Martin Luther King Jr.’s time in CT gains new attention
Civil rights leader worked on tobacco farms here while in college in the 1940s; Memorial to recognize this time
When people look back on Martin Luther King Jr. and his decisive role in the civil rights movement on the day his life is commemorated, they often recall the march on Selma, his imprisonment in a Birmingham jail cell and the “I Have a Dream Speech” in the nation’s capital.
But a little-known chapter of his life, working as a farm laborer in central Connecticut as a teenager, may soon be gaining more attention.
His time in Connecticut while a college student has merited scant mention from biographers and historians, but King himself said he forged strong memories of his summer job working on a tobacco farm in Simsbury.
The farm work that the civil rights pioneer carried out for extra money is also gaining greater recognition this year when a memorial to his time in Connecticut is dedicated Monday.
King was among a group of
To his mother, the young student wrote about a trip to Hartford: “Yesterday we didn’t work so we went to Hartford we really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we … ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And we went to the largest shows there. It is really a large city,” he wrote in 1944.
young Black men recruited to work in the tobacco fields around Simsbury during the summers of 1944 and 1947, cultivating the particular tobacco leaf used to wrap cigars for the Cullman Bros. company.
He was a young college student at the time — he enrolled at Morehouse College in 1944 after passing the entrance exam at age 15 — and joined other striving young men from the South for a trip to the North, away from the draconian race laws that marked their upbringings.
The young men from the Historically Black Colleges like Morehouse were valued by the tobacco company for their reliability and industry, and they earned money for tuition and board at their schools, historians have written. They also gained
new experiences, as well as the friendship of like-minded peers.
North vs. South
For King, the time he spent in Connecticut — worshiping at a church in Simsbury, enjoying a meal in Hartford — were something of a revelation after the intensely segregated world of his native Georgia.
To his mother, the young student wrote about a trip to Hartford: “Yesterday we didn’t work so we went to Hartford we really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we … ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And we went to the largest shows there. It is really a large city,” he wrote in 1944. King later gave a speech at the University of Hartford in 1959 on “the Future of Integration.”
In his autobiography, King later wrote, “After that summer in Connecticut (in 1944),
it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow (racially restricted) car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta . ... The first time I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self respect.”
As he expressed in his autobiography, his early experiences in Connecticut had a deep influence on him.
“King was able to imagine a world that could be broader than the narrow constricted space he saw in Atlanta,” said Jeffrey Ogbar, professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut. “To be able to walk into an establishment and get service, that was for him, his personal development, very important. It provided the opportunity to imagine greater freedom.”
Elaine Lang, former president of the Simsbury Historical Society who researched King’s time in Connecticut, said King was especially struck by an invitation to attend a local church.
“Dr. King wrote in his letters, the treatment struck him. Being invited to First Church in Simsbury — he was asked to join the choir — it struck him quite remarkably. He went to an excursion to eat in Hartford, and he marveled that they walked in the same door and were waited on like any other customer. It proved to be kind of an awakening, to what things could be,” she said.
The assemblage of Black college students working in the tobacco fields also forged bonds that carried into the Civil Rights era. Lang found a newsletter with a commentary written from another student in the period, describing how the college students engaged in discussions about the secondclass status that Blacks were accorded. It was also during this time that King resolved to become a minister.
“A group of young Black college men meeting in the South would have been incredibly dangerous,” Lang said, “The experience these young men had, coming up and working here, provided the opportunity for a lot of them to meet each other, and meet safely.”
But it would be a mistake, Lang noted, to presume that central Connecticut was especially advanced or progressive in regard to the treatment of African Americans, and that restrictions were not in place.
“By today’s standards, were they great? Obviously not,” she said.
The Jim Crow restrictions that dominated the South were far more rigid than in Northern states like Connecticut, but there were informal bans on Blacks at many hotels and restaurants across New England and indignities were routine, she said.
When the Black attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was defending a Black man on trial in Bridgeport in 1940, for instance, he was only allowed to eat lunch at the Stratfield Hotel restaurant because his white colleague was the hotel’s lawyer.
Black travelers in Connecticut in the 1940s often relied on “The Negro Motorist Green Book” to find restaurants, hotels and gas stations that did business with Blacks — many establishments were off-limits. Educational and housing opportunities for African Americans were extremely limited during the period, as well.
New memorial in CT
King’s sojourn in Connecticut is receiving new attention and a permanent marker, thanks to a memorial organized by young people in Simsbury. It is to be unveiled Monday on the grounds of the Simsbury Free Library.
The project began in 2010, when a group of students from Simsbury High School set out on a mission to research King’s time in the area, under the guidance of a history teacher, Richard Curtiss. Students at the Simsbury High School have kept the project ongoing, and working with a local architect, they raised $150,000 and designed the memorial.
Tara Willerup, executive director of the Simsbury Free Library and an adviser to the memorial project, said the students settled on a design that connected North with South, and conveyed a sense of freedom and openness. Glass panels describe King’s life and goals. The students felt a special connection to the young Martin Luther King, she said, as he stood on the edge of adulthood in their town, contemplating what role he might play in the struggle for liberation.
“The glass panels are not closed in by walls, they open to the environment, open to the public,” Willerup said, “They’ve got granite, which is the native stone of Georgia, and brownstone, which is the native stone of Connecticut, so the foundation, the bedrock, is of the two communities, how they met together here. It was a student-led program, they did all the work, the fundraising. They learned as they went.”
The MLK in CT group is expecting to live-stream the drive-by dedication from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday at www.mlkinct.com.
Lang, the local history researcher, said she hoped the labor that King carried out in the tobacco fields and barns in her town, overlooked in the history books for decades, will bear fruit for generations to come, yielding a vision of a better and more just society. It was an insight that King came to develop in the farm camps where he spent hot summer nights after days of heavy lifting.
“We can live and work and worship together, that people of all races could work together,” she said. “We can bear that in mind, and it’s a testament to the power of small acts of respect and dignity.”