FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE TAKOMA PARK FOLK FESTIVAL 

One. The first Takoma Park Folk Festival was held on September 10, 1978. That summer Sammie Abbott sought out local musicians who enjoyed playing for the fun of it. He proposed they organize a concert to help the struggling community-run Takoma Theatre. They jumped at the chance. Six weeks later, the first Festival kicked off and raised $1000 for the theatre. Everyone agreed to do it again. 

Two. Finding the right venue was easy. Lee Jordan suggested using the field at Takoma Park (then) Junior High where he was custodian. The school has served as the Festival venue ever since, except for 1999 through 2001. Those three years it moved to Piney Branch Elementary until Takoma Park Middle School was rebuilt. Before that, in 1982, the Festival helped fund the battle to rescue the school itself from a county-mandated closure. 

Three. The music and camaraderie were always intertwined with raising money. Musicians and staff volunteer their time so admission is free. A wide range of sponsors and supporters offset costs. The crowd is encouraged to buy a shirt or donate money. Vendors pay a site rental to offer a tempting array of international food. The second year of the Festival, Lee Jordan’s Boys and Girls Club received part of the proceeds. Every year since, the profits are divvied up among a dozen or so mostly youth-oriented groups, fulfilling the Festival’s founding principle. 

Four. Make music and people will come. One stage soon became seven. What counts as “folk music” has expanded to encompass all genres, eras and continents. Pete Seeger and Root Boy Slim both played the Field Stage. Families gather at the Grassy Nook. The Dance stage invites all to join in. Enjoy a favorite musician or discover a new talent. Add community tables and a premier craft show, and everyone has a reason to come spend the day.  

Five. Engaging new volunteers is vital. Forty years is a long time to sustain an event, especially one this complicated. The first changing of the guard came in 1989, with a second wave in the mid-1990s. The sudden death of key organizer Lenore Robinson in 2004 threatened to end the tradition. Dedicated volunteers rallied and the show went on. The Festival recently recovered from its 2016 hiatus only to be disrupted by Covid. Going forward its legacy rests in the hands of willing volunteers. 

(call it WHACK-O, he said, not WAY-co), and the Takoma Artists Guild. He spent two decades working with at-risk youth at the Bethesda YMCA, introducing them to Tai Chi among other life lessons. In 2011 Normon retired to open his own studio in Brentwood. There he combined his art and teaching Tai Chi. 

On September 27, 2020, family and friends gathered for a virtual memorial service, available on YouTube. 

Images of Normon’s art: National Harbor, We Come in Every Shade, Protest and working with fourth graders at Sandy Spring Museum.  Read the Roscoe-Normon story from the April 2000 Voice HERE. 

(3)  He worked to give local Black youth access to sports.

After setting up gym time for white students, Jordan went back to the Blair principal and negotiated local Black teens to use the gym on Saturday nights. He soon started a Boys Club with another local coach, opening a new era for Black boys to play baseball, basketball and later football. In 1950 Jordan established another precedent, integrating his Boys Club, a first in Montgomery County, and then he welcomed girls, renaming it the Takoma Park Boys and Girls Club.

 (4) Jordan was also a leader in Takoma Park’s Black community and neighborhoods.

Lee Jordan’s family came north from Mississippi in 1918, participants in the Great Migration. He was eight years old, and, as elsewhere, segregation ruled the day in Takoma Park. As he took on adult roles–pioneering sports organizer, deacon of the First Baptist Church, and president of the community’s citizens association in the 1940s and 50s–he found numerous ways to address the disparities of racial discrimination and inequity. He advocated, both publicly and behind the scenes, for example, pressing the city government for streetlights and paved roads, and successfully campaigning for a playground and a recreation center where Black children and families could gather.

 (5) Jordan played a key role in the integration of Montgomery County youth sports.

In the summer of 1956, the Takoma Tigers, a team of white junior high baseball players, showed up for their Montgomery County Boys Baseball League season opener with a Black player. Jordan had worked with the parents and a team coach to bring his best Black player, Sonny Jackson, a sixth-grader, onto the team. It broke the County’s racial barrier and created local friendships during the period when governments were implementing the requirements of the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education rulings. In 1957, the Takoma Tigers went 24-0 for the season and captured the County title with Jackson, a future Major Leaguer, as one of their stars. Within a few years these former teammates would dominate the football, basketball and baseball rosters at the newly integrated Blair High School.

(6) Under Jordan’s guidance, Sonny Jackson went on to a professional baseball career.

Jordan shared a special bond with Jackson, whose parents were neighbors in the Oswego-Ritchie-Geneva neighborhood. After his success with the Tigers, Jackson became Blair High School’s first Black athlete, starring in football, basketball and baseball. Upon graduation in 1962, Jackson turned down the chance to be the first Black offered a Maryland sports scholarship in football, and instead signed on as shortstop with the National League’s Houston Colt.45s/Astros. He was the 1966 Runner-up Rookie MVP and earned a Sports Illustrated cover. After five years in Houston and six years with Atlanta, he retired as a player and took up coaching in the Majors. In 2009, Jackson was one of the first inductees into the Blair Alumni Hall of Fame. 

(7) Six other Blair Alumni Hall of Fame inductees have connections to Jordan.

Jordan’s influence shows in the Blair Hall of Fame. Jackson’s teammate Bob Windsor (Class of 1961) played for the San Francisco 49ers and the New England Patriots. Tom Brown (Class of 1958) pitched one year as a Washington Senator before joining the Green Bay Packers for five seasons. Steve Barber (Class of 1956) had a 20-game winning season in his eight years as a Baltimore Oriole. Earlier, Jordan’s pitching advice helped Jack Klippstein (Class of 1945) play 18 seasons in the Majors. Two well-known coaches also cited Jordan as a role model — legendary DeMatha basketball coach Morgan Wooten (Class of 1950) and Alan Dodd (Class of 1947), the Takoma Tigers coach, who became the first director of Integrated education for Montgomery County Public Schools, a role Jordan would have applauded.

(8) Jordan was the rare individual who moved easily back and forth across the color line.

From his earliest days as a custodian, Jordan disregarded the color line, and, in turn, parents welcomed his help, while local business owners, merchants and other admirers gave generously to his Boys and Girls Club. White city officials served on the club’s board of directors. School administrators and police officers called upon him for his mentoring whenever a teen needed a guiding hand. City officials asked him to take a leading role in the launch of the Takoma Park Recreation Council in 1965. Later he became the first Black person appointed to the Montgomery County Recreation Council. In 2006, in recognition of his vital contributions, he was inducted posthumously into the County’s Human Rights Hall of Fame.

(9) Two quintessential stories give insight into the man who was Lee Jordan.

A young police officer stopped Jordan one afternoon for speeding and encountered the usual 23 kids stuffed into his station wagon. Jordan told the officer to give him the ticket but “please hurry, we have a game to make.” No ticket was issued. It turned out that the officer had played for Jordan years earlier. Another time Mr. Lee took his baseball team, including a girl player, to a game in northern Montgomery County. Because of the girl, the opposing coach refused to play. Rather than accept a forfeit, Jordan appealed to County officials, who ruled she could play, and she hit a home run in the rescheduled game.

(10) Jordan’s legacy is in the lives he touched and the inspiration he passed on.

Jordan and his wife Helen were on hand, in June 1981, as hundreds gathered at the newly renovated Takoma Park Junior High field to dedicate it in his honor. In 1983 Mayor Steve Del Giudice celebrated Black History Month in Takoma Park by declaring February 23^rd as Lee Jordan Day. Five years later, to the day, Lee Jordan died at age 87 of complications from diabetes. He left behind not only an extended family, but many others who remember how much Mr. Lee cared for them and who remain grateful for the lessons they learned from him. As a community Takoma Park should likewise remember that we were all changed because he called this place his home. 

Learn More

Here are some places to learn more about Lee Jordan.

“Lee Jordan: Life and Legacy” – Watch this program from 2020 sponsored by the City of Takoma Park and Historic Takoma.

“Stories of Takoma Park’s African American Community” – Historic Takoma’s ongoing initiative to document the stories of the Takoma Park African American community.

Lee Jordan: In Appreciation – Read Randy Boehm’s story from the Takoma Voice, July 1994.

The Takoma Tigers: Little League to the Big Leagues – Read Eileen McGuckian’s piece in The Montgomery Story, Summer 2012 (starts on page 8).

The same day Gilbert made his first land purchase, Amanda Thomas bought several lots along Tulip and Maple Avenues in her own name. Deeds show that several other local women did the same. Amanda’s husband Isaac opened the first general store, while she joined in planning Takoma’s first social events. A group photo in Historic Takoma’s archives shows Ida as part of the cast for a theatrical event.

Alcena Lamond and her husband were already living in the area when Gilbert arrived, operating the terra cotta quarry in the District near Van Buren and Underwood Street NW. As matriarch of the extended Lamond family, Alcena played a key role in building the Takoma DC library and organizing the Order of the Eastern Star (Masons). She was an early member of the Citizens Association of Takoma Park and its first female president. In fact, records indicate she was the first female president of any citizens’ association in the area. Her daughter, Mary Lamond White, later took up her role.

One of the first arrivals was Elizabeth “Betsey” Cora Wentworth Dudley. While her husband oversaw construction of many Takoma homes, she raised their four children at 204 Carroll Street NW, currently the CVS parking lot. Her son William Wentworth was the first child born in the new suburb. Two other sons opened long-lived local pharmacies, one in Takoma Park and the other in Silver Spring. For 60 years she witnessed Takoma’s expansion and was much honored by her neighbors as a keeper of early Takoma history.

Maggie Gilbert, the wife of Takoma founder B.F. Gilbert, welcomed newcomers into what was becoming a close-knit community. In an era when entertainment was do-it-yourself, her daughter Margaret and Helen Calhoun, who lived across the street, organized and performed in many recitals and musicales for the pleasure of all.

Elizabeth Cady and her husband spearheaded the formation of Trinity Episcopal Church, hosting the first meetings in their living room at 7064 Eastern Avenue NW, now known as the Cady Lee Mansion, and served as president of the church’s Ladies Guild for 17 years. Her children remained in the house until 1973. The renovated house, now owned by the Forum for Youth Investment, stands as a reminder of the grandeur of early Takoma.

Records show that a young woman named Miss Prentiss, no first name recorded, taught the first elementary school classes in a house on Maple Avenue in 1887. She and the students moved to a four-room wooden schoolhouse on Tulip Avenue (the current site of the Presbyterian Church community center) in 1889.

The arrival of the Seventh-day Adventists in 1904 brought two important women to Takoma Park. The first, Ellen White, the spiritual leader of the church, single-handedly orchestrated the Adventists’ move to Takoma. Over the next five years, she occasionally took up residence in General Carroll’s Manor House while overseeing construction of the Adventist hospital and the college.

The second Adventist was Dr. Lauretta Kress, who was called in to ready the San for its 1906 opening. She oversaw staff and trained nurses while running her own practice for expectant mothers and newborns. In 1915 she became the first woman licensed as a doctor in Montgomery County. Along with her daughter, she opened the Kress Maternity Ward adjacent to the hospital. Meanwhile she found time to be President of Takoma’s Women’s Temperance Union. When Lauretta retired in 1939, the Washington Post calculated she had delivered 4,371 babies since arriving here.

The names of Black women from Takoma’s early years mostly elude us. These women raised their own families while taking jobs as nannies, housekeepers, laundresses and cooks in white households. The evidence of their lives remains in only scattered references from employers praising their assistance and a few photographs captured by Morris Bien’s camera. 

By 1915, more Black women began to arrive as part of the Great Migration. One of the first was Olive Mae Warren, whose daughter Helen would marry Lee Jordan in 1935. Another was Alberta Dawes, whose son Roland currently presides over five generations of the Dawes family. Thanks to Roland we know the name of the teacher who appears in a fuzzy photo taken at the Blacks-only school on Geneva Avenue. Thelma Wheeler left an indelible impression on him that remains vivid nearly 80 years later. Historic Takoma’s African-American Oral History Project is working to recover more of these names.

Coming Next: Part 2 – Librarian Ruth Pratt, author Katherine Paterson, organizers like Belle Ziegler and Opal Daniels, Roland’s gymnast granddaughter Dominique, along with activists and politicians.