Last Saturday, Rose Park hosted a lovely ceremony for the dedication of the tennis courts to the sisters Margaret Peters and Roumania Peters Walker. The Georgetown Current had a great write-up of the event. But due to some understandable confusion, it gave GM a bit more credit for the renaming then is due.
The article repeats something that Friends of Rose Park president David Dunning said during the ceremony: that GM (a journalist) wrote a series of articles about the Peters sisters. That’s not quite right. First, GM is not a journalist, he’s just a lawyer with hobby. Second, he didn’t write a series of article on the sisters. He’s written a couple, but they came well after the renaming idea caught on. Here’s what actually happened:
Last February, an actual journalist–Merlisa Lawrence Corbett–wrote an article on Bleacher Report highlighting the Peters sisters as the original Williams sisters (as in Venus and Serena). Bill Potapchuck, a consultant with the BID, read the article and forwarded it to GM. GM read the article and was impressed by the story. He’s long thought we need to erect more testaments to Georgetown’s African-American past, and the idea of renaming the courts after the sisters immediately came to mind. So he sent a link to the article to Pam Moore, of the Friends of Rose Park, with the court renaming idea. Pam passed it on to David Abrams. And David ran with the idea all the way to last Saturday.
So while GM is immensely happy and proud to see the courts be renamed and for such a beautiful family reunion to take place for the dedication, the primary source credit should be given to Merlisa Lawrence Corbett for writing the article in the first place. And then, of course, to David for taking a stray idea from GM and making it reality.
Too much of African American history in this country was intentionally obscured by contemporary racism and then buried even more by the sediment of time. This is particularly true here in Georgetown. So the work of writers like Corbett to unearth and elevate greats like the Peters sisters is crucial to us as a country reconciling with the errors of the past.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 