Baltimore in 1907 designated as a
tenement district, where multiple
families packed most of the row-
houses and kosher chicken butch-
ers operated in the alleyways.
Many members of these fami-
lies, Schwartz learned, had mar-
ried each other in the old country,
often within families, informa-
tion he confirmed through DNA
research. The pattern continued
in Baltimore, and the Mlynov im-
migrants became integral to a
community that worshiped at
Shomrei Mishmeres HaKodesh —
an Orthodox Jewish congregation
that moved into the Lloyd Street
Synagogue in 1905 — and gave
one another lodging and work.
Newspaper clippings from the
era, he found, spoke of a world
teeming with activity, some of it
downright comical, including the
time the Baltimore Sun reported
that a man named Hyman Bress-
ner “stole up the middle aisle” at
the synagogue and “pulled a
handful of whiskers from the
bounteous beard of Mr. Abraham
Bronstein, a furniture dealer.”
When the police were called, the
paper reported, “almost the en-
tire congregation followed them
to the police station” to see Bress-
ner pay his fines.
“There are many stories we can
tell about this congregation’s life,”
Schwartz says.
Some were tragic. On Oct. 8,
1937, Benjamin Schwartz — a
brother of Howard Schwartz’s
grandfather, Paul H. Schwartz,
and a successful merchant — was
shot to death in his store in West
Baltimore, a crime that triggered
a manhunt.
Schwartz says he spent un-
counted hours calling and reach-
ing out online to hundreds of
people for the project. Few had
heard of him, and most knew little
of their distant relations. Sometreated Schwartz as “a stalker or
internet troll” until he had a
chance to establish his bona fides.
One who needed little convinc-
ing was Ted Fishman, a 92-year-
old Columbia retiree whose fa-
ther, Benjamin, came to Balti-
more from Mlynov in 1920.
As Fishman tells it, Benjamin,
then 18, happened to be standing
nearby when a native who had
emigrated to America and fought
in World War I returned to
Mlynov and sought to bring fam-
ily members to the United States.
Benjamin volunteered to go
with them, and he, too, was soon
living in a rowhouse in East Balti-
more.
Fishman’s best friend growing
up, Leon Schwartz, was
Schwartz’s father. Like many in
the clan, the two would later move
with their families to Northwest
Baltimore, a sign of the communi-
ty’s entry into the American mid-
dle class.
“My father never forgot his
good fortune, to be living in a
country where he could go wher-
ever he wanted, and no one would
ask him for his papers,” Fishman
recalls.
It’s one of the many stories
Fishman plans to tell when he
addresses the gathering, an event
that is to include a walking tour of
the old neighborhood and tours
of the synagogue and the Jewish
Museum of Maryland.
Schwartz, for his part, now
knows the names of nearly every-
one in the two pictures that cata-
lyzed his journey. But it won’t
come full circle until he sees his
extended family members con-
nect, sharing photos and family
stories and solidifying the con-
nections that run from Mlynov —
a Russian “shtetl” (Yiddish for a
village) that became part of Po-
land, and now is part of Ukraine
— through Baltimore and beyond.
If he’d had enough time and
money, Schwartz says, he is sure
he could have filled a venue the
size of Camden Yards. But those
who do come will be celebrating a
valuable bond.
“I imagine our ancestors look-
ing down and being amazed and
moved at how many descendants
are taking the time to assemble to
honor them and their memories,”
he says. “It will be a fitting trib-
ute.”
— Baltimore SunMARYLANDChronicling Baltimore’s Russian past
MILLOY'S PHOTO-GRAPHICS INC.
The columnist’s father, Courtland Milloy Sr., whose paternal
grandmother was born into slavery on a plantation in Mississippi.Talk of slavery, racism,
Jim Crow has a visceral
effect. I’ve seen it in the
squint of my father’s
eyes, how his hands
clench into fists,
lips quiver.
“This project is actually
about both — a village
and a family — and
I’m really looking
forward to getting
everyone together.”
Howard Schwartz,
a 63-year-old Baltimore native who is
uniting “the Mlynov descendants”S0141 6x4washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang • @capitalweather
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