The Historical Society of Moorestown is inviting the community to the township library at 7 p.m. on Tuesday for an update and conversation on the ongoing West End Center Oral History Project.
Attendees will hear from project team members Richard Gray, Nadine Baldasare and Shannon Reilly, and from the historical society’s Lenny Wagner, David Sullivan, Jill Weiss and Cathy Hartley, about the progress of preserving the history and legacy of the West End Community Center (WECC), the social and cultural hub for Moorestown’s once segregated West End neighborhood from 1944 to 1968.
The project team also developed new public resources that will be available at the library session, including recordings of Black elders and digitized original records.
Residents are encouraged to bring any personal stories, photos, correspondence and/or newspaper clippings about the WECC, and the historical society will have recording and scanning equipment available to document what they want to contribute to the project. Materials can be scanned and returned immediately, and while the team seeks items from the 1940s and early 1950s, it will accept materials from any period.
“If you have anything at home that we might have missed or didn’t have access to,” Wagner advised, “but you somehow have it in your house, whether it’s a newspaper clipping, whether it’s a photograph, whether it’s some type of communication … If you come that night and bring it, we’ll have our scanner set up there and we will scan the documents that you bring.
“If there’s a story that you want to tell, we’re going to have a camera there and we’re going to record it, so you’ll be able to tell (your) story and we’ll be able to figure out a way to get that available to everybody,” Wagner added. “The goal here is that somebody can go online and find out any kind of information about the history of the West End Community Center.”
Earlier this year, Moorestown native Gray discussed the history of the WECC and his plan to protect the legacy of a place important in township history. The project was originated and managed by Black men and women in the West End neighborhood as a space where residents could congregate, celebrate and create programs to build community relationships in the face of a discrimination policy that prohibited them from using the town’s community house.
The building was destroyed after it was integrated in the 1960s, according to the historical society, and its site is now home to Yancy Adams Park.
“One thing that has made me feel good about (the project) is the reaction of people when we tell them what we’re working on,” Wagner offered. “We live in a time where people have an aversion sometimes to the truth, if it doesn’t paint a person or an organization in a particularly favorable light …
“But when we say to people, ‘Did you know that the community house was segregated until the 1960s?'” Wagner continued, “… anybody that I talk to about the project, I haven’t had one person say, ‘Why are you bringing this up?’ Most of the reactions are, ‘I never knew that. How interesting.
“ … That’s what’s been fun.”
