Expelled for activism in ’68, this man hopes to get his high school diploma

“It was wrong to determine my future because of that one day.” Mike Fothergill, who was expelled after he walked out of Hartford Public during a protest over the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

HARTFORD—On April 5th, 1968, Mike Fothergill and several hundred other Hartford Public High School students walked out of the building to protest the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis a day earlier.

It would be his last day as a student in Hartford’s public schools. He was kicked out for good, and 55 years later he’s trying to right a wrong.

On the morning of the walkout, Fothergill, a senior, caught the city bus from his family’s North End apartment for the ride to school in the Asylum Hill neighborhood. School had already dismissed the day before when news broke that King had been shot to death, so Fothergill and others expected that classes would be let out early for kids to gather, grieve or just go home, as had happened five years earlier when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

“We figured that by noon they would let us out,” he said. “The scuttlebutt was let’s wait and see what they were going to do.”

When that announcement didn’t come, Fothergill and hundreds of other Hartford Public students took it upon themselves to flood out of the schoolthrough several exits and head to nearby St. Joseph Cathedral to pray and then march peacefully to city hall to protest King’s death. The group even received a police escort from the church and stopped traffic along the way, he said. Once they got to city hall, Hartford Mayor Ann Ucello came outside and spoke to them.

Fothergill, who had been in some trouble with the administration for tardiness and student activism including being a member of the Black Panther Party, anticipated that he’d be facing some detentions or even a suspension for his actions when he returned to school on the following Monday morning.

As expected, administrators were at the front doors of the school and pulling aside some, but not all of the students who had walked out. Fothergill was sent to the office to accept his punishment, but it wasn’t even close to what he had prepared for.

“I was told ‘you’re expelled and your parents will receive a letter of notification from the board of education,’ ” Fothergill recalled.

A few days later Fothergill and his mother went to the board of education offices on High Street to see if he could complete the last credits he needed to graduate through adult education -he was 20 yearsold — or night school. They were told “no.”

“They said I was banned from Hartford public schools for life,” said Fothergill, 75.

More than a half century later, he is asking the board of education what he needs to do to earn that diploma.

A lifetime of community service

Out of school and without a degree, Fothergill moved on to full-time community service, organizing and activism in Hartford.

“I was a rebel, but not an angry rebel,” said Fotherill, whose given name is Gerald, but who has always been known as Mike. “Common sense was my center.”

“We were doing breakfast programs and PE classes and just trying to stay on top of our community,” he says of those days in the late 1960s when the Panthers were active in Hartford and cities across America and the FBI sought to infiltrate their ranks.

Fothergill’s resume of community service and organizing is a lengthy one covering more than five decades. Along the way he has worked with or for the Scholarship Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equity, the Hartford Housing Authority, the Urban League of Greater Hartford, the Clay Hill Improvement Association, Riverfront Recapture and the Harambee Cultural Association among others.

Craig Mergins, who was Riverfront Recapture’s programming and operations manager and ran the youth fishing program got to know Fothergill, who ran a similar program out of Keney Park.

“Mike is rooted in the community and he believes its success starts with young people,” Mergins, who now works in a similar capacity for the Knox Parks Foundation and still works with Fothergill on occasion. “I think he truly believes that the more people we can touch the more we can interest them in following the positive things instead of the negative things.”

Fothergill also represented that state of Connecticut as a delegate at a dozen conferences and conventions where much of the focus was on youth, health and nutrition.

“It was a learning experience. I learned a lot of words I had to go back to the dictionary to check on,” he said, adding that he would have taken the path he did regardless of what happened after the walkout.

But as much as Fothergill was enjoying helping others, the idea that a school and a board of education could toss him and others to the side without so much as a hearing to defend himself and face his accusers began to weigh on him.

He also started to see the roadblocks that not having a diploma were putting in front of him, mainly an opportunity to go to college and get a degree in sociology.

In the early 80s he thought about going back to the board of education to see what could be done to right a wrong, but decided against it, figuring that one man against the same system that expelled him wasn’t going to work.

But there were constant reminders of what he hadn’t achieved.

His mother, who dropped out of high school as a 17 year-old to help a raise the child of a young family member so that she could finish high school, went back at the age of 43 and got her diploma, went to college and became a teacher at Moylan School in Hartford, he said.

Fothergill, who has 20 kids ranging in ages from 55 to 25 years old, was also reminded of the past when he went to athletic competitions at Hartford Public, where some of his children went to school and also walked across the stage to get their diplomas.

He also helped his friend Nick Oliver get his diploma at the age of 65.

“I was ashamed, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t educated,” he said.

Oliver had left high school 3.5 credits short after his senior year to go to work. With Fothergill’s help, he graduated from

Bulkeley High School in 2016, 35 years after he left.

“It was the most amazing feeling. You never forget,” he said of the experience of walking across the stage. Oliver is currently a senior at Central Connecticut State University, where he is majoring in psychology, and he hopes that Fothergill gets to share that experience soon.

Still hoping to walk across the stage

About five years ago and feeling his own mortality on the horizon, Fothergill said he started to think more seriously about becoming a high school graduate while he still had time.

He went to the board of education and requested his records to see what he still needed to do to qualify for graduation. He also tried unsuccessfully to get information from the district about what had happened in 1968 and he developed a friendship with a professor at the University of Hartford who offered to try to help.

Albert DiChiara chair of the sociology and criminal justice department, said Fothergill’s story is rooted in in the riots in Hartford in 1968, when there was widespread panic of violence by Blacks against whites. In the days after King’s assassination, Hartford — like other cities across the country — erupted in rioting and violence.

“He was made a scapegoat by the principal for his activities in the Black Panthers,” DiChiara said.”He walked in a student and walked out expelled.”

A member of the Hartford Board of Education also learned about his story a few months ago and brought it back to the school board to see what could be done.

The school board has policies in place for veterans who left school to go fight for their countries and never graduated. But they don’t have a policy to cover what allegedly happened to Fothergill and others who have yet to come forward after suffering the same fate more than five decades ago.

Ironically, Fothergill’s brother Bryan, also a senior at Hartford Public in 1968 and joined in the walkout that day, was taken aside by an administrator when he returned to school the following Monday and told to go to class.

“(The administrator) liked me,” Bryan Fothergill said.

Fothergill, still a Hartford resident, is willing to take the classes he needs to graduate if his half century of community work isn’t enough to show that he should be awarded one. He’d also like an acknowledgement that a half century ago, a mistake was made.

The school district, meanwhile, says officials have begun researching what happened to Fothergill.

Whatever the final result, Fothergill said he’ll be fine because he finally shined a light on what was done to him and others 55 years ago.

“It was wrong to determine my future because of that one day,” he said.