When Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by a sniper’s bullet 50 years ago today, Hartford, like the rest of the country, reeled. But in Hartford, whose black community had been intertwined with King throughout his 39-year life, the Georgia pastor’s assassination was especially wrenching.
King first came to Connecticut in 1944 to pick tobacco as a 15-year-old, but it was decades later, when he became the leader of a civil rights movement that would transform how blacks and whites lived together in America, that he cemented a bond with Hartford in his friendship with a North End pastor. Hartford’s black community came to know King well, and when he was shot to death in a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968, they felt they’d lost one of their own.
“One of the things he’d always do when he came to Hartford — he’d stop in the community and talk to people on the street,” said Stacey Close, professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University and the school’s associate vice president for equity and diversity. “Sometimes it was just a few guys standing outside their house, other times it was a crowd of 500 people. But people in Hartford felt they knew him. And they really did.”
In 1944, King and his peers at Morehouse College were recruited as cheap labor for Connecticut’s tobacco fields. For a 15-year-old King, the summer in Simsbury was his first taste of the nonsegregated North. He could pray in the same church as whites. He could eat in any restaurant he liked.
“Not that Hartford didn’t have its problems, but [King’s wife] Coretta Scott King said in her autobiography that his time in Hartford was a transformational time in his life,” Close said. “It showed him life didn’t have to be like how it was growing up in segregated Atlanta.”
King would return to Hartford in the late ’50s, when he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Richard Battles, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church. Battles served as regional director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and accompanied him in 1964 to Oslo, Norway, where King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the strength of the two men’s friendship, a kind of conduit emerged between black community leaders in Hartford and the South — ground zero of the national civil rights struggle. Battles and other city pastors marched in Selma and Montgomery. Organizers from Hartford’s NAACP chapter and the North End Community Action Program sent young volunteers south. And King would return to Hartford intermittently until his death in 1968. In 1964, he broke ground with Battles on a 50-unit development of federally-subsidized housing on Martin and Nelson streets.
King’s final visit to Hartford was on March 13, 1967, to speak at a banquet honoring his friend Battles. At the Hotel America, King urged the country’s leaders to withdraw from the Vietnam War, which he said was diverting billions of dollars sorely needed to fight poverty at home.
“He’d begun to see the connection between the war and the slow pace of change in black communities,” Close said.
In his visits to Hartford, King acknowledged the fraying of young people’s patience at the plodding rate of progress, Close said. Black Power leaders were drumming for more radical measures. Black communities — particularly young black men — struggled with unemployment. Safe, affordable housing was always a problem.
And so in 1968, when King was shot to death at a Memphis motel on a Thursday evening, many questioned why they should hew to his pacifist doctrine when change seemed so slow in the coming, so easily snuffed out by those who did not play by his rules.
“I remember, vividly, walking into my mother’s bedroom and seeing her sitting on the bed crying, just crying,” said Stephen Camp, now a pastor at Faith Congregational Church. The TV was on in their Blue Hills Avenue home, flickering with scenes from Memphis. “As she sobbed, pretty much uncontrollably, I began to get angrier and angrier.”
Hartford’s North End burned that night. Scores of young black men, frustrated with paltry or nonexistent job prospects, inadequate housing and an education system that treated them differently than their white peers, took to the streets.
Camp, 16 at the time, gathered on a street corner with other neighborhood kids. “We didn’t riot per se,” he said, “but we expressed our anger. It was a tough night. It took us a long time to get past that night.”
On April 4, 1968, Hartford police used tear gas to break up a crowd of about 150 that had set fire to a North End grocery and looted six stores. Firemen battling a blaze at Andy’s Market on the corner of Pavilion and Wooster streets were peppered with rocks and bottles. Hartford Mayor Ann Uccello drove to Bellevue Square in a squad car, hoping to speak with the crowd milling in front of the housing project. “You have a lot of nerve,” The Courant quoted one onlooker as telling her. “Somebody might throw a brick and hit you.”
Uccello, now 95, recalls rumors being bandied about that people were planning to attack her. The North End was seething, she said, and the anger seemed to stem from the fact that King’s killer, James Earl Ray, was white. Uccello, who only five months earlier had been sworn in as the first female mayor of a state capital, tried to reason with them. The scene was tense. Someone had set fire to mattresses in the street. Uccello gripped her rosary in her pocket.
“I always had my rosary beads inside my pocket,” she said. “I just held onto those with my hand in my pocket, and I wasn’t scared.”
Ralph Knighton was also in Bellevue Square that night. But Knighton, then a 16-year-old Weaver High School student, stayed inside his family’s apartment with his mother, who’d warned him against joining the unrest.
“We were upset,” Knighton, now a housing developer, remembered, “but my mother told me I couldn’t be out there tearing up stuff and getting a criminal record, because that would only hurt me down the line.”
Police cordoned off Knighton’s neighborhood, allowing rioters free rein on their own streets, he said. “The message was, ‘You can destroy your own neighborhoods, but don’t come near downtown.’”
Armed store owners stood guard against looters. Knighton remembers Wilfred “Spike Johnson, a black state representative who owned a package store, standing outside his business with a shotgun and the family dog.”
“People were tense. People were angry. And they took it out on anyone and everyone,” he said. “Even though these people were expressing themselves, they did themselves a disservice, too.”
The North End merchants that had supplied Knighton’s family with their food, furniture, clothes and medicine fled. Package stores — or nothing — took their place. “The neighborhood became void of the services it needed after the riots,” Knighton said. His white classmates at Weaver dropped out, either transferring schools or moving out of Hartford altogether.
Camp, who went to Bloomfield High School, said his teachers never discussed the unrest, or the killing that triggered it. “Public education did not do a good job of talking about black history back then,” he said.
The day after King’s assassination, a crowd of Hartford Public students showed up at city hall. Uccello came down from her office and listened to their demands: The students wanted her to overhaul a public education system that they said did not equip them to gain admittance to college. One student, a young man, showed the mayor his scarred face, which he said came at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend.
“He told me I didn’t know what it was like to be black,” Uccello said. “I still remember that — it just made me so sad, so sorry.”
After the crowd broke up, Uccello took a few of the kids with her in a police cruiser to a South End church, where they were holding a memorial service for King. The rage that had convulsed the city a day earlier was giving way to grief.
“Frankly,” she said, “I never saw any real hatred.”
