(lively music) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) - So this is a talking stick that we use in ceremony and in group circles.

This talking stick comes from a Messiah warrior chief in Africa.

We do a talking circle with the kids.

So what this teaches is respect because whoever has the stick in their hand is the only one that speaks.

- [Narrator] And the one speaking had survived a tumultuous life journey of his own.

And for decades he had not called himself by the name given to him at his birth.

(singing in foreign language) - We love to grow food and part of our native culture is what we call walking in balance on the earth.

- [Narrator] And he was a long way from where he had grown up.

- In order to become a whole being or become balanced, you have to release yourself from all the repressed feelings that you've had in your life in order to become free.

- [Narrator] In his home village of the late 1940s and fifties, Black-Eagle Sun was raised within a system that was forever shaped and defined by this announcement.

(crowd cheering) - [Speaker] Throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe, it is five years and more since Hitler marched into Poland, years full of suffering and death and sacrifice.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] After four years of fighting abroad in the Second World War, those who survived came home to their neighborhoods, towns, and villages, forever changed.

The young men and women of their generation had seen the world and their new found restlessness for independence and control would be inevitable.

(gentle music) If they were able, then they all went back to work.

And whenever possible, they did a whole lot more.

- World War II veterans came home and rebuilt our country.

It's a very emotional thing for me, the things that World War II people did.

- When these guys got home from the service, if something needed to be done, if they needed a station or if we needed a ball field, they just built it.

If you needed a second ball field, they did it.

And I think that attitude of doing for yourself, that if you didn't have it, you do it.

And if you couldn't buy it, you made it, took to our generation.

- [Narrator] And its children, defined it by what they knew and experienced within the borders of their safe and sheltered world.

- What's a village?

In this case, I think two things that are very important.

One is the mill.

It's a mill village.

Everybody was associated with the mill.

That's the first thing.

The second thing, Kendall Dean, was very important because we all knew each other.

When somebody asked me where I went to school, the first thing is not Mount St.

Charles.

It's Kendall Dean.

I knew the same people from kindergarten to the eighth grade.

- [Narrator] And so did I. Like thousands of kids from Slatersville, I too went to Kendall Dean School.

Today the building serves as the newly renovated North Smithfield Town Hall.

And the same space that was our lunchroom and auditorium is now the location for town council meetings.

Behind this mural was once a stage where countless little productions were put on.

And through the years I've seen every photo imaginable from school plays to graduations and some other things.

- So I didn't realize my mom had these pictures in her archives.

So I wanted to show you some of this stuff 'cause it's kind of interesting - [Narrator] Growing up, you learn the names to places that you never forget.

And sometimes they align with images that you cannot unsee.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) The post-war baby boom was one of the most exceptional moments in American history.

And the nuclear families of the 1950s provided a snapshot in time, unlike any other.

The Slatersville of post World War II America was broken down into four distinctive groups of people.

The areas in which they lived were mostly defined by class, language, religion, and race.

And while manufacturing served as the central core where they could all function together as one, the ways in which people dealt with things in Slatersville could not have been more characteristic of its era.

And people either remembered it this way, - Well, it was like being in heaven.

I really believe it.

- [Narrator] Or this way.

- No, I'd say heaven and hell.

Both.

- A lot of these places like Slatersville, it's almost like they were freeze dried in 1955.

- [Narrator] And that brings us to the first location.

- These houses along here, this was known as Governor's Row here on Green Street where the big shots at the mill lived.

- [Narrator] After returning home from the war, Paul Choate began to work his way up in the Kendall Company.

- He became an apprentice first.

He had to go through every physician and he always had a notebook and wrote every evening he came home from work.

- I made a few notes of what was happening.

- [Speaker] Where's the.

- [Speaker] You made some notes down.

- What a shock.

- He went back Saturday mornings.

He didn't have to, but he wanted to be sure everything was all right, faithfully every Saturday morning.

- [Narrator] But it was his passion for photography that is most vividly seen today.

- My father loved photography and I'm holding one of his cameras.

This is a camera that he used between 1947 and 1953.

The viewfinder would take the image in here and display it.

(shutter clicking) - He liked scenes mostly, but he faithfully took the family's pictures.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Narrator] Paul Choate captured life in Slatersville, in vivid color, in what would be its final years as an operating mill village.

And some of these scenic images, they came from slides that in an effort to downsize, he almost threw out.

- This is one of our favorites.

This is Culver sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the parade to come down.

- And unbeknownst to many, there was a flagpole in the middle of that intersection where that blinker light is.

And that was my duty position.

Being a crossing guard at noon with my little flag and my little white cross belt would guide the younger students as they walked home for lunch.

They would go home for lunch.

- [Narrator] And let's not forget wrestling on the common.

- The evenings hours were pretty much governed by the bell and the siren.

(bell ringing) - At six o'clock in the evening, the bell at the mill would ring every hour.

And at six o'clock it would ring six bells, seven o'clock, seven bells, 7:30, siren, you better head for home.

You better head for home, 'cause you better be home by the time eight bells sounded.

- These trees are all essentially as they were only, they're just bigger.

- Our mother had a whistle and that was the way we got called in to supper.

And you could hear it all over town.

- And right on the other side of this road began the field.

- We could roam the town as children.

We had no fear of anything.

Everyone knew us and knew our families and.

- Didn't hesitate to correct us.

- No one- - We'd be.

- Absolutely not.

Or tell our parents.

- Parents, they didn't think twice about their kids, at seven, eight, 10, 12, 13 years old being out until it got dark at the ball field.

(lively music) - We had the grandstand in those days, beautiful grandstand would hold a couple hundred people as all wood.

And eventually it was torn down and it was right behind my house, which was really convenient.

(crowd cheering) We lived, breathed everything, baseball.

And you lived and died with the Red Sox, I mean.

- Back then we used to have circuses in people's backyards and we'd pile all the babies in a wagon and have a little parade.

- And like so many in Slatersville, Pamela and Derek's family had deep roots in the village.

- All these people worked at Kendall.

There's my father, there's my mother.

This is my grandmother and grandfather Allaire.

- [Speaker] Our maternal grandparents, worked there in the early 1900s.

- [Narrator] And Frank later became one of the villages barbers, who was set up in the commercial block closest to Memorial Town Hall.

Here he is giving his grandson Derek, his very first haircut.

- Our dad worked in the lab.

He had the equivalent of a chemical engineering degree from a school in Krefeld, Germany.

And he came over here right after that from England.

But he worked in the lab the entire time.

In fact, his entire career he spent at Campbell.

This front door was considered to be the most unusual front door in Rhode Island.

You know, I bet if we went and knocked on the door, they'd let us come in.

- You can thank Pam for one thing.

You know that beautiful tree you've got right there in the front corner of the house?

- The big one, big five.

- My sister planted that from an acorn.

- Planted that from an acorn.

- From an acorn.

From an acorn.

On every visit to Slatersville, I'd always come by to check that tree.

- Still there.

- I lived here in this house from 1943 to about 1955.

My father was the chief chemist at the mill.

He was Peter Kolupaev.

My mother was Ray.

(bell ringing) We actually rented the place, it was $50 a month.

We had a big comfortable chair here.

And that's where my mother's piano was, right there.

Television set, sat there.

- The television.

- [Speaker] Now, during the holidays, did you- - We eventually got a television.

The Hutch with all the dishes over there.

That's exactly the same.

- [Narrator] So whenever mill employees were promoted in Slatersville, they could move their families to better housing within the village.

The higher your position was within the company, the nicer your home could be.

- [Philip] The yellow house.

The one that had the porthole in the front.

- [Speaker] Oh yes.

- Over the front door.

That's where I came back from the hospital.

- Okay.

- And then I guess this house became available and my dad was doing just fine over at the mill.

So they- - Yeah.

- Put 'em in here.

- [Narrator] And the families, they actually helped each other move.

- We all lived pretty close together.

(chuckles) And everyone would pitch in with the food and the men would move all the furniture.

No furniture company would come in.

- [Narrator] But as sweet and picturesque as all of that sounds, there existed a totally different culture just downhill.

And how could the kids tell?

- Well, you know, I'll tell you.

Every Sunday morning we met in front of the store, downtown.

Quarter of 11, the Catholics went up the hill.

(gentle music) We went to the Congregational Church.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Which also had another name.

- In the old days it was St.

John's.

And we call that The White Church.

(gentle music) (tapes whirring) (bright music) - As the chaplain of the youth group.

I spoke up here.

Why they elected me, I'll never know.

We went on a picnic and we had three legged races and sack races.

The women had a contest throwing the rolling pin.

The races were asking me to do something I'd never tried before.

Just tie the ankles together and try.

(bright music) - My aunt used to talk about the elders that she knew about the difference in between the two churches and how the Catholic Church, when we were thought upon as heathens by The White Church in the center of town, because we could go to confession.

So if you could go to confession, you could sin and say, "Oh, I'm sorry."

Whereas the people from The White Church, if you sinned, you were gone.

- [Narrator] It was from such beliefs that these two religions manufactured the need for two of everything at every corner of the village.

We had two scout troops.

We had the Protestant, we called it.

They met at the Congregational Church and then the Catholic Scouts.

And we met at St.

John's.

And the majority of folks who attended the Catholic Church came from Main Street, which was mostly made up of immigrants.

- Saturday nights you could go knock on any door up and down, any street in town here and come on in, come on in, have a beer and play cards.

And mostly all French.

If you were French, boy, you were in.

- Most of the families on Main Street in Slatersville had French names.

The people used to say that, they'd say, "Don't talk about each other because they're all related."

(laughs) - Growing up, we went to St.

John's Church and I was always pointed to the stainless windows that both the Cournoyer had donated and her other side of the family, the Tessiers had donated.

- As a matter of fact, my mother always, when we went to church, always sat by the Cournoyer window.

- You know what Cournoyer means, if you translate it literally (indistinct) yanda nut trees.

(laughs) But, that's what I understand.

- The Cournoyers, which were my mother's family, have been involved in the church for a long, long time.

- [Betty] And they all settled here because of the mill.

They all went to work for Slatersville Finishing Company.

- I was born in this house in 1940 and I've lived here ever since.

(lively music) As a matter of fact, I was actually born in the room that is now my bedroom.

- Every other house was a relative.

- I never knew what a babysitter was because there was always some relative to take care of you.

- Every day I'd get, my dad would come home from work and he'd say, "Are you going to see your grandmother?"

And I'd say, "No," he's say, "Go back down and see your grandmother."

So I'd come back down here.

She lived downstairs.

Go in and say "Hi may-may," and leave.

Because she didn't speak English and I didn't speak French.

We had a great conversation.

- [Speaker] The working people were usually Catholic and immigrants, Canadian, French, Polish, Portuguese and management was usually the Yankees.

- [Narrator] They even had two different barbers while Frank Allaire served management in one of the commercial blocks, a man named Sharkie cut laborers hair in the other.

- [Speaker] If you were in management, you probably had gone to Harvard because Kendall liked to hire people from Harvard.

You were Yankee and you were Protestant.

- I had a great upbringing in Slatersville 'cause I spent a lot of time out in the woods.

We swam in the pond, in the trench.

We used to play cowboys and Indians.

And I, you know, I had to be the cowboy 'cause everybody always wanted to be the Indians, you know?

- [Narrator] And he was once the water boy for the Slatersville Red Raiders.

- My mother was a maid for, you know, the managers of the mill.

So she did the house cleaning and Ed Wilkes, she worked for the Wilkes and two or three other families.

- The people that ran it, like Wilkes and all that were in the Congregational Church.

So that was a rich church.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Which might explain why the vast majority of people who contributed their home movies came from Protestant families.

Those in positions of management, or with businesses of their own, could afford eight millimeter movie cameras.

While the laborers mainly struggled to get by.

But at least the Catholics could easily visit the Protestant Church and take part in whatever was happening there.

Right?

- No.

- There were too many manmade laws.

I was brought up at Catholic, we could not enter into a Protestant Church.

We could not join a Girl Scout because they weren't Catholic.

- And I'll never forget when I decided to belong to Girl Scouts, I joined The White Church Girl Scouts.

And that was like, oh, you know.

- The way we were taught is you would expect the ceiling to fall.

You know, it was really a bad thing.

- I went out with a boy from the Congregational Church and you know, I broke off with him because that wouldn't go.

My brother went out with his sister and was told to break up with that sister because she was Protestant and my brother was Catholic.

And my mother worked on my brother, her mother from the Congregational Church.

I don't mention any names.

- For me, through the years, to me, there's only one God.

Whatever way they practice, I respect it and I think I'm on the right track.

- [Narrator] Just down the road on School Street, a whole other group of immigrants had begun populating homes in the 1930s.

But the language that was heard in the village back then could only be heard today, by way of Providence.

(Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (gentle music) (Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (gentle music) - There were a lot of the Portuguese people there.

They were very nice people.

They were very religious people.

- At one time, it was known as Portuguese Alley.

- The women would be scrubbing their clothes on the rocks and then they'd have something they put on their head.

And in back of that was all houses.

- [Narrator] And behind those houses lived a man whose job it was to keep the peace.

(gentle music) In a time when the town had very few police officers, those who swore to serve and protect were actually doing it as a second job.

- For example, Bill Allaire, the constable, he wasn't called the Chief of police.

He actually worked in the mill.

He was the only, I guess call it police officer in the town for many years.

- All I can think of is Mayberry, remember Andy Griffith had the two cells and there, and Otis had come in.

That's all Chief Allaire had.

He had a couple of cells in the bottom of the town hall.

- Then Joe Freitas come along.

Joe was a good guy.

He worked in a dye house down here in the mill.

- There was my dad, the police chief, and the deputy police chief.

And they were the entire North Smithfield Police department.

Two cars.

Matter of fact, at one point in time they had one car, and I think they shared it.

When someone new moved into town, my dad would get in his police car ride out, and he was like the welcome wagon.

He would just go there and say, "I'm the police chief here.

And if you ever have any problems of any kind," you know, even including things that young kids did, you know, he was like, "You know, if they're stealing your apples, you let me know."

You know, that was major crime in North Smithfield back then.

- [Narrator] In his early years with the North Smithfield Police Department, Joe Freitas kept his job at the Slatersville's Finishing Company while receiving emergency calls at his home in Forestdale.

- At that time, I used to have the phone in the house, (phone ringing) and I used to answer it 24 hours a day.

So, like I say, I was tied down to the telephone.

I would have to call Woonsocket Police Department to send a message to the North Smithfield Car.

That's how they got in touch with him.

When he worked in the mill, he did his job and they would notify him that there was an accident and he would just leave.

He got a call one night to go out on duty, never thinking that it would be as bad as it was.

It was someone he knew very well that he used to reprimand as just a bad kid and let him go.

And this time he had a gun and he wouldn't give in.

He wouldn't come out.

And he was set up in his house with the gun and Joe called the state police.

When they came, the man fired from his window and they were behind the car.

(gunshot blasting) They ricocheted off the car and hit Joe in the face.

He had all these little baby shots in his face, his eye, his nose, in his ear.

He even had them, as a matter of fact, there was a few, they never removed, but he even went to church that was on a Saturday night.

Sunday morning he was in church with this swollen eye.

- [Jay] When my dad returned home from World War II, he and my Uncle Al, they owned a series of tenement houses.

I believe there was six of them.

- They bought land from my father and built themselves a Portuguese American club.

(bright music) (Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) - [Narrator] And the majority of employees that worked in the Forestdale Mill were the Portuguese who lived right across the street from it.

And they created an event to take care of their own.

- The Holy Ghost Society was formed in 1939, and they formed a thing after Queen Elizabeth of Portugal back in the 14th century, she would open her castle up every year and feed all the poor people in the community, walk around and throw coins out to 'em.

And then take the poorest child that she could find and she would put the crown on, her crown, on top of that person, just to show her Christianity that she was no different and they were no different than her.

In order to belong to it, you have to be Portuguese or you have to marry a Portuguese girl.

I was fortunate that I married a Portuguese girl to be part of that organization.

- The Portuguese people, we visited one another.

We ate at one another's house.

Especially the Portuguese food was very good.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (bright music) (bright music continues) (indistinct) - [Bob] Every year we'll have an auction that'll raise a lot of money.

People buy things that are worth $10 for 300, (chuckles) and that's all for charity.

(Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (bright music) (singing in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (bright music) - [Narrator] But further away, right on the outskirts of the village, there existed a whole other story underneath its surface.

- There was a black family who lived in a place that was down near the road.

It got flooded out.

The trench on one side, and then that pond, that's Curliss pond.

- Well, they took that house and moved it up on top of the hill.

- The very next house that's up on the hill, sits up on a hill.

That's the Old Curliss Homestead.

- I'd forgotten about the Curliss's.

That was the only colored family in Slatersville or around, you know.

- [Narrator] For decades if there was ever a group photo taken and there was one person of color appearing in that photo, whether it was a Sunday school gathering or a class photo in front of the old grammar school, or a Kendall company outing at Rocky Point, or a Christmas dinner in the Weave shed, the last name of the person listed was always Curliss.

- [Speaker] Arthur Curliss grew up on the homestead and then worked in the mills.

I believe he ended up in the dye room.

- [Narrator] And after the war, only one man was supervising that dye room.

- [Ben] Arthur Curliss.

- [Bob] Yeah.

- [Ben] Arthur Curliss is my clerk.

- [Bob] He was your clerk?

- [Ben] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Okay.

- [Ben] All right?

- My father was a dye chemist.

- [Ben] Arthur wanted more money, but I couldn't give him anymore.

So he was done.

He got an offer on a job.

He was a marvelous all around man.

He was a beautiful writer.

A real bookkeeper.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] That guy was way ahead of his time.

He had never gone to school, technically, but he could do the dyes, test the chemicals.

Easy taught, very easy taught, he's a good mind, you know.

Besides that, he did the log book for me.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] He was very conscientious bright, a little short guy.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] He was half Indian, I think.

There were only Indian people around here.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Bob] He lived up near the dam.

- [Ben] Yeah.

- [Bob] By the upper dam.

- [Ben] Yeah, up at the end of that street.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Narrator] Where Reverend Eastman's Camp Toonerville was located.

- We had a name for it, but I don't like to repeat it.

(laughs) - [Narrator] As printed in the Woonsocket call July, 1932.

(water burbling) (water burbling continues) (water burbling continues) (water burbling continues) - That word is not used anymore.

- One of the ways that, you know, people think about it is it was given to the towns because my family lived there and we were dark skinned.

- That's how its got its name.

Now we simply call it the upper dam.

- [Narrator] At one time, this harmful word could be found on maps and official records across America, which forced it to roll off the tongues of white people, young and old.

- Using names with the N word as place names or even negro are really telling about popular history and again, how we use history.

And so when we think about the function of these names, often they mark a story.

(singing in foreign language) - [Bruce] The name, it wasn't I-S-S always, it was C-U-R-L-E-S.

There was a ship captain Amos Curliss from Scotland.

(speaking in foreign language) - Back in the day when they were taking native slaves from New England and bringing them to the Caribbean.

And what they would find was the native slaves wouldn't work.

They would prefer to die than be enslaved.

(singing in foreign language) - Some of them tell stories about hangings and racial brutality that people don't wanna talk about, but they still use the place name.

- Amos Curliss, the ship captain took a cabin boy from one of the captures of the slaves, gave him his name, taught him to read and write, and then released him in Mr.

Connecticut and basically migrated into the Oxbridge, North Smithfield area at that time.

You know, my grandparents were from here, they lived in town.

They're part of that history.

They're on the monuments.

We have people buried up in the cemetery behind the church that go back to the Civil War.

- And so it's a way for us to remember a collective history.

And when I say us, of course that's segmented because different segments of the population remember these things differently.

- Do you know anything about the dams up there between the two reservoirs?

You know what they used to call that?

- [Speaker] I do.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- [Speaker] That's a whole other story.

- Yeah, that's a whole other story.

- [Speaker] Do you want to talk about that?

- No, not really.

- [Speaker] Why did they call it that?

- I have no idea.

- It's just the way it was, you know, the heck.

What are you gonna do about it, you know.

- From the time I was three or four until I got to high school, the name just rolled off my lips.

It was a derogatory term for African-Americans, but we never knew it as kids.

Never recognized that as kids.

I mean, just totally in the dark about it, I think as a freshman in high school, and it was the first time I really began to go to school with more diversity.

We brought a friend of mine named Sandyshome for a weekend, and we went swimming and he heard that term come up.

And (indistinct) was just shocked, but angry.

And I'm embarrassed to say, it wasn't until I was a teenager that I recognized that it was something that should never pass your lips.

- My dad was one of the founders of the VFW.

They used to put on entertainment shows at Kendall Dean.

You can see this was, I think like that maybe the VFW auxiliary.

- [Bruce] What years were these?

- [Jay] Early to mid fifties.

- [Narrator] While the upper dam was one story, community fundraisers were another.

And for better or for worse.

somebody brought a camera.

- Some of this stuff may be controversial to some people, but this was, for example, some shots from the minstrel show.

(audience laughing) (audience laughing continues) Curious to see what you think of some of this.

- I think it's really interesting, is that, so it's, you know, it's like from a time period.

(lively music) - When you looked at the newspapers in New England, in the 1920s and 1930s, there was seemingly almost always a minstrel show.

- I've heard them described as the first truly American brand of theater, which is pretty telling.

- Today a no-go.

- Oh, without a doubt.

- Today a no-go.

- Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you.

- They mimicked African-Americans with mammies and with blackface and with exaggerated features.

- [Stacey] And the Jim Crow character would say wheel about turnabout jump.

Just, so every time I jump, I jumped Jim Crow.

- This is the only picture I've seen of like the audience- - [Bruce] Some of audience.

- The performers in front of the audience, because that looks very much like my Uncle Al.

I'm pretty sure that it is.

- Right.

And then, you know, Kendall Dean's where my, you know, my mom, my aunt, my uncle went to school, so.

- [Narrator] And chances are they were at some of these shows too.

- You know, there were people of color in the VFW.

- Mm hmm.

- My grandfather was a World War II veteran.

Lester Curliss was a World War II vet, coming back was probably engaged in some of those things.

He was a member of the VFW and was accepted because there was a comradery amongst all the people who served together.

- [Narrator] Perhaps.

But what was Jay's perception of all of this as a child, after all, he was around 10 years old at the time.

- I remember going to both of these.

I didn't get the meaning of the minstrel show so much.

- Right.

- As the South Pacific became a musical, I think or something.

- [Joe] Do you remember a guy, Joe Freitas?

Joe was a very wonderful actor.

- [Bob] Holy Ghost Club.

He was a great singer you know.

- [Bob] Oh yeah he was the captain of the police force.

- Joe used to put on minstrel shows to raise funds for different organizations.

And the first one was for the fire department because at that time they used to black the faces.

And that is not allowed nowadays.

- I can remember really laughing.

I can remember some people laughing this, but I really never saw a minstrel, what they called a minstrel show.

- Right.

- As a kid.

- [Narrator] But Joe Freitas and the VFW were not the only ones that put minstrel shows on.

After all, it did take a village.

The Congregational Church had their own shows, as did St.

John's, where Ben Heslin was the organist.

- Slatersville being a small town, he became very involved.

- Yeah.

- Oh, very involved in the head of the scouts and everything.

I mean, he just was- - He was very musical.

- Oh, he put on shows.

- [Ben] See we didn't have any sociability down at St.

John's.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] A regular thing for putting them on, for making money for churches or lodges or any kind of institutions was minstrel shows.

- [Bob] Sure.

Well, I proved that was my hobby all my life.

- [Speaker] Okay.

(lively music) - [Ben] And down the road there was the Portuguese Club.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] You remember that?

- [Bob] Yep, right in Forestdale.

- [Ben] Yeah, well, I put on the same thing for them.

And oh, we had wonderful time.

- He'd have sing-alongs and people would sing.

And he passed out all the songs.

- And he's sing out the lyrics.

- Oh, sure.

- So that everybody could join in.

- Right.

- [Ben] Well, I put on three years in a row, it made a few thousand dollars, you know.

The programs, the first page would be $5 and then $2 and $1, you know, depending on the size of it And that was a great money making thing.

- [Narrator] In fact, he loved it so much that by 1983, Ben Heslin, who was by then completely blind, received a Jefferson Award for community service awarded by Rhode Island's, NBC TV affiliate.

- So nostalgia has this power where it takes the pain and the racism and the sexism and the classism out of our history.

And we stick to the fond memories of things.

- I've struggled with, how do you justify a bunch of white people in blackface?

What I would expect for someone to do in this time, in this era, is say, you do know this is the only form of entertainment they had when they come back that they could afford.

And that they were having a fundraiser to help the community.

I can justify that in my mind, it's not acceptable today.

- [Speaker] I mean, do you think people found this offensive?

- I think.

- In that, you know, of a lot of your older relatives.

- Right and I think that one of the things is, it's because this doesn't surface a lot in the conversations.

I could see that maybe saying something at home in passing and then letting it go, because there was a different level of tolerance that took place in that.

And I think that by understanding that it's not acceptable today, was the beginning of the conversations that people had to have.

You know, like, it's the expansion of people understanding how it makes them feel.

- And I'm not trying to defend myself or these people, but I would also ask this question of someone who today is gonna say something derogatory about this era.

- What we're talking about here, people really, it's hard for them to grasp.

That does seem like a paradox.

Now here he is, got people blacking up their faces, 'cause they're the guys, you know, what is it, three on one side or six on one side.

And then the interlocutor and using that black language or dialect, so to speak, affected.

Now today, it was like, it would be, (gasping), that would never, no.

But remember, you have to always put your mindset in the frame of reference of the time.

It's called context.

(gentle music) - [Valerie] Okay.

Let's talk about context.

(tense music) In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was making their presence known throughout America.

And Northern Rhode Island became one of their targeted areas.

The Klan was not just anti-black, it was also anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant.

And it was gaining traction at a time when over 40% of the state worshiped in a Catholic Church.

One night in July of 1924, they held a rally in the town of Foster, where reportedly 8,000 people gathered in a field lit by 2000 cars, all for the initiation of over 200 new Klansmen under a burning cross.

One month later, a young reporter from Woonsocket's French newspaper "La Tribune", set out to write a story on the KKK holding these rallies.

His name was Lucian San Souci, and he was related to then Governor Emery San Souci.

He was also a French Canadian immigrant and quite the devout Catholic.

When Lucian learned the Klan was holding a secret meeting in North Smithfield, he went to get the scoop.

They were gathering in the area known as Branch Village, close to where this road was located.

A road that was later renamed.

But when he got there, five hooded Klansmen caught Lucian hiding behind a bush, listening in on their conversation.

So they kidnapped him and brought him to an unknown location where they burned a K onto his temple and his left arm.

When they went to brand his stomach, he broke away and ran home.

The Klan denied the whole thing.

Town authorities announced an investigation, but no one could ever be identified under their white hoods.

Bill Allaire the police chief at the time, stated that it was not the Klan and brushed it off as a bunch of guys playing a practical joke.

The story soon disappeared in the local press, but not before impressing the staff at "The Birmingham Age-Herald" in Alabama.

The following year, Rhode Island, secretary of State, Ernest Sprague, granted the Ku Klux Klan a charter.

Then there was the Watchman Industrial School and Camp in North Scituate, a vocational school for children of African heritage who came from underprivileged families.

A school founded by pastor and educator William S. Holland in 1908, a school established with the same spirit as the HBCUs funded by John Fox Slater in the 1880s.

At one time, Watchman had over 1,500 students who learned everything from farming and making clothes to trades of all kinds.

But in 1924, a fire was set, a fire that was put out, but 10 years later, two more fires burned two of its wings to the ground.

Luckily, their students escaped the blaze and reportedly the causes of those fires were only determined to be of mysterious origin.

Then there was housing.

During the Great Depression, many banks failed causing a drastic decrease in home loans.

In 1934 part of FDRs new deal was the National Housing Act, which made housing and home mortgages more affordable.

While it opened the doors to home ownership to scores of white Americans, Black and Indigenous people were overwhelmingly steered away from White neighborhoods and denied mortgages.

This led to skilled laborers from those communities not getting jobs and their kids dropping out of school.

Now, the ripple effects of this act made sure the families and workforces that occupied Mill Village housing throughout the Blackstone Valley were well over 90% white.

So when it came to enforcing FDRs policies in New England, Rhode Island was the worst.

Even as late as 1949, the Providence Journal noted that more than two thirds of industrial firms did not hire black people in any capacity.

By then, minstrel shows were taking place across a national backdrop of tremendous upheaval.

Outside of Slatersville, there was a growing civil rights movement in which Black Americans fought for long overdue social change, fights over access to schools, public spaces, and even lunch counters led to violent conflicts between activists and white supremacists who were often backed by the police.

That's when minstrel shows as a popular form of entertainment began to fade.

By 1960, when the population of North Smithfield was over 7,600 people, its non-white population was only.

Today its white population hovers around 96%.

So, back to context.

If you were a kid growing up in Slatersville during the 1950s, you didn't know any of this.

These stories were buried and you lived inside this racially engineered bubble.

Everyone else was white just like you.

And chances are the younger you were, the further you were from ever having a clue.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Narrator] Charles Roberts is founder of the Rhode Island Slave History medallions.

- We are a place-based organization who marks the landscape of the state of Rhode Island with bronze markers on granite pedestals to represent the indigenous and the African people who fought and died here to make this country what it is.

I actually used to look at white people as ignorant because they didn't know their history and didn't know the sociological effects of what they were doing.

I didn't believe in Malcolm X because I didn't believe that the white man was a devil.

He was just as much being manipulated as the rest of the masses.

And they were following like herd animals, the institutionalized racism that they helped perpetuate.

Even the ones that said, "Oh, I'm not a racist."

But those people, well who were those people they were talking about?

- You know, I was thinking about my uncle Doug Curliss, who now goes by the name Black-Eagle Sun.

- [Narrator] But long before he changed his name, Black-Eagle Sun was one of the most accomplished athletes at Burrillville High School, just one town over.

It was there that Tom Eccleston, an influential coach and mentor, would have a profound influence on his life.

So much so that in 2002, Kathi Wheater, a filmmaker and Burrillville native herself, decided to make her own film about this legendary coach.

- [Kathi] When you look back, is there anybody when you were a kid that had that effect on you that maybe he stuck with you?

- Well, Tom Eccleston, he was like a father, you know, and I get emotional when I think about him, 'cause he was, you know, he was- - [Narrator] That's when she interviewed Black-Eagle Sun in California.

- I ran away from home a couple times.

He was always there.

Got me back into school.

You know, he was always the guiding light in my life.

- [Narrator] And 11 years later when I interviewed him in Slatersville.

- So raised in Slatersville was- - [Narrator] this was the first thing he said.

- You know, growing up when I was young, I had a lot of fights behind my color.

- [Speaker] Because everything you're talking about, you were just recognized as black as Negro.

- Yeah, I was.

I grew up that way.

I was the kid.

It happened a lot of times.

I dealt with a lot, I got a lot of scars on my hand.

In Slatersville, I mean, you don't know how many fights I had growing up with good friends, you know.

We'd fight and then five minutes after we'd fight, we'd be good friends again, you know.

You'd come out of school and the circle of guys would be there and you know, in those days they put a little chip of wood on your shoulder, you know, and the guy who knocked it off, boom, you'd start fighting.

So that's how it used to be for me.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Struggles from his youth that were shared with his family.

(somber music) (somber music continues) (somber music continues) - All I know was that he would come home and put his fist through walls and doors.

He would run out the back door and hang out in the backyard.

And he wasn't happy.

It was hard.

- The way that he was treated, it was really difficult 'cause he couldn't always fight back.

'cause he couldn't fight everybody, it was just his family against everybody else.

- [Kitty] He certainly had girlfriends, but he wasn't able to go to their homes and he would send his friends to pick them up.

You know, he ducked down in the car and those types of things.

- [Narrator] And at the mill, his father had his own battles to fight.

- Well, Arthur was a beautiful man and he would spend a lot of time just sitting and talking to his son.

He was experiencing a lot of things coming out from his living back east.

- [Narrator] And he was quite the prolific writer.

- [Black-Eagle] "Here it is, June, 1990, 60 years ago, it was in a place called Slatersville, Rhode Island.

Back then, I used to write poetry about the animals, scurrying about me as I sat under tall pine trees or sitting on the riverbank near a dam that sang a type of song, as the waters rushed down the dam to the rocks below."

- [Narrator] An incident involving Arthur Curliss was recalled by Mr.

Heslin, the very same man who put on minstrel shows.

And he began his story by referencing a white man in the village by his last name.

- [Ben] There's a guy called (beep), who used to live there on the main street, you know.

Yeah, he was a pain in the neck.

He was a typical, I don't care what color a man is, black, blue, green, or yellow or what nationality he is.

It's the person that matters to me, you know.

- [Speaker] Right.

- [Ben] But this (beep) You know, well one day Arthur was off and (beep) said, "That's the best thing he ever did."

I says, "What?"

"Leave that (censored)."

Imagine that.

- [Speaker] Oh.

- [Ben] Imagine that, doing that with your neighbor.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Narrator] Arthur had gotten a new job at another business in the village, but he didn't stay there for long.

- [Ben] Arthur Curliss went and to his job.

His job was to keep records and send the bills out to different ones that had these things.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] And he worked there a month when the owner came around from someplace else, he had them all over the place.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Ben] All over the state.

And he's seen 'em sitting at the desk there.

He says, "Where did that (censored) come from?

Get him out here."

Imagine.

He fired him.

- [Bob] Wow.

I told him at that time to try it out, you know, and I said I couldn't hold his job too long.

And he came back to me with tears in his eyes.

I don't know how, was that terrible?

- [Bob] That's awful.

- [Ben] Way back in those days.

- [Bob] Oh yeah.

- [Ben] In a small village.

- [Bob] Yeah.

(gentle music) - I worry the most because I don't care how far I get on the sociopolitical scale, as far as a lot of people concerned, you're never gonna be good enough.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - When I got on the football field, things changed, 'cause I was able to take my frustrations out.

You know, I was a pretty hard hitter.

(gentle music) - [Luna] I know for him, sports were a big deal.

That's what helped him.

He was really good.

- But I really lifted weight and I built my body up to, you know, I was like a.

- That's what saved him then.

- Absolutely.

- [Narrator] But he also dealt with it in ways that were self-destructive.

- [Kitty] When he wasn't even a teenager, he would go to the bar, they'd have him wash glasses and they'd give him beer.

He started drinking at a very early age.

- Dad was an alcoholic in that part of his life.

And drinking was probably a way to numb that pain.

- [Narrator] After serving in the US Navy, Eagle majored in political science and special education at the University of Denver where he was approached with an offer.

- There was a superintendent came from Daly City, California.

He said, "How do you feel about being the first Black to ever teach in Daly City, California?"

I said, "Should I feel any different than anybody else?"

He said, "You're hired."

That began my teaching career.

California, Oregon, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona.

- When I met Eagle, he had an Afro and I thought that he was a Black man.

That's when he taught at Berkeley High.

And he taught one of the Black Panthers.

I think it was Bobby Seale.

I didn't even know about him being Nipmuc.

- [Narrator] But at one point, neither did he.

- At the time, I didn't know I was Native American, 'cause my folks never told me.

Some of my family would be talking about it.

But in my mind, oh, they're just trying to pass for something else.

I have a great-grandfather that was a freed slave on my mother's side and on my mother's side, on the maternal side, my great great-grandfather was the chief of the Nipmuc.

So I'm Nipmuc Indian from Grafton.

- Grafton's connection to Nipmuc people is that they purchased that land from us.

It's the only piece of land in all of Massachusetts that's never been occupied by anyone but indigenous people.

I am descended from a Curliss line, a distant cousin from Black-Eagle Sun, still cousins from way back then.

There are many people of color that are mixed, both Black and indigenous.

Prefer the indigenous one because being Black is just- - Because it was so, excuse my language, being Black at the time, you know.

- Not that they treat you that much better than indigenous, but if, I dunno if you've ever heard of pretend Pretendians, white folks who pretend to be Indians just to make a buck or whatever, or to have some sort of prestige.

That tells you that people think that indigenous folks are higher in the hierarchy of humankind than African ancestored people.

- We weren't brought up that way though.

- No, not at all.

- We were proud to be all, every color that we are so Native and Black and white.

And I don't think, yeah, I don't think he thought.

- No, he didn't think that way.

In fact, when when we went back there, it was almost difficult when someone's like, oh, you know, full-blooded native.

And I'm like, "Wait, what?"

No.

- [Bruce] He spent an entire summer on the Navajo Indian reservation.

He was struggling with his life with addictions and did ceremony all summer long.

- So when I began going into my inner self, you know, my whole life was lived out here.

And then I went into my inner self.

I went through a shaman's death.

1969.

I died in San Francisco and my main teacher was Kitpou.

He was the Algonquin shaman chief.

One night, I was at his house, "Tonight," he said, "When you sleep, I'm going to put all my medicine objects around your head and I'm gonna pass all my knowledge into you."

When I woke up, I knew Dougie Curliss spirit had left my body.

Dougie died that night, and I knew that I was somebody new.

- He was no longer Dougie Curliss He was Black-Eagle Sun.

It was part of an awakening of who he was.

It didn't change his history didn't change what he knew, his experiences.

It just changed how he brought himself forward.

- My dad told him to go to my grandfather who was an attorney, and he got the name change done legally.

He wanted it done legally.

- Black-Eagle Sun tells you that I'm an introspective easterner who lives as the sun.

So that's what my name is.

(singing in foreign language) - Our stories say that we fell through the sky and onto Turtle Island onto the turtle's back and the animals helped us put dirt up there and the world grew from there, or this part of the world grew from there.

- I met medicine men in this country who took me under their wing and taught me the native culture.

(singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) - [Narrator] A culture that went as far back as 15,000 acres.

- So this is Nipmuc country, has always been, will always be our homeland.

We're all indigenous to this area.

So you have these Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island lines that mean nothing to my people and my ancestors and still today mean nothing at all because it's still Nipmuc territory.

(singing in foreign language) - [Cheryll] The land and the animals and the plants provided humans, with food, shelter, medicine.

And we in turn cared for them.

- [Narrator] The earliest traces of the Nipmuc people in the Blackstone Valley go as far back as 8,000 years.

A long, long time before these guys showed up.

- As English people settled, they did push people away.

One of the very first things the Europeans did when they came here was convert us or try to convert us.

And so many Nipmucs are Christian and many Nipmucs are not.

- [Narrator] And then there was King Philips War.

- [Cheryll] We allowed them to live in our land.

But then the Europeans started fencing and deciding that this belonged to them.

And having us sign documents that we couldn't read and couldn't understand.

(singer ululating.)

Then European started enslaving indigenous folks or taking children and having them educated in English homes.

I guess we had enough, it was about my people and other indigenous peoples in this region fighting back.

- [Narrator] One of its most violent battles took place within what is now the town of North Smithfield.

Just a few short miles from Slatersville at a place called Nipsachuck.

- A group of Narragansetts came from refuge to collect seeds and food stores that had been stored here.

And they were met by a force of English men four times their number.

The ones that weren't killed were either enslaved or executed later for treason, though I'm not sure how an indigenous person whose people who have been here forever could commit treason against the English.

Some folks thinks it was a great and glorious battle, but it was actually killing women and children.

- [Narrator] In the centuries that followed the hardships faced by both Native Americans and African-Americans forced a path of coexistence.

- [Cheryll] So you have indigenous women whose men have been killed off and holding land.

And you have African American men that are newly freed.

They're looking for land because they can't buy land.

They marry, they have children.

That's why the men have land.

So it just became, at least for the Nipmucs, we just continued to marry each other because we couldn't marry anybody else, right, but each other.

For Nipmuc people, at least we can't separate our beliefs and values and culture.

It's all one big circle, you know what I'm saying?

So it's not a religion, it's not a thing that we do.

It's the thing that we are.

- He used to say, we don't have a religion, but we live a religious way of life.

(gentle music) - Dad lived in the present.

He didn't really go back to the past or equate it with that.

He just was a very, I'm living in the present.

I'm living in the now.

- I chose to live a culture that really has brought love into my life and that's what I give to the kids, love.

You know, every kid I work with, every class, I always stop my classes, I love you.

You know, it doesn't make any difference whether you love me or not.

The important thing is that I love you, you know?

So that's my medicine and- - [Speaker] That's powerful.

- I've lived that way for the last just 40 years.

I've been giving, giving, giving, and it's been a lot of fun.

- I remember him saying, if he reached one person, that's all that mattered.

He taught well.

- He did.

- That's true.

- Yeah.

- He reached a lot.

- A lot of people and I think people could relate to having anger over childhood or anger over how you were treated.

He could reach those people with love.

- Absolutely.

- He could show them that, you know what, yeah, that's hard, but you can love.

And that's how he was able to reach a lot of kids that were dealing with stuff that isn't easy.

- You know, there's a great expression of our children taste what their parents swallow.

- Okay.

- So when we think about it that way, it's like- - There's a bitter taste that goes with it.

- Right, so, because things have changed so much, yes, I should be completely offended and totally offended by this today.

- Mm hmm.

- But I also think and understand the time periods that our history's gone through.

Our entire history's gone through.

Let's remember it's a past.

If we repeat it, then there's a problem.

- [Narrator] And another thing to remember as these shows were taking place, the adults putting them on new, or at least had a sense that their days of working in Slatersville were numbered.

(gentle music) For years its families had circulated rumors that the end of the Kendall Company's presence and ownership of the mill and the homes that surrounded it was drawing near.

While the older generations dreaded the hard turns that lay ahead, their children would be the last generation to witness Slatersville operate as a working mill village.

- It was a wonderful place to grow up until I was 11 years old.

It was such an innocent, a town of innocence.

(Manuel speaking in foreign language) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) (Manuel speaking in foreign language continues) - Oh, hey.

- He got to a point where he didn't converse much during the day.

We would go to bed and I'd wanna go to sleep and be able to sleep.

But he would talk all night and he would whisper about, "I'm Dougie Curliss from Slatersville, Rhode Island."

He would say that.

But then sometimes he was Dougie Curliss and sometimes he was Black-Eagle Sun.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes you would ask him his name and it would be one or the other.

That's one of the things that happens in Alzheimer's.

Every part of his memory had left him, but he still had his childhood.

(gentle music) Summer found that.

And we knew right away that was where he needed to be.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Toward the end of his life.

Eagle's father Arthur wrote a letter to his family after a brief visit.

- [Black-Eagle] "Hi, my dear family.

My trip home after an inspirational and glorious week was like clockwork.

I enjoyed being with Eagle.

It was an eye-opener to the spiritual feeling I felt within.

It was like my dreams that I was going to do, but didn't have the guts to follow through.

I thanked the spirit father for letting me have a son whose vision came to him and followed through.

I love you truly, but never have fully understood how it was to be played out.

I believe I have found a path.

Love to all, Dad, Grandpa, and Friend."

(gentle music) (lively music) (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues)