Director: Claire Andrade-Watkins

This feature-length documentary tells the untold tragedy and scandal of what happened to a vibrant community of immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands in the Fox Point section of Providence Rhode Island who were forcibly displaced by urban renewal to make way for coffee shops, antique stores, and elegantly restored houses.

Cape Verdeans are the first sub-Saharan African people to voluntarily immigrate to Providence, Rhode Island. The new immigrants sailed and arrived in 1892 on the packet ship Nellie May captained by Antonio Coelho. The first Cape Verdean community in Rhode Island, settled, grew, and thrived in the historic Fox Point area of Tockwotton and Sparrow Parks near the waterfront and the Port of Providence from the late 19th through the mid-20th century. This close-knit Cape Verdean neighborhood of tenement homes and businesses stretched contiguously through Tockwotton, then along South Main, Pike, Brook, Traverse, and Wickenden Streets.

SKFPR fills in a significant thread currently absent from 02903 and State historical narratives about people of African descent, that can now be told and recognized as part of Rhode Island’s rich shared migratory tradition.