The West End Community Center 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 discrimination that prohibited them from using the town’s community house.
As part of its newest initiative, Conversations That Matter, the Community House of Moorestown invited residents to participate in a conversation with Moorestownian Richard Gray about how the history of silent segregation links the histories of the Community House and the West End Community Center.
The latter served as the social and cultural hub for the township’s once segregated West End neighborhood from 1944 to 1968.
Residents at the discussion with Gray learned about the West End Community Center Project, a plan by the Historical Society of Moorestown funded by the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Inclusive History Grant Program. It aims to preserve the history and legacy of the center through recordings of Black elder interviews and digitized original records of the facility.
Residents at the talk shared stories about their historical experiences at the center and the Community House, and explored the possibility of current and future collaborative and collective efforts to uncover, document and share important histories of the Community House, the center and other local and regional institutions.
Team members for the West End Community Center Project include Richard Gray, Nadine Baldasare and Shannon Reilly, and the Historical Society of Moorestown’s Lenny Wagner, David Sullivan, Jill Weiss and Cathy Hartley. The project began in 2022 after Wagner, president of the society, connected with Gray through township Mayor Quinton Law.
Baldasare and Gray had known each other before: Baldasare is a former student of Gray’s, who is a lecturer at Columbia Law School. Back in 2020, Gray had shared stories with Baldasare about the West End center and his own history with the community and wanted to tell that story. The project formed after Gray and Wagner met and the team got together.
Pamela Henshall, executive director at the Community House, met trustee Jaye West’s husband, Randall, last year. Henshall and Randall were looking at a framed photograph from 1928, depicting what appeared to be a formal meeting of mostly men – along with two women and three Black men seated at a table – when Randall mentioned his friendship with Gray. Conversations That Matter took shape after Gray and Henshall met.
“When you look at storytelling,” Baldasare noted, “when you look at why going back 50 years and looking at those documents (from the project) and telling the stories of the West End Community Center … What it has given everybody who’s been involved in this project is a chance to imagine a future that is deeply steeped in the past which speaks to Moorestownians, but is also better.
”That’s really kind of the most amazing thing ever.”
“Our histories will not really come to fruition unless we really figure out a way that we can learn from the historical society about how to document, how to do this, how to be able to learn the technical things …” Gray pointed out. “And the historical society learns from us the particular nuance of what it is to tell that story, so that what ends up coming from this … is the story of Moorestown that needs to be told as a community.
“ … This is not just a historical project, but it really is a project about lessons we’ve learned from the past that we may want to bring into fruition today and how do we do that, and who plays the roles?” he added. “That’s a part of the conversation that I’m hoping to have.”
