For a long time, Scotland — a Montgomery County community founded in the 1880s by African Americans — was a living symbol of how good our country can be at looking the other way.

As recently as the early-1960s, many of Scotland’s Black residents lived in condemned homes without running water — their neighborhood accessible only by a rocky, unpaved road — as the land around them became an affluent enclave for White commuters. Scotland could easily have disappeared, the way so many Black communities that became prime spots for redevelopment did.