Essential workers and Black history at Academy building

SALISBURY — There is still time to see two interesting and timely exhibits from the Salisbury Association Historical Society at the Academy building on Main Street in Salisbury.

One is a series of photographs of Salisbury’s essential workers, with and without masks, by Leo Nadeau.

The other is a collection of student research into the stories of the Civil Rights Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and their connections to the Tristate area (see story by Kaitlin Lyle in the May 5 edition of The Lakeville Journal ).

A reporter dropped in at the Academy building on Saturday, May 14. Lou Bucceri was holding the fort, as usual.

He said that Nadeau pitched the idea of documenting the town’s essential workers, the people who kept coming to work during the lockdowns and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bucceri said he liked the idea, and the project was underway.

Bucceri drew attention to a short video made by Sharon Center School students about the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrialized North in the 1920s and 1930s. The video, created by the students, teacher Lilly Barnett and filmmaker Ben Willis, shows student art work with a voiceover of a poem, “One-Way Ticket,”  by Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes.

Both exhibits are on display through the end of May.