The following Connecticut experience presentation is part of the ongoing partnership between the Connecticut Humanities Council and Connecticut Public Television.

We're exploring Connecticut's rich history and culture.

Together.

My darling sister been nothing but excitement here today.

Colored people for once can say they have had the city.

The 29th and 31st Regiment arrived here.

This am.

They have been coming from New Orleans for two months.

The colored people came from all directions.

Eddie Brown, who lived and worked in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote this letter describing to her good friend Rebecca Primus, the excitement in Hartford's black community around the end of the Civil War.

I went up to the meeting with on him.

Every other person we met had nigger in his or her mouth.

They were so mad to think the white was compelled to make a fuss over them.

As the Civil War came to a close in 1865.

Connecticut's African-Americans faced an uncertain future.

Slavery had been abolished throughout the country.

But what would be the position of blacks in Connecticut and then America as a whole?

What lay ahead for Connecticut's African-Americans?

Was a century of struggle for equality.

From Connecticut's earliest days, men and women of African origin were treated as a distinct people in Connecticut.

As in all of the other northern colonies, Slavery existed in the period up to the American Revolution.

After the revolution, Connecticut and the other northern states set in motion a process of abolishing slavery.

It was gradual abolition in Connecticut.

It lasted well into the 19th century, and it's only in 1848 that slavery is finally irrevocably abolished in Connecticut.

Even though they were no longer slaves, they were not free and equal citizens.

Connecticut was the only New England state at this time, which did not allow blacks to vote.

About 200,000 black soldiers fought on the union side in the Civil War, and the service of black soldiers put the question of black citizenship on the national agenda.

At stake, the claim to citizenship.

It seems that fighting in the Army kind of elevates you to the status of a citizen in a way that wasn't possible in peacetime.

The reconstruction period that followed the Civil War witnessed a struggle in Connecticut over voting rights for blacks.

What was going to be the status of African-Americans?

Now that slavery been abolished in the entire country?

When the voters of Connecticut turned down black suffrage in 1865, it was a very pivotal moment in the unfolding of the politics of reconstruction, because it was a warning to Republicans in Congress that they might lose support in the North if they pushed forward with black suffrage.

Some Connecticut whites supported the rights of blacks to vote, including legislator and circus entrepreneur P.T.

Barnum.

God has made of one blood.

All the nations of man, our human soul that God has created and Christ died for is not to be trifled with.

It is still an immortal spirit without regard to color or condition.

All men are equally children of a common father.

But other Connecticut whites opposed voting rights for blacks.

In 1865, the minority report of a legislative committee argued this race is inferior to the Caucasian race.

The report listed what it considered to be the deficiencies of the black race no capacity to compete with the white race in the march of civilization, no invented faculties, no genius for the arts offer.

Any of those occupations require an intellect and wisdom.

Amendments to the United States Constitution during the Reconstruction period established equality before the law for African-Americans.

This changed the status of people of color in the South as well as in the North.

In the north, doors were open to them of political participation, in terms of economic activity, in terms which had been closed before the Civil War.

On the other hand, most of the discrimination in the North was not legal discrimination.

It was more social discrimination.

These laws didn't really get at that sort of private kind of discrimination.

So in some ways, the conditions of life of black northerners changed a lot, and in other ways they didn't really change at all.

By the Reconstruction era, Connecticut African-Americans numbered more than 15,000.

Between one and 2% of the state's population concentrated in the state's major cities.

Black communities drew strength from well established institutions.

When slavery ended, it was a church where people found strength, found hope.

They found in the church a place where they could be human, treated as human beings, treated as equals.

It was a church that told them that they are somebody that everything God made was good.

If they are good.

An important new institution was formed when Black Civil War veteran Lloyd G. Seymour wrote the governor asking to form a black battalion of the state's National Guard.

Seymour, who was my great great grandfather, was born Roy G. in Colchester, Connecticut, about a week before Christmas.

He decided to go off and fight in the Civil War.

He mustered in as a as a private.

He rose through the ranks to what was then probably the highest rank that he could attain as an African-American in the military.

And that was to the rank of sergeant.

There was an attempt to form independent units in the National Guard.

Lloyd Seymour writes a letter to Governor William Buckingham saying, in effect, the fortunes of my people are rising and we'd like to have an independent colored unit to His Excellency, perhaps you may be not a little surprised on receiving this communication coming as it does from the hand of one who belongs to that race of people whose complexion is not white, as the spirit of progression is being felt among us as a people, it creates among us a desire to show to the world, to the people that not only in times of war can we occupy places of men, but also in times of peace.

In 1879, the General Assembly decides to form a black battalion, and Lloyd Seymour enlists and he is made captain again.

His sons at that time also enlist.

There's quite a history that seems to have developed about serving in the military.

It's made me very proud to know that I'm a direct descendant of of this person and his several accomplishments.

Another organization that Connecticut blacks created in the Reconstruction era was the Connecticut Equal Rights League.

The objects of this league are to encourage sound morality, education, temperance, frugality, industry, and to promote everything that pertains to a well-ordered and dignified life.

To obtain by appeals to the minds and consciences of the American people, or by legal process, when possible, a recognition of our rights as American citizens.

Their goal was to win Connecticut Blacks the right to vote.

African-American Minister Amos Beaman proclaimed.

One great battle is to be fought by the colored people of Connecticut before they can stand up.

gain the right of the elective franchise.

They must The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Finally gave Connecticut blacks the right to vote.

But the status of black people in Connecticut remained hotly contested.

In the Hartford right after the war in 1868.

They decreed that there shall be special black schools for black students, and the black students would have to go there.

This was unique.

It had never happened in Connecticut.

There were black schools, but they were voluntary.

And the state assembly immediately said, You can't do this.

And so they passed a law again, six weeks or so after the Hartford Ordinance of 1868, decreeing that all Connecticut schools, everywhere shall be open to all students 4 to 6 years of age, regardless of race.

Connecticut finally seemed on the way to eliminating racial discrimination, as in 1874.

A report from the New Haven Board of Education indicated the result of the war changed and who will say unfairly or unjustly, the entire relation of the people of color to the state and to its other inhabitants.

It made them citizens.

It opened to them all offices of honor and emolument.

It destroyed color.

All were to be Americans alike, whatever their descent.

Each was eligible to any of the state offices from the lowest to the highest.

By law, no discrimination could be made in the schools of Connecticut on account of race or color.

Less than a decade after the Civil War, racial discrimination and prejudice against blacks began to intensify in Connecticu While reconstruction as a sort of period of our history ended in 1877, when the last federal troops were removed from the South and the southern states were back under the control of white supremacists.

Democrats.

Now, in the next 25 years, up to about 1900, a slow but steady retreat took place nationally from these ideals of equality.

Racism sort of reasserts itself as the national norm.

In the Hartford economy, it's quite clear that the rules simply bar hiring of blacks.

I think the most striking sign of the the economic retreat is that in this city, which is heavily industrialized and also has a growing insurance industry, there is only one black person employed in the insurance industry and only 11 black people who are employed in factories out of well over 900 black people who hold jobs.

In contrast, there are 110 domestic workers.

This indicates that blacks are increasingly being barred from the major sources of economic vitality in Hartford.

And that really spells trouble for black people in Hartford.

Meanwhile, Connecticut factories were being flooded by immigrants, one of the sources of considerable bitterness in the black community is witnessing white ethnic immigrants coming over from Europe and the 1880s entering full fledged citizenship in American society ahead of African-Americans who had been here often for many generations.

Doctrines of so-called scientific racism proclaiming the inherent biological inferiority of blacks were widely taught a leading universities such as Yale University in New Haven.

These doctrines purported to establish a hierarchy of inferior and superior races.

Usually Caucasians were at the top and Negroes at the bottom.

Italians, Irish and other groups fell somewhere in between.

In 1870, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he applied the theories of evolution for the first time to humanity, and he accepted that evolution had formed humanity into different races with some with superior moral and intellectual endowments to others.

And these doctrines became enormously popular.

The prestige of Darwin's theory of evolution, combined with white anxieties over racial equality, meant that it became, by the late 19th century, an accepted doctrine throughout American intellectual life that such racial doctrines extended to the world of art when no black artists were allowed to exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Hartford painter Charles Ethan Porter was featured in a pamphlet attacking their exclusion A World's Fair.

It is the ultimate exhibition opportunity for an artist, certainly working in the 1800s.

He was not allowed to present his work in the exhibition.

The notion was that African-Americans did not have the brilliance, the intellectual capacity to understand nature, to articulate nature.

He could not be judged on par with his peers across the board, and that was essentially unfair and often represented the frustrating situation for artists of color.

Even in the world of politics, where African-Americans had won the right to vote.

Equality was largely an illusion.

On the state wide influence of blacks were further diminished in the possibility of having any influence because of the rotten burrow system.

This is a system in which every town in Connecticut had one or two deputies to the General Assembly.

Regardless of the size of the town.

Blacks, by the turn of the century were overwhelmingly urban, so that the influence of the cities was radically reduced from what it should have been.

And it was not corrected until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered it done in 1964.

Nonetheless, Connecticut blacks and many whites tried to use the political process to resist the return to segregation.

In the 1890s, Connecticut blacks established the statewide Sumner League named for the famous Massachusetts abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner.

With considerable whites support it campaigned for legislation to outlaw discrimination in public places.

Faced with opposition from Hartford hotel owners, however, the legislature passed only a watered down version of the bill.

World War One caused what is known as the Great Migration of 400,000 African Americans from the South to the north.

The first pioneers of that wartime migration may well have been Southern College students who came to Connecticut.

We see evidence of it as early as 1915, perhaps even earlier, when tobacco plantations here in Connecticut needed laborers, immigrants who'd been working on those plantations went back to Europe, where some of them began to work in factories.

Tobacco plantation owners in the Hartford area went to the Urban League in search of laborers for the farms, and the Urban League actually helped to facilitate the migration of young college students from historically black colleges like Morehouse.

These young men came up to do seasonal work on the tobacco form.

The National Urban League, an organization as devilish to aid black migrants, helped more than 1400 young students come to Connecticut from schools in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

An East Windsor tobacco plantation manager observed.

The Negro students who have been sent us have been an unqualified success.

They are such a success that we anticipate bringing up the student boys very early in the season next year and employing them during the whole growing period.

The Farnham and black students write back and they talk to their relatives down south and say, This is a great place to come.

There are a lot of jobs.

The students were followed by other migrants.

Hartford's black population increased from 1500 in 1916 to 4000 a year later.

When they arrived, new migrants formed their own churches and other organizations.

The new migrants told researchers their reasons for coming.

I came to work for the American Tobacco Company because the white people in Georgia took all I made.

I thought I could get along better up here because I could not make a decent living in the South.

Better education for children, more freedom.

They were coming to escape the racial terrorism they were experiencing in the South.

In addition to violence in the form of lynching, there were legal codes.

Jim Crow.

A form of racial apartheid here in the United States, which segregated according to race, public facilities, transportation, education.

This stayed in place until 1954.

When we get the Brown versus the Board of Education decision in approximately 1915.

My grandfather was recruited by representatives of the Malcolm Irons Fittings Company to come to Branford from North Carolina to be employed in the foundry.

And he came and he liked what he saw and went back to Sunbury, North Carolina, and encouraged some of his friends to relocate here.

Black migrants to Connecticut found conditions better than in the South, but they still faced discrimination.

Branford was a welcoming community in terms of being able to find employment because the major employer was the foundry.

The problem was in finding housing.

There was no such thing as integrating that minority population into a white neighborhood.

This issue of of housing came about and to address that, they had this particular meeting at that meeting.

My grandfather stood up and said, I'm black and I know it.

I'm proud and I show it.

And that was a major thing to do in that particular time, because to refer to a Negro as black was just something that was not done.

As a growing black population collided with long established forms of discrimination.

Many new black organizations were formed after the turn of the century.

Two of the major organizations that were founded were first ACP, which was created in 1909, founded by W.E.B.

Dubois and others to wage the the war against racism, against lynching, against the legal barriers that stood in our way.

A year after the ACP, the National Urban League was founded to fight the battle for social and economic equality and to serve the waves of migrants who were moving from the farms to the cities.

Thereafter, you saw the creation of organizations like the whole Marcus Garvey movement and others who became quite exasperated with the slow pace of progress in this country and who frankly thought that there ought to be a return to Africa and some kind of push toward separatism.

The initiative for forming the Hartford chapter of the NAACP came from Mary Townsend Seymore, wife of Frederick Seymore, who was the son of Civil War veteran Lloyd Seymour.

Mary Seymour read W.E.B.

Dubois on how to approach segregation and illegal discrimination.

And his approach is that the challenger and she agrees with that.

So she writes to New York City, to the headquarters of the NAACP and tells tell them she would like to form a chapter here.

I met the Seymore is in the late forties.

I was in junior high school at the time.

My mother introduced us and we became good friends and they became my aunt and uncle Fred.

One of the things my mother had told me about the Seymour's was at the Hartford branch of the NAACP, had been founded in their home.

Well, for me, the NAACP was a beginning.

That was the beginning of I have to use the old term Negro assertiveness about liberation and about civil rights.

And so connecting these two people with the beginning of the beginning made them super original, if you will.

Mary Seymour enrolls in the home service work of the Red Cross, which brings her into contact with working black women.

Those who work in the tobacco warehouses and on the fields.

And so she does something that is totally radical For that period.

She decides to form a union of black women in 1920.

Mary Seymour ran for the state legislature on the former Labor Party ticket with support from Hartford's labor movement.

She also campaigned for the freedom of peoples as far away as Ireland and India.

When she died, the Hartford Courant praised her a woman of culture whose mind and heart went out not only to the oppressed people of her own race, but to subject people everywhere.

Throughout my early life in Hartford.

I would say that the Seymour's represented the legacy of African-American leadership in Hartford.

I always had the feeling that my mother and her peers in the NAACP felt that it was the Seymour's leadership that they had to live up to.

That was the standard.

As World War One came to an end.

Black veterans returned to Connecticut, where their opportunities were still largely determined by their race.

But when this soldiers arrived in cities like Waterbury and Hartford, there were tensions over where they would fit in the grand scheme of things.

There were still residential segregation.

The neighborhoods weren't open as a rule.

In the twenties, the National Urban League did a study in Waterbury documenting the fact that over 90% of the African-Americans lived in a particular neighborhood, and that was a familiar pattern in many northern cities.

An unpublished study of Hartford conducted by the National Urban League in 1921 provides a unique view into the kinds of job opportunities available to African-Americans.

Many of the men encountered a lot of resistance from the unions and from others, and it really had difficulty adapting.

They were able to get a toehold, working as servants, working as maids, working as delivery men, working as porters.

We had this sort of grab hold of the lowest rung of the economic ladder and climb up.

But again, that lowest rung was a lot higher than what had been left on the farm in the south.

One personnel manager of a large Connecticut plant observed the one reason why they have not been advanced to better positions is that the opportunity is not yet open to them in the plants.

By the mid 1920s, Connecticut was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity, claiming 23 chapters with 18,000 members.

The first Klan was organized right after the Civil War by former Confederate leaders who used it as a terrorist organization to keep blacks from exercising the vote that they had just won.

It came back into existence again during World War One, and I think one of the things that triggered it was the showing of D.W. Griffith's motion picture, Birth of a Nation.

And the Klan is different than its early days in the South because it spreads throughout the north and it becomes an organization that's not only against blacks, but is against foreign Catholics and Jews.

In 1916, the movie comes twice to Hartford at the Palace Theater.

Every showing is sold out.

In 1922, the film comes back to Hartford again, but this time the ministerial Alliance and the ACP persuade the mayor of Hartford to withdraw it, which he does.

In 1922, on the hills around New Haven, the first ceremonial admission of new members in New England is held, least 3000 people there with almost 300 new admissions.

and there are at People denounce it, but it it has a persistence and it still is here in the state in the Great Depression of the 1930s, black workers, often the last hired and first fired, faced high rates of poverty and unemployment.

Connecticut's black communities responded to social and economic stress by building community institutions.

My remembrance of Dixon Community House goes back to when I was a grade school child.

There was hardly a weekday when I was not at the Dixwell Community house right next door to the Dixwell Church, which had been instrumental in getting the community house going.

But building the community gave a kind of focus, a place to work out of a base to initiate new programs, all kinds of things that weren't possible.

When I graduated from the New Haven High School, known as Hill House in 1939.

Of course, we were still in the midst of a depression when 19 year old Constance Baker spoke in a meeting at New Haven's Dixwell Community House.

The director, Senator, a board member contractor Clarence Blakeslee.

I was there and he said, You know, I heard you speak the other night at the community center, and I wanted to know why you weren't in college.

And I said, Well, I don't have the money.

He said, What would you like to do?

I said, Well, I'd like to become a lawyer.

And his bushy eyebrows went up in the air and he said, Well, I don't know about much about women and the law, but if that's what you want to do, I would be glad to pay for your education for as long as you want to go.

And so he paid for my college and my law school education for black community centers in Connecticut's major cities, nurtured artists in the fields of music, theater, painting and writing.

And some Connecticut black artists had a national impact.

Black performers were featured in the modernist opera for Saints in three acts, which combined the music of composer Virgil Thomson.

The poetry of Gertrude Stein and a black choir.

Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum presented the 1934 premiere performance of that opera, for instance, in three acts was a watershed in the history of African-Americans in the theater.

It was the most publicized cultural event in the United States.

In 1934, it represented the first all-Black cast in any opera, but it was an opera that was recognized at the time as something on the cutting edge of modernism.

Two years later, Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration put unemployed artists to work painting, writing and performing for the public.

This theater was designated in 1937 as one of the sites for the Federal Theater through the WPA.

There were only five of them in the entire United States, and there were two units.

There was a white unit and a so-called Negro unit.

And they performed, for example, the first all-Black cast of the Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill in 1937.

So that Hartford audiences saw African-American performers in this theater on a regular basis in the late thirties.

Soon after, the White and black theater units in Connecticut became one integrated company.

The theater in America has in so many respects, broken through color barriers.

Why?

Because it has more truthfully reflected life, both its angers, its achievement, the good and the bad.

You see that our society is a society composed of many different people.

I think that theater really makes us kind of changes the way we think about the nature of equality in our society is that it gives us situations that maybe we don't confront every day.

I think theater can make us question that.

It can make us think about something in a way perhaps we have never thought about it before.

I think it's so powerful and I think it's so necessary In the visual arts.

Black painters like Laura Wheeler Waring had the example of Nelson Primus and Charles Ethan Porter to follow.

Laura Wheeler Waring is one of my favorite artists.

She was born here in Hartford, went to school here, but her artistic career was in Philadelphia.

She was able to bring out in her portraiture the full personality of her subjects.

I have been planning to make a record of interesting characters of the American Negro in Paint.

I have been invited by a friend in France to bring the exhibit there when it is finished.

She will use it largely to create more interest in interracial and international knowledge.

And these images, which came on the scene in the twenties and thirties and forties, began to challenge certainly that stereotypical imagery that had really been disseminated throughout the entire United States.

It started to give the true picture.

African-American writer and poetry was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908 and worked there as a pharmacist.

And poetry was very significant in that she had a very wide crossover appeal.

She's the first African-American woman to sell over a million copies.

She couldn't have done that if her readers were only African-Americans.

Her major contribution, I think, is that she gives us a glimpse into the lives of black New Englanders, black people who live in small New England towns.

We really don't get that in any other writers work in sports, as in the arts.

Connecticut blacks Challenge the Color Line.

Hartford schoolboy Johnny Taylor pitched in previously all white leagues in the 1930s.

The reason John did not get into the major leagues was that because of his lack of ability, it was because the color line had not been broken at that time.

It was the Yankees who tentatively signed him up in high school.

But when they found that he was of color, they asked him to please change his heritage to Cuban.

And of course, he refused to do that.

Almost every writer would state that if anyone deserved to be in the major leagues, it was Johnny Taylor.

played for the New York Cubans, he had a match up While he with Satchel Paige as he became very famous in the Negro National Leagues because he beat Satchel Paige, who was the best.

John felt that the black baseball players of that day played the background and the foundation for the youngsters that came along.

Jackie Robinson steps in against four and deep third.

Duke Snider against the rain.

Jackie slides he safe the attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces.

I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost.

World War Two caused a huge increase in the demand for labor in Connecticut and stimulated renewed black migration to the state.

During World War two, munitions factories in Connecticut recruited African-Americans from the South to come and work.

These workers were needed because white men who had worked in the factories before were going off to war.

18,000 black migrants came to Connecticut between 1940 and 1945.

Some of them came from the Caribbean.

These men were recruited from the islands to come to the United States.

We had the West Indians, mainly Jamaicans, going all over the country, mainly to work on farms in Connecticut.

They concentrated on tobacco farms.

The reason why we came here.

This country needs us.

The soldiers, all the men was going training, going to fight a war and need manpower.

It was a government project.

They got a special visa to enter a country.

They were considered seasonal workers.

They have told me they pretty much were isolated on the farms.

They didn't really intermingle a lot with the whites in the local area.

When we came here in 1944, the American people on whites was told that we wasn't like monkey have tails, and then lying about that as whites story.

And when they looked when you walk in, they look around to see the tail was not in.

During World War Two, as in World War One.

Black students were brought from the South to work in Connecticut's tobacco industry.

One of them was an Atlanta school student named Martin Luther King Jr.

I do believe that the experience of the Martin Luther King had and Connecticut probably did have a direct bearing on his ability to decide in favor of the ministry cause he could see a society that was vastly different from the one in which he had been born.

Society was one that was hospitable to African-American males in a way that was.

Being in Connecticut, working with the tobacco, we felt free other than we ever felt in our lives.

The growing demand for labor in Connecticut, we opened the question of the status of African-Americans in the workforce in the early years of World War Two.

Black women were largely excluded from industrial employment.

My mother didn't get into the factory until the Second World War.

They took in other reasons, but they did not take in black women.

There were white women in the factories, but the black women got in there.

After the Second World War, because they needed the help.

In Waterbury, Laila Alexander, head of the Pearl Street neighborhood House, began a campaign to demand the hiring of black women.

My grandfather worked with the community center on Pearl Street.

He worked with Mrs. Alexander.

She questioned the manufacturers or the higher ups in the city of Waterbury, and they decided, well, it was time for them to open up the doors and let some of them come in and work.

Even while African-Americans were entering Connecticut factories in growing numbers.

Those who went fight for their country faced a segregated military.

I graduated from Hillhouse High School in 43, after which I was drafted for World War Two.

After meeting, I was really in segregated units with the 92nd Infantry Division.

Axis Sally was like Tokyo Rose.

She could get into the American radio frequency.

You can say that.

Why are you guys fighting?

Don't you know that yesterday there was a lynching in Alabama?

Most of us by that time, you know, had dedicated ourselves to fighting for America.

No matter how imperfect America might be.

We were not about to desert that dream, even though perhaps for us, it was less a reality than it was for some others.

American fighting men of the Fifth Army undoubtedly helping to bring liberation from tyranny to towns and villages in the path of the northward advance.

I enlisted in 1946, a year after the close of World War two.

As a 14 year old private, I had entered as a drummer and I learned how to play the French horn and the bass.

Returning veterans like Willie Ruff found Connecticut a hotspot for jazz.

I came to Yale as a as a student in 1949, and immediately because I could play jazz and I could read music and I played the bass fiddle and the French horn.

I had job.

It was a great musical scene here.

And so just the interaction that we had between one another.

You saw someone doing something say, Hey, man, I like what you did, man.

Tell me how you did that.

So we would exchange ideas and techniques, and that's how we learn.

Music has been one of the most potent cultural fighting forces in American life.

The place of black music in the American musical experience can't be overemphasized.

We did create something that nobody else did out of this need to resist.

Jazz is one of them.

The spiritual is another.

It could only happen here where the need to resist was most profound.

In 1943, the state government had established the Connecticut Interracial Commission, the forerunner of today's Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, and the first states Civil rights agency in the country.

The director of the Commission was Frank Simpson, who, by his persuasive powers, was able to go to certain industries, department stores, place departments, school systems and persuade them to take a chance, as he put it, and hire someone of color.

In Connecticut in 1947 and follow the lead of three or four other states and enacted a fair Employment practices law which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race color.

One of the early cases that became a major case in Connecticut was a case the interracial commission pursued against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the case was pursued on behalf of two gentlemen, one named Stuart, and the other named Tillie.

By went into service in the forties.

I. I was a staff sergeant in the service.

When I left service, I went to trade school for years.

When I got out, I was dying to get into the union.

I went through application after applications.

We didn't think it was fair that we were held back and they were taking people in ahead of us.

We went to Mr. Simpson and the state took over a case.

An investigation was conducted and the investigator determined there was reasonable cause to believe that these gentlemen had been declined membership in the union because of their race.

We went to court and I told them like it was that I went in the Army.

I fought for the country.

I said I thought.

I was good enough to be in a union like anybody else.

I served the country.

The court ruled in favor of the Commission on Human Rights.

They wanted to make me a foreman on one job.

So the general foreman says, Gee, I don't know if those guys would listen to you.

Six months later, they called me in the office and said, Why does everybody want to work for you?

I said, I treat a man like I like to be treated.

In 1946, the state's interracial commission surveyed the nine municipalities where most Connecticut blacks lived.

Of these nine places, only Bridgeport has Negro firemen.

Only Hartford has Negro librarians.

Only three cities have Negro teachers.

And only four places have Negroes in administrative or clerical with the municipal government.

In 1948, there was a commitment by the new administration and the chief of the Hartford Fire Department that there would be an all out effort to recruit and retain and train African-Americans.

I was inspired by the fact that my cousin, Frank G. Davis, Jr, was one of the first six African-Americans that was seeking employment in that first class.

And he was very proud.

And he wore that uniform.

He no longer took the bus to work.

He walked to work because he felt that he and the others, they all lived in North Harford.

They wanted to be a pride and a symbol to a community that had not seen African Americans in a uniform.

In 1952, John Stewart, following his cousin, joined the Hartford Fire Department.

When I was appointed fire chief on August 2nd, 1980, at 1:32 p.m. in the afternoon, it made history that not only Harford, I was the first African-American to be appointed fire chief in New England.

But segregation was far from overcome.

Connecticut's Commission on Civil Rights found that much of the state's housing outside of central cities was covered by so-called restrictive covenants, which did not allow the selling of property to blacks and other groups such as Jews, also considered undesirable due to restrictions placed on property by, landlords and real estate operators.

It is virtually impossible for members of various minority groups, especially Negroes, to secure homes outside of the most congested areas.

A 1957 survey found that two thirds of Connecticut whites opposed or had doubts about having black neighbors.

In the 1950s, more than 85% of Connecticut's black population was concentrated in urban areas.

Only 4% of the black families in the state lived in integrated private neighborhoods.

Some ten years later, Waterbury residents Lillian Brown and her husband decided to build a house in a new subdivision in Waterbury.

A lawyer this said, We have to go to a meeting.

And we were all sitting around and my husband and I were in the center like we were on trial.

They said everything.

They called me a prostitute.

We had to be.

Why would they at this age, be doing this?

The every degrading thing you could think of was what they said.

And I said, Nobody is going to tell me where I can live.

If I can afford to live there.

Nobody has a right to do that to you.

And I felt that I was fighting for everybody of color.

In the 1950s, Connecticut felt the impact of changes in the South.

Black farm workers who were being replaced by machines began a new migration northward, doubling Connecticut's African-American population in a decade.

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement in the South was challenging long established patterns of segregation.

This is the major school desegregation case in 1954, Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

And during that case, as a member of Thurgood Staff.

Of course, I worked in research and on the brief that was ultimately filed in those cases, and that ended racial segregation in Southern public education.

When Rosa Parks refused to move from the back of the bus, that was the beginning of a grassroots revolution in the country.

We had no idea how fast things would move and how the world would change.

It was a revolution that people in Connecticut were watching.

I drew my inspiration myself, who largely from the South, where these big demonstrations took place.

It just was so moving to me to see how the black community rallied against all these horrible forms of segregation.

What stands out in my mind is the incredible leadership of the African American community.

I was president of the NAACP in Greensboro, North Carolina, when our youth council did the city and then the Woolworth in Greensboro.

Reverend Edmonds moved to New Haven and became active in core the Congress of Racial Equality.

African-Americans in Connecticut supported the Southern struggle and revitalized the struggle in Connecticut.

I Think the contribution of New Haven, as well as the willingness to be a witness, to be a soldier in movement after movement by picketing at the world, work in New Haven on the corner, church in chapel.

It was clear to me that segregation was a national concern, a matter for every American conscience.

But it was good to go down to Birmingham when they had terrible riots.

There and get very inspired by King and Abernathy.

I took people down to see what was going on.

All the kids who were being spun around by fire hoses and then they would come back determined to do more.

In America, thousands from Connecticut joined the 1963 March on Washington, the largest civil rights the country had ever seen.

We drove down to Washington and saw crowds pouring into the Lincoln Memorial, black and white, and in the way that I had never experienced before.

It was just really chilling.

And you need that kind of inspiration because as we know, there are so many countless indignities suffered by African-Americans and African-American women every day that you always need a person like a martin Luther King to give you hope.

I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

I often say I learned how to walk in picket lines.

One of the issues that was of paramount concern to my parents and other local activists were the schools in Bridgeport and Stratford.

It was by custom segregated.

So you went through the front school door with everyone else.

But you went to a classroom where there were only black children.

So when I went to school, I was also going to my battleground.

I was expected to stand my ground to speak up if I saw books that shouldn't be there to tell the teacher.

I insisted on being recognized.

All this activity culminated in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed segregation in public accommodations and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which reinstated the 15th Amendment by 1965.

All of the laws supporting requiring segregation in any way had been declared unconstitutional.

So the Congress enacted giving blacks effective remedies against racial discrimination.

When the Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision and the executive branch had eliminated segregation in the armed forces, which was our foremost symbol of segregated society, so that by 1965 we had become a non segregated society and legally speaking.

But social customs of racial segregation remain to be challenged.

In Connecticut in particular, I think the civil rights movement, well was certainly instrumental in pushing the voter registration activities that forced local governments in in New Haven, in Hartford and other cities where there was, you know, any sort of black black population to become more responsive to the needs of black citizens.

I was a member of Kneecap.

They were very, very active in doing the things like sit ins, marching, confronting the city council on issues.

They were a very important part of our history in the 1960s.

Reverend Martin Luther King Junior returned to the states in whose tobacco fields he had labored and told a packed new haven audience, We stand on the border of the promised land of integration.

Negro and white must learn to live together as brothers, or they will perish together as fools.

In 1965, a large group of demonstrators convened at the state Capitol building from all corners of Connecticut to show their support for civil rights legislation.

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin was the principal speaker.

I remember the saying that if we could put a man on the moon, America should put 40 million Americans on their feet.

The civil rights movement wasn't a movement of people waiting for someone else to do something for them.

It was a movement of people care of changes in their own place, on their own.

No one gave anybody anything.

Everyone put their reputations on the line.

The belief inequality was so strong that people were willing to give up their lives, their homes, their love and their future to ensure that others would have a better shot at it.

This century of struggle from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement provides a rich historical legacy.

But today, the position of African Americans in Connecticut remains uncertain.

During the years since 1965, blacks have served as the mayors of the state's largest cities, and some have moved into the upper reaches of the state's social and economic elite.

But the great majority, the main concentrated in urban ghettos, largely cut off from access to the state's celebrated quality of life.

Despite the advances in civil rights.

Connecticut African-Americans still face substantial obstacles to full equality.

But if the century from the Civil War to the civil rights movement us anything about the future, it is that those who struggle so valiantly for equal rights have fostered a tradition that will live on and that their struggle will continue until full equality has been achieved.

Well, we will be, sadly, by no means no rain.

I am sad that there'll be no sun, not my coffee, no rain.

Five years since I ran.

0030305.

That so many, so many died and died thousand.