The following Connecticut experi presentation is part of the ongoing partnersh between the Connecticut Humaniti Council and Connecticut Public T Together, we're exploring Connec rich history and culture.

Connecticut.

And its cities.

Three centuries of change is mad by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, with addition provided by Webster Bank.

People in Connecticut, like Americans in general, are often ambivalent about their We see them as centers of civili culture and vitality, yet also as places of danger and degradation.

We see our cities as reflecting much of what is best and what is worst in ourselves as a people.

This ambivalence is nothing new.

From Colonial Times, Connecticut have both valued cities as centers of commerce and learn and feared them as unruly concen of poverty and disorder.

Our cities themselves have chang enormously.

The small commercial cities that dotted Connecticut waterway and colonial times were supersed by much larger industrial cities dispersed throughout the entire remain today, but the industries that made them centers of wealth These cities creation and economic advancemen have shrunk or even vanished.

Today, Connecticut has 21 charte cities and several other uncharted urba They vary in size and political but all are complex concentratio of institutions, activities and How did our cities become what t today?

What are they becoming now?

What should they become?

The answers to these questions a not only city dwellers, but those who live in Connecticu suburban and rural areas as well.

For its first century, Connecticut was a rural agricultural society whose largest towns were little more than villages.

To the ideal of those early sett was that you would have a commun in which all of the civil citize were also members of the church.

So that you had a godly city, a city upon the hill.

And the idea was these were goin God's little villages and all the world was supposed to look and emulate They were Puritans from Boston who arrived in 1632, 1633 and found Boston in the are overcrowded.

And they came here really as part of Massachusetts to get the beautiful land of the Connecticut River Valley.

The Connecticut River was one of the most prominent si for settlements because it provi inland routes to the farming com Yet it also provided access to the oceans and Long Island Sound and coastal trading.

The settlers displaced the Indian inhabitants of Connec and established a colonial gover which in turn established the to And towns, of course, were creat by the colony government.

There is a great sense in New En the towns have a certain autonom but they don't win at all.

That's a myth.

Towns were created by the colony administrative convenience of th Really?

The towns can't originate any po or any authority.

The towns can only do what the colony tells them.

They can do.

Ultimately, in Connecticut, all of the territory was carved There was no inch of Connecticut that wasn't part of a town.

towns.

Gradually, a few of these little settlement began to grow and to develop a n It was, of course, out of these that ultimately larger cities gr and the ones that prospered most were the ones that were on seaports, or at least water port Hartford and Middletown, up the Connecticut River.

And that, of course, New London, New Haven These were the principal village that developed into cities.

These emerging cities traded Con crops and livestock for manufact goods and sugar, imported primar from England and the West Indies By 1754, an English official tra through Connecticut described Ne A town of trade in the harbor full of vessels.

Who came into the harbor, New Ha You'd look out, you'd just see all these ship ma So you might see at any given ti 70, and it would be a beehive of People be coming and going and they'd be rickety wharfs and people would be unloading th You would have a sense of real a From the earliest days, cities were centers of cultural vitalit A European visitor to New Haven was amazed at the balls with the danced minuets and country dance until 1:00 in the morning.

A hundred charming girls dressed with elegant simplicity.

English visitors were always impressed with them.

They always came, expecting to see people dancing around tre stumps and wearing strange Buxto They were always amazed at the degree of urbanity, just 1750s and 1760s, you saw wine me by the You saw milliners.

You saw dancing schools.

You saw steeples.

You saw activity.

You saw very sophisticated busin At a wedding in Norway, 90 guest danced, 92 jigs, 52 contra dance 45 minuets and 17 horn pipes.

living in the centers of those c began to think of themselves And the people as being different from the rest of Connecticut.

They were more sophisticated.

They developed these worldly tas They certainly were much less pu than their grandparents had been The late 18th century villages that became cities were typified by what we call a walking city.

Typically, a bootmaker would liv and have a shop downstairs.

Lawyers would live upstairs and have their office downstairs And these people were in face to face contact all the time.

It was a wonderful way to build a community.

Connecticut Cities became centers of poverty as well as wealth.

Landless laborers concentrated in the cities.

Care of the poor became a subject of public debat and alms houses came into being.

We have, for the first time in the mid-to-late 18th century, people who are unable to make th in the world, living in cities, because as a community became la became less concerned with being their brother's keepe And there's less of a spirit of and of parish and of church to care for people and more of an institutionalizat African-Americans had lived in C from the beginning of the colony When people think about the black community, they almost forget that there we Yankees who had been here for th 400 years and that they had built institutions as well.

So there was a tendency in the l 18th century for African-America to move into the cities.

And by the 18th, by the 1790s, this was a very visible movement And you have in New Haven and Ha and Norwich and New London and a few other places and little tiny black communitie Urbanization brought conflict between city dwellers and the ru on the outskirts of town.

As these Connecticut maritime vi became more compact in their pop more complex and the kinds of se that were necessary.

They began to try to get the tow to enlarge the war, for to put lighting along the wharf or to establish a fire departmen And farmers would come in from the outlying areas to these town meetings and vote these things down.

They weren't going to get any advantage from And why should they pay their ta for these frills in.

Rural areas often split off from the emerging cities?

Farmers in the rural Hampden section of petitioned the State Government to separate them from the city m Professional men of notions and modes of conducting business very different from your petitio were all farmers.

If you look in the 18th century, you'll probably find 200 petitio to the colony and state governme from various parts of towns wishing to separa from other parts of towns.

During the revolution, they took on a curious urgency.

They often mimic the rhetoric of the revolutionar No taxation without representati We have no common interest with these people.

There were little revolutions against the big cities by all th small towns, and the farmers tended to dominate town governme Well, they did not want to pass tax rates, and merchants increas that they needed some control over the compact part of town if their town was going to be ab to grow into a city and compete.

What eventually happened in the 1780s, as Connecticut cre the first cities in New England.

In 1784, just after the American Revoluti Connecticut's five leading towns were incorporated adding a new layer of government to the urbanized areas of each t The city of Hartford at first is still part of the town of Hartfo What happens is there are two governments there.

There's a city government of Har and it deals with local issues for the merchants and the urban But then when the town meets, they also deal with the issues for the whole town, but they're able to pass separat and do development for the compa without having to tax the farmer So both farmers and urban dwellers liked it.

In the 19th century, Connecticut cities developed a n as centers of industry.

Well, manufacturing began to tak About the 1830s when steam power entered the pic Before then, of course, most of the industry in Connecti was run by water power.

At one time, Connecticut had over 200 manufacturing villa around the state, and all of the upon water power to run their ma But when steam power came along, it meant that the factories could be centralized in the urba In Danbury, there were no waterf There were no real river that could be dammed for a mill So water power made it impossibl for Danbury to have very big fac But when the railroad came to Da what it meant was coal could be brought in in large qua that could fuel big factories.

So what you get here because of railroad, I think is an increase Larger machines, more power because of the coal and danbury's industry really ac because of that.

Initially, the movers and shaker of the Middletown community had proposed a railroad in the in the 1830, but it was held up in the legisl by steam boat owners who were af of losing revenue on the steamsh that were playing the Connecticu because Middletown was delayed in getting the railroad by about It required Middletown to be more enterprising in how they were going to build the without direct links to Hartford and Boston.

It slowed them down, and it did not become a city com to New Haven or Hartford.

Commercial cities and former mill villages across rapidly developed into industria for a number of reasons.

Take New Haven.

Chauncey Jerome moved his clock factory h just before the Civil War and gets really good at the mass production of brass In fact, world dominant New Have Timex to the world at that time, and that shapes the machine tool industry here.

Once you get a start in an indus or cluster of industries, what the economists call the external economies, the adva that each firm throws off to oth in generating knowledge, in sustaining a workforce, in su small suppliers and service orga which make things work.

There gets to be a kind of a vir spiral, a spiral upward.

So certainly a big part of the s of the development of Connecticu as industrial places is the spec that occurred.

It's really pretty amazing when you consider how much of the nation's brass goods were produced in Wat or how a very significant portio of the firearms were produced in and New Haven typewriters Bridgeport and Hartf probably responsible for a prett significant part of the nation's It said in building hardware that New Britain produced nearly half the building hardwar that was produced in the United States at the end of the 19th century.

Of course, a very interesting qu perhaps a central question when you're looking at the matter of cities in Conne is how come Connecticut never did have one big city?

And why are we just between New York and Boston.

Many of the early promoters of Connecticut seaports had gran dreams, thought that they could in Connecticut, Boston or New Yo but they faced insuperable geographical o The absence of naturally deep ports was serious, but perhaps even more serious was the lack of a good set of wa ways connecting the interior.

And here you couldn't compete with New York because Ne the Hudson River.

And then, of course, in the 1820 the Erie Canal was built, which connected to the whole cen of the United States.

And Connecticut couldn't do that Now, there was a dream.

There was the farming and canal, but it was too small and it was New York, meanwhile, and Boston had developed the whole infrastr of major world shipping and had great harbors and no por Connecticut could ever compete w And they can't compete to this d In the commercial era.

They didn't develop.

You say, well, okay, what about the industrial era?

Why wouldn't they develop there?

And of course, they did develop very rapidly.

We have probably the premier 19t century city is Bridgeport for t When you look at the history of and the incredible, phenomenal g in the 19th century, why didn't it develop?

Also, by this time, the financial and other interest became focused in New York and t was so dominating that Connecticut could never cat For 200 years, most of Connectic people were descendants of the early Puritan settlers.

But in the early 19th century, immigrants began pouring into the states cities, starting with the Irish.

In Connecticut, the first groups of Irish people were workers that came to build in the 1820s, several hundred in the case of the Windsor Locks Canal in the Farmington Canal, I think that Hartford and so much of urban America was experiencing this tremendous primarily because of industriali That growth created a demand for unskilled labor.

Somebody had to pave those stree someone had to build those house somebody had to chop the wood or haul the coal for those facto So there was a great need for unskilled labor.

And for the most part, that's what Irish men did.

The Yankees had very mixed feelings about these new immigrants.

The industrialists wanted them.

They were a cheap labor force, and the industrialists ran Connecticut pretty much thro most of the 20th century.

The power structure of welcoming these immigrants, of course, the people with whom they were competing for industri jobs were not happy.

And there was always a great dea of prejudice against them.

Small town Connecticut often reg immigrant urban Connecticut as a when urban legislators proposed to remove a law prohibi professional athletic contests o a Salisbury legislator asked.

Are we ready for commercialism because of the pressure brought by the alien population of the great cities?

Irish immigrants also disturbed old Connecticut.

With their successful entry into city politics.

They become the stalwart support of the Democratic Party.

But they ask things of the Democratic Party what the Our city jobs, city contracts, places on the police force, mone for things in the Irish neighbor They're not pawns of the Democra they're exacting a price for their participation.

And this is the way a group makes it in American politics.

But the political power of the c new immigrants was limited by th constitution.

It gave large and small towns nearly equal represents motion.

In the legislature.

You had towns as small as union with a couple hundred people with two representatives to the house of the General Assembly.

And you had these burgeoning cit also with two representatives.

period of time, what happened was that the rural villages came So over a to dominate politics in Connecti at least in the General Assembly I by 1950, 11% of the voters could elect a majority of the lo Connecticut cities continue to become more densely populated and were widely and often accura as centers of poverty and diseas While cities have always been places of disease simply because live more closely together and diseases are more readily tr so in the 19th century you had cholera, a yellow fever.

People would bring malaria back from from the tropics.

The sanitation in most cities took a really long time to catch with the density of living.

Crime increasingly became a fact living in the mid-19th century, Haven moved from a voluntary wat to a professional police force, and by 1871, it had a force of 50 police offi course, have always had their desperate neigh cities, of They were inhabited by the poor, the scraggly.

They were usually down by the wh seafaring people, dives, houses of prostitution.

And unfortunately, these areas w the low rent areas as well.

And so that poor people would have to congregate there whether they wanted to or not.

City leaders tried to redesign their cities to eliminate undesirable neighbo The first redevelopment in Hartf actually the creation of Bushnel The Reverend Horace Bushnell dep the fact that there were slums a the what we used to call the Lit that wound downtown all the way out to the Connectic So we said, let's get rid of these terrible and create a municipal park in H The area that was Bushnell Park was very unattractive.

There were all the tanneries along the Mill River also known And because it was run down, it was one of the few places in River.

where Irish people could put their chanties, where African-American people could afford to buy property.

Bushnell had the idea, which is a very progressive idea for the time, that if you could create an oasi in the middle of the city, it would provide a calming influ on what even then were perceived as a faster paced urban life.

And unfortunately, this 200 some odd people were in the way They were compensated for their that was taken for the park.

And yet this mixed community of and African Americans never really coalesced anywhere So it was broken up.

It was the first instance of a c being broken up for urban renewa that I know of in Connecticut, though not the last.

Despite their problems.

For more than a century, Connect industrial cities were engines o and productivity, centers of cul and civilization, and vehicles for economic enfran By 1865, Hartford was considered the wealthier city in the United per capita.

It was at the at the time when manufacturing became the dominant economy.

It employed more people than there were in farming and i But manufacturing was king, and it remained the dominant fac in Connecticut's economy for 100 years.

While the industry provided jobs and wealth, Connecticut's cities continued to be thriving centers of cultur Hartford has always been a center of cult In the 18th century we had the Hartford, which which was the first literary gro in the nation.

Then in the early 19th century, Hartford became a publishing cen I think there were over 21 publi That's what drew Mark Twain to H Then, of course, you had Nook Fa Mark Twain settled and Harriet Beecher Stow In 1842, Daniel Wadsworth built the Wadsw Atheneum, the first public art m in the country.

The cities are really the center of the achievement of the Indust HART Connecticut was the Silicon Valley of the 19 was the place which experienced the highest le of achievement in the great indu revolution of the 19th century, which transformed the world as surely as the information age is transforming our world today.

Huge fortunes were made in these in many ways are a legacy of the industrial age.

The modern city, as we know it, was really a creation of the industrial age with its infrastructure of socia agencies and cultural institutio and educational institutions and great neighborhoods.

And it's only the cities that have that complexity to the and that diversity of richness t During the golden years of the Industrial Age, downtown Hartford was also a nationally k retail center.

Chief Fox and Company was the ol department store in Hartford.

It was founded in 1847 by Gersho and it became really the retail center of downtown Ha Eventually, there were several other departm that were founded like Sage, Alan Brown, Thompsons Tigers, bu Fox and Company was the queen of Many Connecticut residents cherish memories of its cities as vibrant and exciting places to live and I was started in Chief Fox in 19 Well, a lot of people would say oh, you work in foxes that emphasize foxes.

I don't think there was anyone that ever moved into the state Know.

that didn't immediately know.

It was a wonderful department st They were busy all the time.

Oh, it was always mobbed.

And she had a wonderful restaurant on the second floor and they sometimes had fashion s there.

She'd have people walk around and all the food was always good and customers dressed in those d they came down and they spent the day downtown.

They had lunch.

It was the outing.

It was a delightful place to wor I enjoyed every 34 years of it.

It's hard to believe, I think, these days that there w Such a place.

New Haven was another vibrant ci in Connecticut during the econom boom years of World War Two.

The period of World War Two, New Haven and Connecticut in gen is basically a war manufacturing And there was then there was a b of people coming in to work.

The influx came in and the vital of course, then everybody was ma So what happened?

and of course you didn't care where anybody was from.

There were weekend dance session where they block off a whole str Duke came through, concentrated.

He came through all of that.

They used to make the circuit.

Practically every big player got booked here Billie Holiday it came through b I played the to the holiday at Williams Paradise and they co and they say, Be here for Saturd and the whole street would be bl and everybody could come.

I mean, not only the black commu everybody came and listened to t We didn't think of how great they were at We were out there dancing, having a great time.

Even as the industrial city reac its zenith, the forces that would ultimately it were already gathering, just as the railroad in the 19th had centralized industry and as workers in Connecticut ci So the automobile mill in the 20 made it possible for people to m out of the cities, to the surrou suburbs and rural areas.

The car can't be left out of thi by 1923.

You look in the in the newspaper want to add in a city like New H and you can buy an almost new mo for less than 100 bucks.

So people are buying these thing in huge numbers.

The immediate effect was to give the central cities a heart attack, a cost of traffi which formed around the central district in a new haven.

That was an acute enough problem the mayor's number one issue by and it continued to be the numbe problem for downtown retailing all the way into the urban renew at the end of the 1950s.

And they solved it then with a neutron bomb, right?

By destroying the traditional ce retailing and installing great arteries to drain away the traffic toward suburban mall Further changes came after World as the state began to shift away from a manufacturing economy.

The federal government also created through taxes and through the FHA incentives for new construction in greenfie which made it economically sensi to build suburban housing in great quantities and to induce white flight, often not flight from blacks, but flight from a city which had of accumulated problems.

The move from cities to suburbs was helped by federal and state that ranged from transportation and taxation to education and ho In Connecticut, much like in other states in the Union, the federal government essentially subsidizes the growth of suburbs during the mid fifties.

Through the late seventies, the Federal Housing A subsidized suburban home ownersh and with strikes is that it explicitly did not subsidize urban home own Connecticut provided the growing towns with educational subsidies The state of to build new schools, and the 19 Federal Interstate Highway Act paid 90% of the cost of major hi The new highways open large non-urban areas to industry and that affected city people and su people in different ways.

Poor folks in Hartford don't have access to suburban jo as equally as suburban as have access to Hartford jobs.

I mean that suburbanites who have cars can get into Hartf but the Hartford public transpor system even going to suburban malls, is considered oddly inadequate, in part because they wanted to control t youth coming out to the malls.

But it also undermined the ability of workers to work in stores to get to subu small factories or whatever.

So you get the case in Hartford, for instance, of people who really like may want to work but who are really caught geographically in the cit The problems of Connecticut citi were aggravated by the state's centuries old, rotten rural system of political repres which allowed small rural towns to dominate the legislature.

This, of course, was a great sca It wasn't unique to Connecticut.

It was happening in a number of other places.

a number of Supreme Court decisi that ultimately said this violat And there were the 14th Amendment, the equal pr clause, and Connecticut had to f And the US Supreme Court issued that ultimately compelled Connec to rewrite its constitution and to do away with the rotten borough system and have a system in which people were represented Unfortunately, another movement, a demographic movement, had overtaken events and one would think, okay, now the cities are going to get thei share of representatives.

But by the time that this was put into place in 1966, the suburban movement had overta And as matter of fact, the cities never did get their f of representatives.

Starting in the 1950s, Connectic particularly New Haven, became pioneers of a massive national effort to address urban problems that came to be known as urban r These programs provided large federal subsidies to clear away what were called blighted urban and replaced them with new const and highways.

Urban renewal remains controversial to Urban renewal doesn't happen by accident in New Haven or and it isn't an inv of a local mayor.

It isn't Dick Lee's idea.

Uniquely, it's a national policy It grows out of the Housing Act and it responds to the declining economic vitali of a whole class of American cit There were so many problems in t It was almost as though no one had been paying attention And it really was true.

They were not paying attention.

Nobody was worrying about the ci The big picture is Americans forgetting what a city was all a And in their enthusiasm for the automobile, they destroyed cities everywhere throughout the United.

States to ensure the free passag automobile right through urban a And what they decided they do is kill two birds with o from that point of view and get rid of what they call sl And they really burst through New Haven in the middle So they brought this right through the Oak Street area.

The plan was to replace the Oak neighborhood with the Oak Street linking downtown with major high One of the best overall goal was to rebuild the city and to give a helping hand for the hundreds of thousands of who are bereft of a decent standard of living.

And when we got the money to do development, we approached the Oak Street nei It was the most blighted section of New Haven.

I was born and.

Raised in New Haven in the Oak Street area.

While the buildings weren't the and people call it the slum, the attitude of the pe it was a true community.

We still consider people who lived on Spruce Stree even though they weren't blood relatives as relatives.

Well, this picture was taken on Oak Street and there was a candy store here.

My dad had number 124 Oak Street and this was London Bakery 126 O Everyone would shop every day, every butcher, a baker or a shoemaker or a Chinese hand It would, of course, kinds of ho And over there were structures, or four stories or six stories, and they were without gas or without electricity some of them, even without runni and roaches and cockroaches and rats, the kind of vermin that you associate with the most quality of life that you could t I think there were 886 families down there.

We had to move them and we did move most of them.

Some moved out themselves.

We had 10,000 rats down there.

They were big.

They were almost Well, the way we.

Well, Dick was right that they were rats there.

They didn't get rid of the rats to get rid of the people in the Get get rats.

Nearly four decades later, resid displaced from the Oak Street neighborhood still gather for an annual reuni Ladies and gentlemen, want to we to the 38th Oxley Reunion Dinner I was very fortunate to have lived on Oak Street for gave me an opportunity to meet s many great people, and that's what makes this reuni so special.

I had a piece of property where we had our printing busine ended up moving to West Haven only because of redevelopm made promises that we would be r within the city.

The appraiser came in from the c and he said, Don't worry, you'll fine out of this thing.

We've got people out for relocat Where did they take me?

Out to all the suburbs.

Nowhere within the city was offe a piece of land for redevelopmen not one piece.

The Oak Street Connector replace approximately 400 businesses when the businesses left, the people who owned them left to redevelopment in New Hav has been described as a failure, and it did eliminate the slums of Oak Stree And my opinion, after all the re is that it indeed had to go.

We did the very best we could th area when we cleared a possible for a new telephone company buil and it employed 2500 people and it was on a tax rush for $25 Well, that's a pretty damn good develo I'd say urban renewal in New Hav basically one of America's trage The city received more tax dolla for urban renewal per person than than any other city in Amer And basically use those tax doll to destroy low income housing without replacing it.

The passions raised by urban ren still shape our debate over how best to revitalize our citie Does the answer lie in large sca redevelopment projects or in smaller scale, more neighb based forms of regeneration?

Oh, do you know?

The trouble was.

While suburbanization was elimin inner city jobs and urban renewal was eliminatin inner city housing, African-Americans from the South were migrating to Connecticut.

Increasingly, the story of Connecticut cities intertwined with the story of African-Americ Many of the job opportunities for African-Americans in the Sou had been jobs sharecropping, far agricultural jobs for the most p and new technologies, mechanizat coming along displaces those.

They no longer have that kind of work available Not all of them, but a great many of those worker then migrate to the north in search of jobs.

The irony of manufacturing.

As a magnet, people arrive just at the crest of the wave in the forties and fifties with African-Americans coming in from the South and the leading up to the civil rights era in the sixties.

The job base is just draining aw draining away, draining away.

So it's the worst of all timing.

And the African-Americans were stuck partly by prejudice as it showed up in real estate m and partly by social services, which were linked to central cit neighborhoods and public housing, which was co in very considerable quantities near these plants.

All those forces kept people in as the jobs went away.

I don't think that the condition in Connecticut or in any norther were could possibly live up to w southern migrants expected them They simply were not as differen the South as people had hoped they would be.

Segregation, racial prejudice, all of those sorts of things wer and well.

The evidence that we have that is what happens in many northern cities in the s And those frustrations, I think, to explode both in political org and political movements, but also in violent rebellions a In Hartford, in New Haven, in all of these cities, a new country of political leade community based political leader outside of the control of the dominant local political establishment, the war on poverty was very big.

The Community Action.

Agency, wh Hired a lot of community people, gave them a lot of.

Administrative experience.

And became a really critical.

Part of our.

Community.

And a lot of the folks who are.

Involved now in the sixties.

Came out of that war on poverty.

When we talk about the political empowerment of blacks in Hartfor we cannot use as our reference point the politica empowerment of like blacks in De Newark, whatever, because the black population is so small when largest number of blacks vo still was a minuscule drop in th Nobody really needed their vote.

It's only when they discover that they can get the attention of the political arena by creating disturbances and protest that the political a begins to look at them.

They were protesting in terms of the police, in terms of jobs, in terms of.

Social service.

In terms of electoral justice.

And you had people sort of wakin from the fifties saying, you know, things aren't that goo We really don't have a lot of eq Going on here.

You get tired of being stepped o You get tired of being ignored.

You get tired of being looked at as a second clas In 1968, I vividly remember the announcem King and his death.

To me, that triggered the beginn of the height of I don't care anymore, you've killed our leade You don't care.

I'm not going to be good anymore In the 1960s and 1970s, racial tensions erupted into rio It was just tumultuous times where people were just so agitat about injustice about.

Leaders.

Being killed and assass And I mean, you just didn't know The only thing to do was to stri To strike out because there were a lot of options and not a lot o Connecticut for racial violence in Bridgeport.

Waterbury.

Middletown.

New Britain.

Stamford.

Norwalk and Hartford.

On Labor Day 1969, Hartford crow state and city police, damaging nearly 100 buildings.

It began in the black community.

We burnt up and ran out LA Drugs We burnt up and ran out.

Businesses that have never come back to thi We're still suffering those pains of the sixties.

For individuals like me.

You could cry when you look and We still got a long way to go.

Besides protests and violent reb African-Americans used their increasing numbers to make into urban political leadership.

With the demographic shift and the growth in the black popu blacks began to have dreams of winning the mayoralty.

Right?

And they win.

The first black to Become mayor of Hartford is Thurman Mil But electing political leaders didn't necessarily translate into effective political power.

People really got involved with voter registration.

Voter registration was really ve but there.

Was that illusion that they were participating in the election.

Process.

But in terms of people having sp responsibilities like ward chair and having the ability to hand out largess, it appeared as if a lot was goin Power in the control remained with the boys in the ba But the.

Room, in the smoke rooms.

So what we had was black mayors like Milner and then late Perry, assuming a mayor's office And keep in mind it's a weak mayor's office.

They have very limited power ove that's increasingly broke.

So they run as politicos to a co trying to convince the community that their election will mean something to that comm when in fact, substantively, their election is going to mean Black political action went beyond ele The Black Panther Party, a national African-American orga with revolutionary objectives, became a force in New Haven, a local black militant group in the Hill Parents Association, allied with the Black Panther Pa In New Haven, the association with Black Panther Party and Hil Association came about because F Harris and Willie Smith and othe the knows how to sit down with t who were bringing the Black Pant here to let them know.

The Hill Parent Association had been in New Haven working That.

for the concerns of black.

People.

In 1970, the Black Panther Party the subject of a nationally publ and highly politicized murder trial in New Haven.

We had the military here for May Day, 1970.

We were occupied by the military It was here then.

That's not goo The New Haven Panther trial became the focus of massive prot Kingman Brewster was president o and said a black man couldn't get a fair trial in this country And that created a big furor and what have you.

So the racial issue was probably at its peak, modern day peak in 1970, in New Haven.

After Black Panther incident, so who had never been involved in t before were awakened by the cond and the.

Inequities in the system.

They were willing to get more in While the Black Panther Party soon ceased to be a force locall the period of black militancy left a continuing legacy.

The Hill Health Center was founded in the early 1960s, and it was a combination of pare from the Hill who'd had difficul getting their children into Yale Haven Hospital.

Actually, in the other state Rifles Hospit for routine care.

The community had a place they could call their own, and they could come to a place where they were treated with dig where they knew that the health providers cared about their heal Basically, it is a full service health care that serves a broad spectrum of the community.

And the fact that it has had the kind of longevity that it ha means a lot because it's a stable institution now in our In the 1960s, another migration the composition of Connecticut c Increasing numbers of Puerto Ric came to Connecticut, encouraged by an arrangement between the Department of Labor Rico and Connecticut.

Tobacco Gr The Connecticut Valley Growers Association decided that this wa of cheap labor and actually set various mechanisms to recruit migrant workers to the Connectic for tobacco and agricultural pro They made an agreement to send w to the tobacco fields and to the farms during the time in Puerto And then they would be returned the harvest back home from Puert Those workers came, wanted two s and eventually they began to like the area and to stay.

The problem with the migration of Puerto Ricans to Connecticut, especially the Hartford area, wa it was a migration of farmers, r poor farmers who were undereduca didn't speak English.

We didn't bring our priests, our lawyers, our doctors.

So you had a large number of peo who would have been unable to se Well, in San Juan, I remember people used to get ar for loitering because Puerto Ric live outside, you know.

So I was hanging on the stoop, y but it was pretty, pretty awful.

Unlike some of the previous grou the issues of culture and langua were key obstacles.

The social agencies weren't prepared to deal with a that didn't speak English.

It was a very painful period.

The schools, you know, the dropout rate was astronomica actually, with teachers who were the first professionals who arrived here because of the for bilingual education started.

And after the teachers came, you they have relatives that may be and doctors, etc., but that didn until the late 6070s.

So it's relatively very new.

Puerto Ricans provided not only new ingredient in the cultural mix of Connectic but also the basis for a complex of alliance and rivalry among discriminated against grou in the urban political arena.

African-Americans have been here for a very long t and don't want to lose political Certainly deserve to have, you know, political power.

And they've worked very hard to to be engaged in a political We're relatively newcomers.

Our numbers are rising dramatica and we're now the largest minority in Conn And that's something that, you k would naturally set off a dichot you know, a fear of I might lose my position.

But at the same time, on the pol front end of the economic front, as a result of the riots in the and the disinvestment that happened to the central bus district in Hartford and the white flight out of most neighborhoods in the cou we had to join forces politicall and economically to make sure th neighborhoods that we lived in a home were not impacted negativel Hartford is projected to be the first Latino city in New in the next two decades.

Not only are we here, but we're here to stay and conti to make gains.

As African-Americans and Puerto streamed into Connecticut cities in the 1960s, the industries that employed pre generations of migrants continue to stream out of them.

If you think about the last deca of the 20th century, by now industry, while the industrial concentrati in the center of Bridgeport, New and other Connecticut cities is you find lost to the south and S parts of the U.S. got lots of industry which had once been in places like Bridgeport or New Haven or And then, of course, and this co There are a great manufacturing which can be carried out more ch in parts of the world where labo costly than it is in the United And that has indeed occurred.

In Connecticut as a whole.

Manufacturing employment dropped from almost 50% of total employment in the early to less than 18% in 1996.

All the big plants that had made Bridgeport known throughout closed the Remington Arms Compan General Electric almost complete All the plants, it seems, were moving their workfor to the southern states or out of the country altogether Bridgeport had three major depar stores here in the fifties and s They all moved into the suburbs just because that's where the population was moving.

Therefore, that's where the economy was mov That's where people were spendin because that's where they were l The decades long erosion of the economic base led to what was widely perceived as an urban crisis.

By the 1990s.

Industrial base was largely.

Gone.

Downtown Mall had closed that was supposed to save the ci the urban renewal schemes of the and things were not looking good for Bridgeport in the city declared bankruptcy.

The city hit bottom in 1989 1990 and the subsequent mayor recogni the city was very significantly that became publicly known and a fact of life.

Bridgeport's 1991 filing for ban became a national symbol of urba Bridgeport, Hartford and New Hav were listed among the country's ten poorest magazine's 1991 survey of Best P to Live ranked New Britain and W Money as the two worst of the country' 300 larger metropolitan areas.

David Rusk came to the General A I think in 1994 and did a presentation of cities in the United States who were programed to fail and had passed the point of no r in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgepo Waterbury were among those cities.

As Connecticut cities grew from trading depots to concentrated manufacturing centers, they pass repeated cycles of decline and r in the face of the severe crisis of the early 1990s.

Many believe Connecticut cities had nowhere to go but further do But the fate of Connecticut citi at the close of the millennium would be full of surprises.