Little Liberia Meeting With Hon. Bill Finch Mayor of Bridgeport, Ct.

            It was Saturday March 17^th 2012.  There was a buzz within a small sector of Connecticut’s Liberian Community. The much anticipated meeting between the Liberian Community, Hon. Bill Finch, the Mayor of Bridgeport, and the ABCD Corp was being held. The meeting had been planned for a few weeks and was expected to be a game changer for the revitalization project for the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses, in what was the thriving African American Community of Little Liberia in Bridgeport Connecticut.

            The meeting was scheduled for a 10 AM start and even though I arrived 15 minutes early, I was much later than my planned arrival for 9:00 AM. There were a number of Liberians in front of the Broad Street City Hall Annex. Many were dressed in their traditional West African attire, men in the colorful embroidered collarless Vai shirts and women in their lappa suits, matching body wrap, blouse and head wrap. The rest of us were dressed in Western attire, but all were dressed beautifully.

Liberians like most people of color have a visceral distaste for clocks, watches or anything that reminds us of time. If alarm clocks aren’t screaming at us to get up to go to work they remain avowed enemies. Considering our tendency for strolling into meetings thirty to forty minutes late and expecting “stop the meeting for me” updates, we told the Liberians that the meeting would start an hour earlier then it really would. We wanted everyone there on time; after all, we were meeting with the Mayor of Bridgeport. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the group was already there when I arrived. The first words that hit me though when I walked up to them were “Wilson! Where is the President?”. “Oh Boy, Joe was late “, I thought.

            Being on time is not one of Joe Morris Kalapele’s strong points, but artfully building alliances and relationships in and outside the Liberian Community is. The unassuming nature of the President of the LCAC, the Liberian Community Association of Connecticut belies his sharp intelligence and clarity of vision. Joe Morris and his Staff while building the Liberian Community of Connecticut have managed to develop a strong relationship with the Mayor of the City of Hartford, Connecticut. The results of that relationship are evident in the office space and program support provided to the Liberian Community in Hartford.  Working with the City of Bridgeport and the Little Liberia Project were the next logical steps. While the heyday of the large Liberian population in Bridgeport during the 1970’s is long gone, a somewhat invisible but still sizable Community still exists there. The Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses had come to the attention of the previous Leadership of the Liberian Community a few years earlier and the historical importance of the property was not lost on them. Failed attempts were made to contact the owners of the property and soon those attempts were abandoned altogether. With new Leadership came new and different priorities. However, while interest in the Houses faded, it was never completely lost.

            In the summer of 2011 interest was renewed in the houses when several members of the Liberian Community approached Joe Morris about the Little Liberia houses. Joe at that point had not heard about the houses and in typical “Joe Morris” fashion, he rolled up his sleeves and got right to work. He did some research and found that the houses had been threatened with foreclosure a few years earlier for unpaid taxes but a deal had been negotiated with the city. He contacted well respected and connected Bridgeport native Mrs. Carolyn Nah who put him in contact with Dr. Charles Tisdale of the ABCD Corporation in Bridgeport, and the current owners of the houses, The Mary & Eliza Freeman Center. A meeting was arranged between the Liberian Community, the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center, and the ABCD Corporation a few weeks later. At that meeting the current status of the houses was presented and an invitation was extended to the Liberian Community to participate on the Little Liberia project.

Working himself into a frenzy on the morning of the meeting with the Mayor, one Liberian actually questioned the Mayor’s awareness of the meeting. Another suggested that the Mayor may have cancelled and we just were not aware of it, all this, because of the locked entrance to the City Hall. I calmed him down and within about ten minutes, a Security Guard came to the door and told us how to get to the Mayor’s office. The mood immediately changed.

            Even though the Meeting Room was spacious, more chairs were brought in. We had a packed house. Representatives from the ABCD Corporation, Local pastors, Community Leaders, a Ph.D candidate researching the Little Liberia Community, Representatives from the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center, the Liberian and Congolese Communities were all present. Noticeably absent were Mayor Bill Finch and yes, Joe Morris. Joe showed up about 15 minutes later bringing along a few other Liberians.

            The meeting began immediately upon the arrival of the Mayor. Everyone introduced themselves, described their roles, and identified organizations they were affiliated with. Ms. Maisa Tisdale, President of the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community and niece of Dr. Charles Tisdale Executive Director of the ABCD Corporation in Bridgeport, chaired the meeting and skillfully navigated through many questions and comments while giving us a little bit of the history of the houses, how her Organization became custodians of the historic property, and what their vision for the properties is.

            Mayor Bill Finch began by charming the group with a story about his first contact with the Liberian Community of Connecticut when he was a Connecticut State Senator. His secretary had informed him that he had been invited to an event planned by the “Librarian Community of Connecticut”. When he arrived, what he saw was in stark contrast to what he expected and one of the event planners explained to him very quickly that it was the Liberian Community of Connecticut. He had a great time that night, enjoyed the traditional Liberian dancing and of course the mesmerizing beat of the West African drum. As he shared his vision for the Little Liberia Project, he connected the dots between the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses, the City of Bridgeport, Liberia, and the West African region. He painted a picture of his vision of economic and cultural cooperation between the City of Bridgeport and the West African region; a vision springing from the same hope shared by Mary and Eliza Freeman and their contemporaries in Little Liberia over 150 years earlier. It became very evident that the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses though beaten and battered today still rings with hope for a new generation.

            A few hours later the meeting ended and as the participants walked away, each carried with them a renewed vision of the possibilities that lay ahead. The challenges are great but with perseverance, and hard work, the same aspirations that drove the Little Liberian Community of Bridgeport 150 years earlier, will drive this multi-ethnic and multi-talented Team to success. In a collaboration unheard of before in Connecticut, the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses has brought together the Congolese, Ivoirians, Liberians, Nigerians, African Americans, as well as Non-People of Color, and hopefully will bring many others of the African Diaspora together for a common purpose. This stanza from the Liberian National Anthem, written in 1847 reminds us, as it did the freemen who returned to Liberia that strength comes from unity.

“In union strong, success is sure

We cannot fail

With God above our rights to prove

We will over all prevail”

The Little Liberia Bridgeport Project

It is no surprise that Ethiope, a thriving African American Community in Bridgeport made the decision to call itself “Little Liberia” in 1848. About a year earlier, on July 26^th 1847, Liberia declared its independence and became the first sovereign nation founded by freed African slaves on the African continent. These were exciting times for people of color all over the Americas and the Caribbean. The possibilities were endless. Black led nations, first Haiti and now Liberia, represented the hopes and aspirations of people of color everywhere. This was especially true for this small Connecticut community, no stranger to the freedom movement. Jehudi Ashmun the first governor of Liberia was from New Haven,Connecticut. Eight years earlier the captured Africans, Cinque and his band from Africa had been acquitted of mutiny on the Amistad, again in New Haven. There were whispers that the Underground Railroad had established routes right through this community although no one would affirm or deny.

The sea working in cahoots with the slave traders had facilitated the forcible transportation of millions of Africans, generations of men, women and children to these shores. Now with bloodlines from all over Africa, this community, a mixture of freed slaves and newly arrived Africans made their living from the sea. A different kind of freedom drew them here; financial freedom. Homes, schools, businesses, churches, and even the first public library in Bridgeport provided evidence that given the chance to reach their God-given potential these people could flourish like all men for all men are created equal.

Mary and Eliza Freeman, two sisters with no ambitions for fame were part of this community. They were free-born sisters from Derby Connecticut who became successful landowners and later purchased adjoining properties in the “Little Liberia” community in Bridgeport. They worked in New York City and used their homes as rental properties. Mary bought out Eliza’s heir’s interests in her properties after her death and went on to purchase many other properties and amassed a fortune in the process.

Like all of us, Mary and Eliza Freeman just wanted a good life where they could thrive, prosper and make the best of their talents. These were ordinary women who were extraordinary in that they unwittingly left a legacy that now keeps the light of that community flickering after over 150 years. It is said that after Phineas Taylor Barnum of PT Barnum fame, Mary Freeman was the second wealthiest person in the city of Bridgeport.

One hundred and sixty four years later and four years after another momentous event in African American History, the historic election of Barack Obama,  another generation of the African Diaspora represented by descendants of that “Little Liberia” community, the Caribbean, Liberia, The Congo, Cote D’Ivoire to name a few have banded together to fan the flames from the embers left by Mary and Eliza Freeman. This time however, in a country led by an African American President and under the auspicious leadership of the ABCD Corp and Ms. Maisa Tisdale these ordinary people have launched the Little Liberia Project.