The tobacco fields of Simsbury might seem like a far cry from the post World War II civil rights struggle, but they actually played a critical role in the formative years of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
At the age of 15, King made his trip north from Atlanta to Simsbury, where he worked in the tobacco fields, according to the New Britain Herald.
King spent two summers in Simbsury, in the Cullman Brothers area shade tobacco farms, according to the Simsbury Historical Society. The first was 1944. In 1947, he returned between his junior and senior years at Morehouse College.
These summers were an eyeopener for the southern college student, according to the historical society. It was clear from his autobiography that this was an extended view of life away from mandated segregation.
Passages from Dr. King's autobiography were published in the Herald.
“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.
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The job was not an easy one. Many of King's contemporaries called it miserable, but King found the relative lack of segregation liberating.
“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.”
“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.
You can read more about Dr. King's adventures in Connecticut on the New Britain Herald site.
