The church refuge

On Aug. 22, 1967, school buses brought dozens of women and children from Congress Avenue “for evacuation from the Hill,” according to a report in the old Journal-Courier. They were brought to a Girl Scout camp in Hebron, to private homes in North Haven and to churches and a synagogue in Milford and Hamden.

One of those refuges was the Spring Glen Church on Whitney Avenue in Hamden, where 60 women and children stayed overnight in the Great Hall in playpens, bassinets and cots.

“I was 12 and I would have been brought here because my mother thought it was a good idea for me to help take care of the kids,” said Nancy Dittes, now of Branford, who is still a church member, along with her husband, Curt Johnson, and mother, Fran Dittes.

“I remember it was beastly hot,” Nancy Dittes said. “But it was definitely a community spirit and lots of people involved … and I’m sure there were people staying overnight.” Fran Dittes helped in the kitchen.

Betsy Wollensack, who now lives in Philadelphia, said, “I do remember that it was after school. We came home and our mothers enlisted us to go down to the church and baby-sit for this influx of kids who would be coming down from New Haven because of the violence.

“I remember taking care of some of the infants and feeding them and changing them when they needed to be changed and putting them to bed to sleep,” Wollensack said.

Inspired by the experience, members of Spring Glen Church, a member of the United Church of Christ, started a day care center at the Farnam Courts housing project in Fair Haven, Dittes said.

Johnson said, “My impression is that ’67 and ’68 were a real wakeup call for this church in terms of how serious conditions were in New Haven and I am most proud of the fact … that there was work which continued for years, which was the Farnam day care.”

In the years since, Spring Glen Church has continued its social justice activism and its welcome of people seeking refuge. As part of the Spring Glen Alliance for Refugee Resettlement, the church is helping to resettle a Syrian family. It is the third refugee-resettlement effort the church has been involved in.

“Especially given what’s going on currently, there’s this sort of exoticized understanding of what refugee means,” said the Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson, senior pastor. “But we as a church are dealing with spiritual, social and emotional refugees.” bad housing. He remembered it as a more desperate community.

“In my view, the challenges they had were directly an outgrowth of the urbanrenewal program ... the Hill was the flash point,” he said.

The conventional wisdom now is that the wholesale clearing of neighborhoods is not the best approach to redevelopment. Until recently, the Hill has been isolated, although plans are moving forward to reconnect it to downtown and there is private investment that will bring more housing to an area that has remained a sea of parking lots for decades.

“Fred [Harris] was a very charismatic figure. It would take you three hours to walk down Congress Avenue as everyone knew him,” Wilhelm said. “The Hill Parents Association had a lot of support in the community.”

News stories at the time of the riots were critical that Harris wasn’t brought in more directly to help quell the violence.

Ann Boyd has been an activist for decades, a member of the Hill Parents Association because of her interest in education for her nine children. A few years later, she also joined the Black Panther Party and praised its work, establishing a health clinic for residents, as well as a breakfast program.

She said when the non-fatal shooting on Aug. 19 occurred, it was the trigger for an emotional release.

“It let them throw off their frustrations. People just took to the streets,” Boyd recalled.

“People just felt things were unjust. When an incident like that happened,” their emotions took over, Boyd said.

She said there was no organized structure. “Folks just went out to do what they thought would add to the attention of what was going on,” Boyd said.

“There wasn’t much good that came out of it . ... Out of that riot, the most damage was done to our own communities,” Boyd said.

She said black residents were the tenants, not the homeowners, in the Hill, which was different from Dixwell and Newhallville, where there were more owner-occupied homes.

While others are happy with the plans in place for the Hill, Boyd remains skeptical.

“For 50 years, nothing was really happening in the Hill. It’s like a cancer that is slowly eating away at the existence of what we call the Hill,” Boyd said.