Every third Saturday of each month an events room at the West Indian Social Club in Hartford transforms into the city’s new Caribbean Heritage Museum, with touchscreens playing neighborhood stories, walls displaying decades of migration, organizing and family relics, and audio of kids reciting Ja maican activist Marcus Garvey’s speeches. “We don’t have to wait for somebody to tell our own story, we can tell our own story,” said Fiona Vernal, curator of the museum and associate professor of history and director of the University of Connecticut’s Africana Studies Institute. The West Indian Social Club was founded in 1950 as a home away from home for Caribbean farmworkers who came to Connecticut during World War II to grow tobacco. In a state where more than 100,000 people now identify as West Indian, the new Caribbean Museum is the result of the club’s organizing, mutual aid and cultural work in Hartford as a way to preserve and keep documenting their heritage. “Some people say the museum is an offspring of a 13- or even 18-year process,” Beverly Redd, Board of Directors’ chair of the West Indian Social Club, said. “But it really took us 75 years to get here.” The Caribbean Museum in Hartford. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror From idea to reality In 2014, the club’s Board of Directors started brainstorming how to sustain the organization in the long run. As a result, a cultural heritage committee was formed under the leadership of Tanya Dorman, the club’s current director of compliance and regulatory services, who was serving as vice president at the time. Dorman recalls the club’s basement and attic were full of photos, artifacts and relics of past members, club presidents and parades. Some items have been loaned to different organizations when they needed to use them for West Indian-themed exhibitions. But Dorman wanted these items to have an organized and digitized home. “So our leadership team decided that we needed to make something of it, and I said, boy, it would be really good if we could have a museum, because we do not have a Caribbean cultural museum here,” Dorman said. The club then got into partnership with nonprofit Education for Development and Support Network, and that was when Vernal, who had already done oral history exhibitions with the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History since the ’90s, joined the museum project. Fast forward, Redd and Dorman created the nonprofit Caribbean Cultural Heritage Alliance to be able to accept donations to spin off the project. “We’re building it from the ground up, without much,” Redd said. The work Redd, Dorman and Vernal do at the club is on a volunteer basis, like the rest of the members. Outside of the club they have full-time jobs as well as families. Hence, putting together the museum became a slow but steady process that they did not want to give up on. “I was thinking about how difficult it was for those Black Caribbean men in 1950 to come up with the idea of the organization, fund it, find a building, purchase the building, during times of segregation,” Vernal said. “I have the ghosts of these men, not in a frightening way, in an inspiring way, reminding me that we should be able to pull this off and take it farther than they did.” You can click on audio recording stories from field work Vernal has done for more than 25 years. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Curating the museum Vernal had help from graphic designers, student interns and her UConn departments of Africana Studies and History, as well as contract workers ripping up the carpet, doing the electrical work, and flattening the walls, so that the room used for the museum would be ready. They also had the support and guidance of the West Indian Foundation. “I might be the connected thread with everybody, but this project is a collaborative effort,” Vernal said. Each of the walls in the museum has its own school program. Accompanied by a map of the Caribbean, the first panel is called the ‘invitation’ where the curator invites attendants to engage, and learn about the West Indian migrants and their descendants’ history of mobility, organization and leadership that has transformed Hartford into a ‘Caribbean city’. Next to the map, are the stories of the oldest members of the West Indian Social Club: Sidney Barnett and Kenneth Bennet Sr. “It’s important to document those stories, because our older generations are dying out, and they’re taking the history with them, so how can we capture it? Here, with the museum,” Redd shared. The oral history listening station takes place on a touchscreen where you can click on the audio recording stories from field work Vernal has done for more than 25 years. Alongside the touchscreens, the wall is dedicated to black Caribbean organizing and leadership efforts, like Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political activist, founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which had a Hartford chapter. There are archive photos of Negro World, Garvey’s newspaper which became one of the most widely distributed and influential Black newspapers in history. The walls also display a timeline of the West Indian enclave history in Connecticut, the ‘starvation’ ship that transported the first West Indian laborers, photos of cricket and soccer teams, women’s auxiliary, the pageant and parades, which were carefully curated by Vernal and her interns. In the past museum openings, Dorman said she heard multiple children pointing to the photos and the list of the club’s founding fathers. Dorman said they shouted  ‘that’s my grandpa’ or older adults uttered ‘that’s my auntie.’ It happened to her too, since Dorman’s father is in the photos as well. “My own father came here as a farm worker and he has his picture and artifacts too. That’s part of the museum. My dad died before my second birthday so my soul attachment is through those artifacts”, Dorman said. Redd wants the museum to feel like a community hub for West Indians, but also to ‘friends of the Caribbean.’ It’s a place they want all to feel welcomed, especially if they live away from home, and if they are second or third generation. “When you leave a country like Jamaica, you leave the warmth, where you could walk outside and go get a piece of sugarcane to eat. And then you come to Hartford, and you’re lonely, you’re locked inside,” Redd said. “This space is for them and for all, ‘come on in this is your home away from home.’” The Caribbean Museum in Hartford on December 1“We’re hopeful that the museum will tell our story 150 years from today,” Redd said. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Future plans  The museum has been open since October — every third Saturday of the month, even though they are still continuing to work on other pieces for it.  There are some parts of the walls that are meant to have interactive activities, but they wanted to leave it to the community to decide what they want to see so there are areas where people can stick Post-its to the wall with their ideas for what they would like to see added. Vernal hopes the museum can raise money for a complementary mural project. “We’re looking to collaborate and partner with the school system from an educational perspective, so there will be field trips,” Dorman added. Redd, Vernal, and Dorman said the museum can grow as long as they have funding, which has been a longtime struggle. For now, it will stay where it is. “We’re hopeful that the museum will tell our story 150 years from today,” Redd said. The next opening is on Dec. 20. ...read more read less