Martin Luther King, Jr in Connecticut

I wrote this for the paper a few years ago, but it seems like a good day to run it again:

The scene of Martin Luther King, Jr standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, addressing a vast crowd alongside the Reflecting Pool, is locked in the national imagination.
In that scene, he is model of eloquence and courage, a polished speaker delivering an oration that will thunder through time.
But King wasn’t always a civil rights giant whose words resonated around the world.
There was a time in the mid-1940s when King was just another teenager picking tobacco in the Farmington Valley.
But historians say his two summers in Connecticut may have played a pivotal role in propelling King along a path to prominence.
For it was on his trips to Connecticut that he experienced a world that didn’t mandate segregation, where he could sit, worship and eat with white people without the specter of Jim Crow hanging over all.
And it was during his second summer in Simsbury that King decided he would become a preacher.
“The white people here are very nice,” the 15-year-old King wrote to his father in 1944, “We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.”
To his mother, King wrote, “I am doing fine and still having a nice time. We went to church Sunday in Simsbury and we were the only Negroes there. Negroes and whites go to the same church.”
King later wrote that he went to Simsbury just before going to Morehouse College “and worked for a whole summer on a tobacco farm to earn a little school money to supplement what my parents were doing.”
“One Sunday, we went to church in Simsbury, and we were the only Negroes there,” he wrote. “On Sunday mornings I was the religious leader and spoke on any text I wanted to 107 boys.”
To his mother that summer, King wrote that he’d had a day off so he went into Hartford with friends and “had a nice time there.”
“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,” he wrote.
King returned to pick tobacco again in the summer of 1947, when he “led religious service for his fellow student workers at a tobacco farm” in Simsbury, according to Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr Papers Project at Stanford University.
Carson said Friday that “about all we know” of King’s early forays to Connecticut comes from his letters.
It happened so long ago that few if any people have any memory of King from that summer, he said, and he would look skeptically at claims by others to recall much of anything about King in those days.
After all, he said, King was just a teenage boy at the time with “no real strong connections” to the area.
Other than the summers picking tobacco, Carson said, probably the only other times that King went to Connecticut were to give a speech or two. Connecticut Public Television’s Connecticut Journal determined recently that King spoke at least a dozen times at Yale, Wesleyan and in Bridgeport in the years after the Birmingham bus boycott.
King looked back on the first trip to Connecticut as a key time in his life.
He later wrote, in a passage published in his Autobiography a few years ago, “After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation.
“It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased 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 rest rooms, 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,” King wrote.
Carson wrote in a piece about King’s decision to become a minister that “a crucial period” in the young man’s decision-making “came during the summer of 1947” when he was in Simsbury.
“After several weeks of deliberation, he telephoned his mother from Simsbury to tell her of his intention to become a minister,” Carson wrote.
“My call to the ministry was neither dramatic nor spectacular," King wrote in a seminary application later. “It came neither by some miraculous vision nor by some blinding light experience on the road of life.”
“Moreover, it was a response to an inner urge that gradually came upon me. This urge expressed itself in a desire to serve God and humanity, and the feeling that my talent and my commitment could best be expressed through the ministry,” he wrote.
“I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become,” King wrote.
He could not have imagined how great his responsibility would become or dreamed of well he would handle the challenge.
Connecticut, though far removed from the great trials of King’s life, was the third state in the country to set aside King’s birthday as a holiday, back in 1974, helping set the course for the creation of a national holiday to honor the civil rights leader


*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Congressman Larson pays tribute to King

Press release from U.S. Rep. John Larson, who represents Bristol:

Washington, D.C. -- Today Congressman John B. Larson CT-01, Vice Chair of the House Democratic Caucus, released the following statement in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 79th birthday, which the nation will observe on Monday:
“As the nation pauses on Monday to honor the late Martin Luther King, Jr., we should reflect on how he dedicated his life to making this nation a more tolerant place. We remember his critical role in the Civil Right’s Movement—the Montgomery Bus Boycott, his involvement in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his arrest in Birmingham, the March on Washington, his outspoken stance on the war in Vietnam—a collection of heroic acts that forged change in this great nation.”
“Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought tirelessly throughout his life against injustices not only towards African Americans, but towards all members of society, in order to promote community amongst our citizens”
“As we remember that legacy, it is important to recognize that the work of Dr. King is not complete. He dedicated his life to serving others and humanity. He believed in nonviolence. He believed in the greater good of mankind. What would Dr. King say about the violence plaguing cities across the country, like Hartford, in my home state of Connecticut? Our children are growing up in war zones. Families are being devastated and a generation is being lost.”
“This year on Martin Luther King Day, we should all remember Dr. King and his message of nonviolence. This year, let us bring his message of compassion and nonviolence to our city streets.”

*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

Bristol ought to show some respect on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

It's been many years now since America decided to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr by making his birthday a national holiday.
Across the country, there are ceremonies to mark the occasion, to pay respect to King and his causes, to keep alive the dream he embodied of a better world, for blacks as well as whites.
For some reason, though, Bristol has rarely seen fit to join the crowd.
In the best years, the city government has joined with the NAACP to hold an event that allowed for a public expression of our debt to King and to hail the America he helped to forge.
But too often, and this year may be no different, the city has done nothing.
In reporter Jackie Majerus' story today, leaders of Bristol's tiny NAACP chapter say they'd like to hold an event on the holiday in the auditorium at Memorial Boulevard School, as they sometimes have in the past.
But acting President Nicole Walker-Massari said the group can’t afford it this time.
“They want us to buy insurance,” Bill Whitehead, the former branch president, told Majerus.
So for the lack of a few hundred dollars, there apparently won't be a ceremony in Bristol, other than the religious one that the Beulah AME Zion Church sponsors.
It's incomprehensible, really.
A city of 61,000 residents should have a public ceremony on important occasions such as the King Holiday, which could be co-sponsored by the NAACP and other groups. But unless someone at City Hall steps up to the plate, it's not going to happen.
If the city won't take the lead, at the very least it shouldn't be forcing the NAACP to seek out insurance for taking on a task that it ought not have to do alone.
I understand the rationale for requiring $1 million insurance policies when a private group wants to use public space for a private event, whether it's a political fundraiser or the crowning of a beauty queen.
But why should the NAACP have to fork over money to do something for the community as a whole? Why, for that matter, should the Bristol Veterans Council have to buy insurance so it can hold Bristol's Veterans Day ceremony at the school?
If the city government is going to let groups take up the burden it refuses to shoulder itself, it should have the self-respect not to make them pay to do it as well.
I know Mayor Art Ward plans to talk today with city lawyers about this whole situation. I hope they'll see the big picture.
The narrow-minded focus on the bottom line, no matter what, that this policy is based on sends a rather stunning message to the community: the city government is not a partner. It's just another obstacle to doing something nice for Bristol.

*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com