Students Time Travel At Black History Museum

Tuskegee Airmen uniforms, Greensboro sit-in chairs, and historic newspaper clippings provided Brennan-Rogers fifth graders with an up-close look at Black history at a museum dedicated to African Americans past and present.

Two dozen students from West Rock’s Brennan-Rogers Magnet School traveled to Stratford last Wednesday morning to travel through the time periods of slavery and civil rights and so much more at the Ruby & Calvin Fletcher African American History Museum at 952 East Broadway.

The students learned the details of several of history’s landmark periods for African Americans from the museum’s owner, longtime collector, and former New Haven police officer Jeffrey Fletcher. 

The museum opened in October 2021. Fletcher plans to expand to another location in Stratford next year. 

The students were accompanied by three Brennan Rogers teachers and by Family Resource Center staffer Lensley Gay. 

Fletcher and his museum colleague Liz O’Rourke and board member Ricardo Curry led the students on their field-trip tour of the museum. 

In one exhibit room students viewed authentic newspaper clippings from a Louisiana Thursday morning paper that dated back to November 1860, half a year before the start of the Civil War. Several pages of that 1860 newspaper advertised the sale of enslaved African Americans. 

“This was so normal then it was just right in their faces in the morning newspaper,” O’Rourke said to the class. 

Several students took turns reading the explanatory exhibit plaques detailing the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the Tuskegee Airmen.

Fletcher thanked the fifth-grade class for the idea to have youth read the exhibit plaques and said he plans to make it a museum tradition going forward when schools visit. 

Fifth-grader Miguel read the museum’s excerpt about the Tuskegee Airmen, who helped to defend America during World War ll. 

The museum’s exhibit displayed the authentic uniforms of two Tuskegee Airmen: Hartford native and second Lt. Edward Thornton Dixon and Fletcher’s cousin, First Lt. and bomber pilot Henry Fletcher. 

After learning that Henry Fletcher was a bomber pilot, Miguel asked Fletcher, ​“Is that a grenade on his uniform?” 

Fletcher said the part of the uniform Miguel referred to was not a grenade but instead a dye pack used if pilots were lost at sea and could better be spotted by other planes. 

“When they went over to Europe to fight World War II, Jim Crow laws followed them all the way over to Europe where they were assigned to digging ditches, chauffeur, and kitchen patrol,” Fletcher said. 

Even after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully passed legislation allowing African Americans to fight in the war as pilots, he continued, Black soldiers were still mistreated. 

“When they came back to the United States, they had German concentration camps in the South, these individuals when they came back they had to sit in cattle cars where animals were and German prisoners sat in passenger cars,” Fletcher said. ​“They thought they were serving the country as patriots, but again segregation followed them.” 

The museum featured several exhibits that focused on the enslavement of African Americans. Those exhibits included collected artifacts of punishment instruments like leather whips and a ​“slave collar” that was equipped with a bell full of buckshot that deterred enslaved people from escaping. 

One exhibit also featured a replica of a small wooden sleep space for those who were enslaved while being transported overseas. The wooden replicas contained a small wooden body laying a top a sparsely hay-lined wooden ​“bed.”

“What if they were too tall to fit in there?” fifth-grader Aiden asked. 

In another room fifth-grader Mariah stood before a framed photo of a Black toddler working on a cotton plantation. 

“That’s just a baby!” Mariah said.

Mariah pointed out the poor condition of the child’s clothes and shoes and the oversized bag for the collected cotton attached to the baby. 

“That’s just wrong!” she added. 

In the next room, students watched a short video detailing the story of the March on Washington with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. 

“This was a movement, not a moment,” Fletcher said. 

In what Fletcher called the theatre room, authentic signage was on display showing doors and seating areas that were designated by ​“White” and ​“Colored.”

The theatre room also displayed several historic movie posters on the walls that were popular around the Civil Rights movement. 

One students asked: ​“Was there any movies that had Black people in them?” 

“There were movies but they were called B- and C‑rated movies which never got to the big movie theaters. Not like Gone With the Wind, The African Queen, or even The Wizard of Oz,” Fletcher said. ​“They were playing in places in the South in small pockets of Black communities.”

“You have all these incredible objects. Where do you get them?” Miguel asked. 

Fletcher said his collection started with his mother, who began collecting historic artifacts and had a collection of about 250 objects before her passing. 

Since then Fletcher has increased his collection to about 7,000 objects. He said he collects items through auctions and donations. 

“What happened to all the pilots who flew in the Tuskegee Airmen group?” another student asked. 

Fletcher said most if not all of the Tuskegee veterans have passed away. Gay added that she brought Tuskegee Airman Connie Napier, Jr. to New Haven in 2013. 

Students asked if Fletcher ever tried on the airmen’s suits, and he said he rarely handles the uniforms and never has worn them. 

Another room housed several historic posters for advertisements and entertainment which depicted caricatures of African Americas that drew upon racial stereotypes.

“They made these to demoralize you and make Black people look bad so others would feel above them,” Curry said. 

“This was a form of bullying,” he added. ​“They wanted you to think Black people were stupid, but that’s not true. This is what your people went through.” 

In the second-to-last exhibit Fletcher showed off a ​“Jim Crow Door” used in the past to segregate bathrooms for ​‘White Men,” ​“White Women,” and ​“Colored Men.”

Beside the historic doors, the museum also displayed a bathroom door that is typically seen today without signage segregating bathroom users based on their face. The door symbolizing today’s bathroom did have a defaced Starbucks logo and sign describing the Fletcher v. Starbucks legal dispute that occurred in 2013.

Fletcher told the class that at the time he was a police officer and visited a former Starbucks site at Church and Chapel Streets. While in his police uniform Fletcher said he was denied access to the Starbucks bathroom key because he was told by an employee that it was locked in a safe. However when he returned Fletcher was told by his fellow officer colleague that when he departed the coffee shop the barista allowed a white customer to use the bathroom with the key that was in the employee’s possession. 

The notice on the museum’s door was a settlement letter sent to Fletcher from Starbucks offering to pay him $3,000 and requiring he never talk about the case. Fletcher said he declined the money so he could tell his story. 

“I tell you this story only because 75 or 80 years ago you weren’t allowed to go in certain bathrooms if you were a certain color and same thing years later when I wasn’t allowed to use the Starbucks bathroom,” Fletcher said. 

In the ​“Jim Crow” exhibit alongside the bathroom doors was a full jelly bean jar Fletcher put on display to replicate the voter suppression tactics used throughout history to keep African Americans from voting. 

He told the class that African Americans were required to guess how many jelly beans were in the jar before they were allowed to vote and if they were wrong, they were not granted access to the voting booths. 

The museum walkthrough concluded with a final exhibit that had several banners depicting the decades of African American influencers before, during, and after the Civil Rights movement. 

Students pointed out faces of such artists and celebrities as Tupac, Michael Jackson, and Oprah on the museum’s walls. 

Fletcher emphasized the importance of ending the museum with the success of African Americans to display the triumph and full story of those that came before. 

“When you leave here I want everybody to be on a happy and good note,” he said. 

Next year when the new location is opened for the museum, Fletcher said several celebrity clothes items will be on display and will tell some history of other races, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ movements that occurred in Connecticut. 

The final room also displayed a sampling of the 3,000 vinyl records collected by Fletcher’s mother Ruby and two guitars played by his father Calvin.