MLK Day event features King associate, fundraising for Unity Green
WEST HARTFORD — A virtual event on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday will bring a colleague of the icon to speak about the historical Civil Rights movement and the ongoing challenges today. At the same time, the event will fund a project to bring awareness to West Hartford’s historical involvement in racial injustice and a move toward unity.
West Hartford’s First Church will commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on Sunday with a Zoom webinar featuring Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr.
The occasion is being used to raise money for the newly renamed Unity Green. The green space on South Main Street near West Hartford Center had been known as Goodman Green for almost a century until activists found out that original landowner Timothy Goodman also owned slaves.
Adrienne Billings-Smith, founder of Concerned Parents of Color in West Hartford, will chat with LaFayette on the Zoom event. Billings-Smith also spearheaded the renaming initiative.
“I had been named to the town’s human rights commission. There was a Pride flag raising in June [2020]. It was a joyous event,” she said. “Someone said, ‘How far we’ve come, doing this on the land named after a slave owner.’ I said ‘Oh no, it won’t be named after him for long’.”
Billings-Smith worked with First Church, which was given the land by Goodman in 1747, to rename the strip Unity Green. “It’s just a piece of land, but this shows the community that they do believe
Black Lives Matter, that they do have to right these wrongs,” Billings-Smith said.
The name Unity Green was chosen to highlight the contribution of people of many races and faiths to the growth of the town. “All hands worked the land,” Billings-Smith said.
The Rev. Erica Wimber Avena of First Church said the congregation is “super excited” about the name.
“We see it as being a beginning of a conversation, not an end, as an opportunity to now celebrate a wider history of what has happened in this community,” Avena said.
The great-great-great-greatgranddaughter of Timothy Goodman is also happy with the name change.
“I feel very good about it but I have to say it was kind of a shock to realize there were slaveholders in my family. It took me a couple of days to digest that,” Dotty Stone said. “I felt it was pretty important that the whole story be told. That’s what the point is for Unity Green, to not leave anything out or anybody out, to include people who worked hard for people settling West Hartford and didn’t get any credit for it.”
Town Historian Tracey Wilson said the idea to change the name has been casually discussed since 2018.
It started at the beginning of the Witness Stones Project, a townschools initiative to install memorial stones in Old Center Cemetery honoring West Hartford residents who lived enslaved. “Students at Conard studied a man named George who was enslaved by Timothy Goodman. At Goodman Green I challenged them and said, ‘Should this sign say ‘Timothy Goodman, an enslaver, gave this land?’,” Wilson said. “So the challenge was out there until the Concerned Parents of Color took it on.”
LaFayette’s participation in the church’s Zoom event was organized by Victoria Christgau, founder and executive director at Connecticut Center for Nonviolence. LaFayette, an early Freedom Rider and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, asked Christgau to found the organization, and is its honorary board chair.
“In the foreword of Dr. LaFayette’s book, ‘In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma,’ John Lewis wrote ‘No one, but no one, who lived through the creation and development of the movement of voting rights in Selma is better prepared to tell this story than Bernard LaFayette himself ’,” Christgau said.
Billings-Smith said donations to the Unity Green Project will pay for sidewalks, benches and signage with QR codes to learn more about West Hartford history.
To register for the Zoom event, or make a donation to the Unity Green project, visit whfirstchurch. ccbchurch.com/goto/forms/148/ responses/new.
A copy of LaFayette’s book can be bought in advance at thekeybookstore.com. Those who use the coupon code WHFIRSTCHURCH get a 25% discount.