Join Tom Thurston and Maisa Tisdale in conversation as they discuss Bridgeport’s historic Black community, Little Liberia, and why the struggle to remember and preserve these structures matters.
Maisa Tisdale is the President of the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Freeman Houses, owned by sisters Mary and Eliza, are Connecticut’s oldest surviving African American homes, the only two original structures remaining from an antebellum settlement of free people of color, Little Liberia. The homes were named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and are part of Connecticut’s Freedom Trail, but remain so imperiled that in June, 2018, they were designated one of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.