Interview with Noel B. Wellington-McCarthy
IntervieweeInterview with
Noel B. Wellington-McCarthy
(Jamaican, 1914 - 2003)
Date2001 May 2
Mediumdigitized audio cassette tape
DimensionsDuration (side 1): 47 Minutes, 34 Seconds
Duration (side 2): 21 Minutes, 55 Seconds
Duration (total runtime): 1 Hour, 9 Minutes, 29 Seconds
ClassificationsInformation Artifacts
Credit LineGift of the CHS Exhibitions Department
Object number2013.26.28a-e
Description(a-d) Audio cassette tape of an interview with Noel B. Wellington-McCarthy, who was interviewed by Fiona Vernal on May 2, 2001. (e) Black and white portrait photograph of Noel McCarthy.
Topics discussed include McCarthy's childhood in Jamaica; his parents and other family members traveled extensively and often in the 1930s and 1940s; his employment in Jamaica before migrating; his work history at a clinic, the municipality, and at the Panama Canal; traveling to Panama; parable about being a "know it all"; farm laborers arriving in America dressed in their best clothes; racial discrimination; racial confrontation on the bus; transferring from Florida to Connecticut in 1945; getting married; racial discrimination in the real estate industry; and how a random Jewish man and his friends helped McCarthy buy his house.
2013.26.28a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.28e: photograph
Topics discussed include McCarthy's childhood in Jamaica; his parents and other family members traveled extensively and often in the 1930s and 1940s; his employment in Jamaica before migrating; his work history at a clinic, the municipality, and at the Panama Canal; traveling to Panama; parable about being a "know it all"; farm laborers arriving in America dressed in their best clothes; racial discrimination; racial confrontation on the bus; transferring from Florida to Connecticut in 1945; getting married; racial discrimination in the real estate industry; and how a random Jewish man and his friends helped McCarthy buy his house.
2013.26.28a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.28e: photograph
Label TextListen to interview at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/40002:19641569
NotesSubject Note: In 1999, the West Indian Social Club of Hartford and the West Indian Foundation asked the Connecticut Historical Society to join them in documenting the lives of the West Indian immigrants who first came to the Hartford area in the 1940s to work on local tobacco farms.What began as a project designed to record the experiences of these early pioneers - mostly men from Jamaica - subsequently grew to include audio and videotaped interviews of men and women, elders and young people, longtime residents and more recent arrivals to the Greater Hartford area, both from Jamaica and the other English-speaking, independent countries in the Caribbean.
The exhibition explored a common thread that seems to link people’s individual stories: the challenge of putting down roots in a new place while maintaining ties with the people, history, and cultural heritage of their homelands in the West Indies.
The exhibition, "Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties: Greater Hartford’s West Indians," was on view at the Connecticut Historical Society from July 2, 2002 – August 31, 2003.
Status
Not on view
