Preservation, segregation meet in state history lesson

There’s not much the North likes better than to act smug about the big questions this country has faced over its 200-plus years.

We were on the winning side of the Civil War, but more than that, the morally right side. Jim Crow was a Southern phenomenon. The North, Connecticut very much included, likes to believe we float above all that messiness. The truth is a bit murkier. It’s of course a good thing this state didn’t take the side of secessionists 150 years ago, but it’s not as if everyone up here was pure of heart on racial questions. The post-Reconstruction era saw the development of a deadly system of repression for Black Americans in the South, but they faced enormous obstacles when they left, as well. As Martin Luther King said when he took his fight for fair housing to the North, “I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’m seeing in Chicago.”

The world has changed since King’s death in 1968, but some constants remain, including the struggle for access to housing equality. And yet even as segregation in Connecticut continues, many in this part of the country are content to pat ourselves on the back rather than make real progress toward achieving the goals of the civil rights movement.

Which brings us back to Martin Luther King.

The story of his time in Connecticut has been told for generations and is key to understanding his later years. As a teenager, King spent time working in the tobacco fields of the Farmington Valley and experienced for the first time a life outside the Jim Crow South. “I had never thought that any person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate at one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” he wrote.

Many years later, Simsbury is moving ahead with a plan to preserve some of those lands as they once looked, and state and local officials are using the event to proclaim their civil rights bona fides as well as their commitment to the natural world.

It’s a cause well worth celebrating. But missing from the discussion is much talk of what had once been planned on the property, and which the town had bitterly fought — a 640-home subdivision that would have included around 160 affordable units. A court battle substantially reduced those numbers, with 88 affordable units planned. Instead, there will be nothing.

Simsbury, just a few miles from Hartford, is an overwhelmingly well-off, white town. About 4 percent of housing is considered affordable.

And in common with many other Connecticut suburbs, it’s not that interested in building multifamily housing of the type that might bring some level of integration. When the opportunity came to sell the land for preservation, it passed a referendum with 80 percent of the vote. “I didn’t think you could get 80 percent of Americans to agree on anything,” Eric Wellman, the town’s first selectman, said to the New York Times, apparently forgetting that opposition to affordable housing is one of Connecticut suburbia’s defining traits.

Mary Donegan, a UConn professor of urban and community studies, said in an interview that the history of urban renewal in the Hartford area continues to play out.

“Once the wrecking balls came through the cities, a lot of white residents went to the suburbs, while Black residents were banned,” she said. “We can’t undo that history, but what we can do is provide people today with options,” such as available housing in a variety of communities.

To see a town use a remembrance of Martin Luther King to block affordable housing “is really quite something,” she said.

There could be room for both. The Simsbury sale includes a lot of land, in a town that already has hundreds of acres set aside for recreation. The town could build housing while also preserving the barns and fields from King’s day and construct an exhibit in his honor, which would be a fitting tribute to a lesser-known aspect of his story. Instead, the newly preserved space will include hundreds of acres for open space and athletic fields. To call this effort primarily about historic preservation is insulting.

It’s bigger than one town, and the struggle to build affordable housing outside the cities continues. It’s a debate Donegan, for one, would like to see recast.

“One way it’s framed in Connecticut is each municipality has a duty to provide affordable housing, and it makes it seem like a burden, almost as if towns are martyring themselves to provide people who are disproportionately Black and brown with a place to live. I think that misses the point,” she said.

Instead, we could look at it as a positive. “Every family has the potential to contribute to the state’s growth and development, and it’s in our interest to make sure each person and each family has that opportunity,” Donegan said. “And every town has an opportunity to grow with the wonderful diversity that we have in Connecticut.”