MLK’s Time in Connecticut: An eye to a world beyond the Jim Crow South

By François Steichen

Connecticut is a tobacco State. That’s a big surprise to many, but as Nutmeggers know, the most esteemed broadleaf cigar wrappers are grown just east of Hartford, on about 2,000 acres, from East Windsor south to Glastonbury.

Less well-known, even to Connecticut residents, is the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s two summers picking tobacco in Simsbury.  In 1944 and 1947, the 15-year old, Morehouse College-bound student cultivated and picked tobacco on the Cullman Brothers’ “Meadowood” Tobacco farm with a coterie of his fellow Morehouse students.  The time that King spent in Simsbury not only helped him decide to become a Minister, like his father, but also transformed his previous mindset – that African-Americans and white Americans could not interact peacefully.

 

At times, Martin Luther King’s autobiography reads as a series of epiphanies that forced him to fight against, or at least reckon with the reality of, segregation.  The first such reckoning happened when he was only six years old, when a white friend’s father told his son not to play with King anymore.  His parents sat him down to explain “the existence of a race problem,” which “greatly shocked” King.

“From that moment on, I was determined to hate every white person.  As I grew older and older, this feeling continued to grow.  My parents [told] me that it was my duty as a Christian to love [the white man].  [But] how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?  This was a great question in my mind for a number of years.”

On April 17, 1944, two months before traveling to Simsbury, King won the State high school oratory contest at the First Baptist Church of Dublin, Georgia.  On their way home from the event, King and his chaperone teacher, Sarah Grace Bradley, were told to sit in the back of the bus.    At first, King refused.  But Mrs. Bradley convinced him to heed the law.  Still, he could not get past the injustice of having to stand in a bus with empty seats in front.  As he later wrote, “that night will never leave my memory.  It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

How odd, and even astounding, to hear such words from a man who devoted his life to the non-violent movement.  Yet how humanizing.  King was not born a hero, and he was far from perfect.  But he grew out of this early mindset to become the measured thinker and speaker who led the movement for civil rights.

King’s change in outlook was far from instantaneous.  The four years from June, 1944, when he traveled to Simsbury, and September 14, 1948, when he entered Crozer Theological Seminary to “begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil” were stepwise, epiphanic, and ultimately, transformative.  Key to this transformation was King’s ability to process the stark dichotomy he witnessed between the segregationist South and points north of Washington, DC, where “we go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”

How Cullman Brothers came to recruit King and other young workers is fascinating, because it sheds light on the structures and self-help organizations, like the National Urban League, that made the two Great Migrations of African-Americans from the South to the North possible.

Simply put, Cullman Brothers was in need of labor because so many of its workers had gone to fight in World War II.  In turn, historically-black colleges (HBCUs), led by Morehouse, in Atlanta, saw such summer jobs as a good way for their students to pay tuition.  Indeed, the Cullmans sent most of the students’ wages directly to Morehouse for that purpose.  The National Urban League acted as “good-offices” middleman between employers and HBCUs. Students seem to have viewed this as a money-making opportunity, but also as an adventure in a place they had never seen.  Cullman Brothers may have paid for the students’ train fare to Simsbury and back, though King writes to his Mother on June 18th: “I can’t send but ten dollars home this week, because they took out for railroad fare and board.  It will be the same for the next two weeks.”

Alberta King, Martin’s mother, did not want him to go to Simsbury, but he left Atlanta in early June, 1944 with his friend Emmett “Weasel” Proctor and other Morehouse students.  In a letter of June 18th, King relates to his mother that the train “stopped in Spartanburgh, SC… and we went under the Hudson River and entered New York.  It is the largest place I have ever seen in my life.”

Cullman Brothers put them up at the Barndoor Hills college boarding house on Firetown Road in Simsbury.  The work was not easy, but it appears that the students felt well-treated, in spite of the long hours.  They would get up at 6 AM, work from 7 AM to 5 PM, have dinner, and be in bed by 10 PM.

King wrote to his Mother: “I have a job in the kitchen, so I get better food than any of the boys, and more, I get as much as I want.”  In June, King asked his mother to send him “fried chicken and rolls,” but countermands the order in August, because “I am getting pretty good food here now.”

King was clearly a leader among the student workers: Sunday mornings, we have church in the boarding house, and… I have to speak on some text… to 107 boys.  We really have good meetings.”

An early eye-opener for King was when students would go to Simsbury to see a movie, or to have milkshakes at Doyle’s Drug Store.  They would also go to Hartford to shop, dine, or see a show. “Yesterday… we went to Hartford.  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.”  On June 15th, King wrote to his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., that “Sunday, I went to church in Simsbury.  It was a white church.”  King puts a finer point on this observation in his later autobiography: “one Sunday, we went to church in Simsbury, and we were the only Negroes there.”

King would return to Simsbury in the summer of 1947.  In the meantime, he had to square the freedom he had felt in Connecticut with the oppression of segregation on the return trip to Atlanta and during the two summers he spent working for the Atlanta Railway Express Company.

“It was a bitter feeling going back to segregation,” King writes in his memoirs.  “It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I please on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.  The first time that 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 restrooms, 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.”

In his Memoir, King does not directly mention an event in 1946 that may count as a precursor to the non-violence he later espoused, but in any case demonstrated the decisiveness and maturity he had grown into: toward the end of his summer job at Atlanta Railway Express Co., a white foreman called King the N-word.  King quit the job right away.  One wonders whether this was the first time he had been insulted this way on this job, or whether the upcoming last day of the job made him feel that it was safe enough to leave.  In any case, he was a rising Junior at Morehouse, his father “had never wanted… [him] to work around white people” in the first place, “because of the oppressive conditions,” and he was self-possessed enough to see injustice through a broader lens: “here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.  Through these early experiences, I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”

One is also struck by the fact that King did not return to Simsbury for three years.  Did he yearn, in 1947, for the freedom he had felt in Simsbury in 1944?  Did quitting his job put him on a list of “troublemakers” not to be hired?  Did he decide that his father, “Daddy” King, had been right in telling him not to work with white persons?

One suspects that King, by this time a rising Junior at Morehouse, had already begun to find his path forward, and that it did not necessarily involve staying in Atlanta.  By the Spring of 1947, King was starting to feel an urgent call to the Ministry.  On the one hand, King felt that “my college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts to my mind.”  But that spring, he took a course on the Bible, in which he “came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape.”  He was not ordained until February 25, 1948, but it was during his second summer in Simsbury that he called his parents to tell them that he wanted to become a Minister.

He would apply to Crozer Theological Seminary, near Philadelphia, in October, 1947, matriculating there on September 14, 1948.