- So Dwight, tell me where we are and tell me what we're watching happen right now.

- Alright.

This is my solar ran tobacco shed where we are sewing up our shade tobacco.

The trailers come in here and drop off the baskets from the field they put put on this bench here.

These two people take the tobacco out of the baskets and lay 'em here for the sewers.

The machine keeps running and we form a continuous string of sewn tobacco.

And down there the hangers are hanging the tobacco from on nails from the two by fours back and forth until we slowly fell up the shed.

- Now you are one of the last of the breed of individuals who are doing shea tobacco.

How many generations back does this farm go?

- Well, my great-grandfather bought property here in 1870.

- Okay.

- And of course there was no shade tobacco at that time.

He was growing the broadleaf tobacco.

- Okay.

- And, but he learned the business from his stepfather.

He was basically an orphan, but he learned the business from his stepfather whose family had been growing tobacco even longer.

- So Dwight, we are now stepping under the shade.

- How difficult is it to grow shade tobacco?

Well, because the leaves have to be pristine, undamaged, unblemished, in order to be marketable for the cigars, everything has to be done by hand here in the field.

The process hasn't changed much in a hundred years.

The leaves have to be carefully picked and stacked into the boxes here.

And that require a lot of labor.

Can this say tobacco process be duplicated?

It's been tried in other parts of the world, you know, and they do that, but they'll get leaves for wrappers, but they will not taste the same as the tobacco that's grown around here in the Connecticut Valley.

[Upbeat Hip Hop Music] ♪ - All around the world.

You will find Connecticut's mark on cigars.

The tobacco developed and grown in the Connecticut River Valley, became the best tobacco for cigar wrappers in the world.

I'm June Archer and I'm on a journey to learn the history of Connecticut tobacco and the stories of the people who toiled in the soil.

This is Stepping into the Shade.

- There's kind of a romantic mythological narrative about tobacco... - Absolutely.

Absolutely.

...that if you don't fit into that narrative, you're kind of lost.

Tobacco has kind of always been a part of the US economy.

- Okay.

- Even during colonial periods, tobacco was so important.

It was even used as currency in the colonial period.

So tobacco has never been, you know, marginal to the US story.

And tobacco has been grown in Connecticut for a long time because of the favorable conditions here for agriculture.

Where the story changes though, is in 1900.

- Okay.

- And this is where I found out that the shade grown tobacco, the tropical varieties grown for the wrappers, the tobacco, the cigar wrappers, these really broad, flexible, delicate leaves that give the color and flavor to cigars that are the most prized, you know, forms of, you know, globally, consuming tobacco, globally.

Right.

And growers in Connecticut begin to experiment with ways of growing this other kind of tobacco leaf, not just the filler tobacco, the stuff that's smoked in pipes or in cigarettes and things like that.

They begin to experiment with it because it's so valuable.

They could make three times as much per acre by growing the shade grown tobacco, these tropical varieties than they can growing these other varieties.

- How did they learn about cultivating shade tobacco?

- They needed to establish kind of experimental processes here in the state for how do you recreate tropical conditions here?

Right.

There's a proposal to fund an experimental plot, $30,000 from the state legislature to develop new agricultural techniques.

At the peak of Connecticut's tobacco growing days was incredibly lucrative and a major driver for the state, and was reflected in the kinds of celebrations that the state had, used to have this tobacco festival here in Hartford.

Wow.

Yeah.

People would come from across the country to Connecticut just to come here, just to come here and check out the tobacco production.

Right.

And there was like a tobacco queen, like a beauty contest.

And it was a big deal.

We need to bring, we need to bring that back.

It was to bring that it was a big deal.

- Tobacco has been an important crop, well, pretty much since there's been Connecticut, actually, even before Connecticut, I guess when they, people first settled Windsor, one of the first crops that they grew was tobacco.

Windsor was the first town that was settled and farmed in Connecticut.

And it was because of the soils that were standing on right here.

You know, throughout much of New England, the soils are stony.

they're so relatively poor because they've been scraped off by, by glaciers here in the valley.

This was a glacial lake.

It deposited all kinds of great sediments.

These soils are sandy loams.

You won't find, I dare you to find a rock.

- What are some of the risks in tobacco farming that you could share with us?

- Oh, there's an awful lot.

The tobacco types that we grow here are cigar wrapper tobacco.

So the leaf has to be perfect.

You can't have a blemish, can't have a bruise, can't have anything wrong with it because you don't want the outside of your cigar to look like it's been run over by a truck.

Correct.

It's a very labor intensive crop, so it's expensive to produce.

When the colonists first came here, they first started growing the Nicotiana rustica, which was the sort of a wild type that was grown by the native peoples in this location, all of eastern North America.

Once they were able to get access to the Spanish tobacco or Virginia tobacco that came in here, they selected their own type, which became known as shoestring.

And over time they keep bringing in different types of Maryland broadleaf came in and was selected and growers just kind of kept allowing these to open, pollinate and cross and select in the best lines.

And over time we came up with Connecticut Broad Leaf, Connecticut Havana Tobacco, and eventually Connecticut Shade.

And literally it's been a process of 380 years of election.

- Tobacco is what we consider a very important ceremonial herb.

And in our community, the men actually plant the tobacco.

It has been known, you know, for millennia that women are not supposed to handle the tobacco and the tobacco plants 'cause we're the givers of life and we carry the children.

Right?

And tobacco can actually leach into your body through your skin.

Tobacco is very much part of our ceremonial life.

It's an offering.

It's giving thanks for the gifts and the blessings that you give.

And it's helping your prayers reach the creator.

So, I as a person, don't ever have to smoke tobacco to utilize tobacco in ceremony.

A lot of times you would just take the dried, if I hold just this up, this happens to be... Actually, this was gifted to me.

Part of sacredness of traditional ceremonial herbs is that you gift or you barter for it, but you're not really supposed to be selling it.

Okay.

So, it shouldn't be commercial.

What people do is they break a little piece of that off and then they give their offering to the ceremonial fire.

And when you're putting the tobacco there, it's that offering to the creator to hear your words, to hear your prayers.

And it helps those go up to the creator at Katuit house.

And so tobacco is very much part of ceremony.

- As you explained that, you talk about trade gifting.

Do you think that colonists feel like they bastardized this - Plant?

Indigenous people along with being hunters and gatherers, if you will?

We also were agricultural, we were growing all kinds of things in our agricultural gardens.

Along with that was the tobacco.

So when Europeans came here, they were struggling.

When they saw all these things, they were seeing our, our agriculture and the tobacco was part of that.

And they unfortunately took advantage of a lot of the things that we had and didn't necessarily use them in the same ways.

You know, conquest is about taking of everything they needed the tobacco and here it was.

And we were in this space and place where there was a lot of it and an ability to grow even more of it.

- Right.

- You know, when conquest is there, it's all about conquering the people, which we know the sad history of that, but the enslavement of others.

I think when you get back to the essence of like this tobacco and the meaning behind it for our people about giving thanks for the gifts, it's about having enough, but not having too much.

- As tobacco farming grew and expanded into a major industry in Connecticut, finding the labor to cultivate the crop became more and more challenging.

Major events like World War I and World War II took away much of the labor resources, as did the growth and expansion of manufacturing.

- Tobacco was considered a necessary product just as steel was in World War II.

Wow.

So it had to be produced and, you know, cared for.

And who are the workers who's left?

Men are gone off to war.

Women are in industry that leaves children.

And you have these young kids now surprised going into the fields at age seven.

And they're working nine to nine and a half hours a day.

And they have another one to three hour trip to get to the tobacco fields.

And Connecticut and so many other states too, it's not just Connecticut, had no laws regulating agricultural labor age.

So you could have them as young as you wanted.

Most places said agricultural labor is family farm labor and you cannot regulate children on family farms.

- you talk about women in industry.

Tell me a little about the Women's Land Army.

- Connecticut had a Women's Land Army in World War I, if you will.

And there is a wonderful article in the Connecticut History, which is a journal about Daisy Day.

And Daisy Day was a high school teacher from Hartford.

And during the summer, in order to help the war effort, she worked on farms in the Women's Land Army.

- One of the things that I found interesting was there's this bait and switch perspective that happens.

- The bait and switch is when they began recruiting young black men in the South.

They said that you're gonna go north and it's gonna be a summer vacation.

And when these youth arrived, of course, taken to the tobacco fields, their living conditions were horrible.

Their pay was miserable.

There are instances where the state police raided garages.

And this is where some of the black kids, maybe about 30 to 50, I'm not sure how many... - Housed?

- ...were housed.

And these kids had to pay weekly food and board.

So this was not free, this was not provided.

They could be, you know, 14, 15 years old.

They're just recruited down there.

They used to even have billboards.

- Pat, how old were you when you first began picking tobacco?

- 14.

Not picking.

I worked in the shed.

- Worked in the shed?

- Yes.

They had picked us up at, in the old yellow school buses with the name AST on the front.

- And what'd the AST stand for?

- American Shade Tobacco.

- What did you do specifically?

- I actually piled in the sheds.

You know, they used to sew the tobacco and then they would hang it in the sheds to dry.

And after a shed was completed, we'd move onto to another shed.

So they'd start at the top.

So I actually, because I was so slow in the sewing and it was piece work that I, my job was to, to keep the piles going so that they can continue with the sewing.

- Now how dirty was that working with the tobacco?

- It gave dirty a bad name.

I mean, from head to toe we'd start out reasonably clean in the morning, you know, fresh, our clothes, our hair, our scarves.

And by the end of the day, you couldn't even recognize us.

We were like one big mud pack.

What were some of the memorable moments?

- The friendships, you know, understanding the work.

The guys that came from, particularly from somewhere else, like from Jamaica, from Puerto Rico.

And I could, we felt sorry for them 'cause their food wasn't the greatest and they had to work all day.

- Did you come to learn how important shade tobacco was after working on those farms?

- I did.

I did.

I realized that particularly Connecticut Shade tobacco, that those went into only quality cigars.

And I wanna tell you, I made 28 cents an hour.

That was a lot of money in those days for a teenage girl.

Now when you say those days, this is the fifties?

- Yes.

I graduated from New Britain High School in 1961.

So I started working in tobacco in the late fifties.

Some of the tricks, like the sliders and the frogs, they would put in the baskets.

- I remember those.

- Yeah.

Okay.

The guys would do that to tease us.

So you imagine taking the leaves out of the tobacco, tobacco leaves out of the basket and a frog jumps out at you, or a big giant spider.

- So what does this area of Suffield, Connecticut mean to you?

- Well, it takes me back 50 years and - 50 years.

- 50 years.

- Wow.

Okay.

- And I remember coming here and thinking it was the most beautiful country because I grew up in a steel mill town.

And so what we had surrounding my hometown were steel mills.

And when I saw this, I was in awe.

- Now, how was that trek?

Where did you come from to, to get here?

Oh, - I came from Elwood City, Pennsylvania and Hathaway Steam folk, they recruited us because it was a depressed area and there weren't jobs for young girls.

And they told us that they would transport us here on a bus and give us housing and if we made it through the whole summer, we'd be able to go to the beach at the end of the summer.

That was huge because we were in a landlocked, you know, city.

And this is what I remember at the end of the day, which was a long day.

We'd get on the bus and we'd yell, "First in the shower!

Second in the shower," because it was like, I think one or two showers for like 14 girls.

You know, that wasn't, you know, we had to have our showers - Right.

- But also over the hill was a lake.

And you know, kids would just go jump, literally go jump in the lake to cool off.

'cause it was hot.

- It was hot back then.

- It was very hot.

- Yeah.

- Now how old were you at that time?

I was 17.

- So, 17 years old, you make this trek to Suffield, Connecticut, like what did that feel like as a 17-year-old girl, probably just coming into her own?

- I didn't think too much about it, except that I knew I had to do it.

And I was going to work because that was gonna be my money for college.

That was gonna be how I would get to college.

And so there's no question in my mind I was gonna stay the whole summer, you know?

And plus they'll give you transportation up.

But if you didn't like it and you wanted to quit, you had to figure out how to get home.

- Here's the day in the life, a typical work day.

The kids get up between five 30 and 6:00 AM.

The other supervisors and I get up a half hour earlier.

I'm usually up at five.

When the whistle blows, they jump out of bed and alternating weekly with the lower main, get dressed and make their beds while the lower is in the bathroom.

Then they go to breakfast, then come back and change into their work clothes.

We are on the buses at 6:45.

Work starts at 7.

We work until 9:00 AM where there is a 15 minute break.

Then the slowest part of the day begins, from 9:15 to noon.

We eat lunch from 12 to 12:30.

Then we work again till 3:30.

When we get off the buses, about 3:45 at the camp, the kids get their shoes off and get their clothes off and run downstairs to take showers, two at a time in a stall.

They're done usually by 4:00 or so.

Announcements and mail are at 4:15 to 4:30.

Dinner is about 4:45.

After dinner on Mondays, the girls go swimming.

Visits to the boys camp occur frequently.

Friday we go shopping.

Saturday evening is movies.

Sunday is supposed to be trips and things, but so far we've gone nowhere.

Medication whistle blows every night at 8:45.

Bed area is 9:00 PM.

Lights out is 9:45.

I'm usually in bed by 10:00 PM and I'm ready for it.

- In 1961, a film called Parish was released.

The film starred Troy Donahue, a young man who along with his mother, worked for a tobacco farm that was in war with a competing farm.

The film realistically portrayed shade tobacco farming, except the girls working on the tobacco farm in the movie didn't really get very dirty.

And it was partially filmed in Windsor, Connecticut.

How did you become extras in this movie?

- Well, we're not really sure.

We were nine years old.

I think somebody from the production company came to our school, Pequonnock Elementary School.

And we lived on the farm, you know, where they were filming because our parents worked there.

- We're displaced people.

We came as displaced people after the war.

We were sponsored by the tobacco company to come here.

My parents worked 40 years until they died or retired.

And same thing with their parents.

- You were displaced from?

- Germany.

- Germany.

- After World War II.

She was born in East Germany, and we were born in West Germany.

- But our parents are Polish.

- Yeah, - My parents were born in Poland, but during the war, they took people to work on the farms in Germany.

You know, and we came, my mother and my father.

I was the only child.

We came here through tobacco.

We came to Windsor Locks by train.

We went through Ellis Island also.

So we came here and we came with a trunk.

I still have that trunk.

That's all you can take with you your whole life.

Like you said, they got the jobs here and they lived 40 years on the farm.

They had to sign a contract for two years guaranteeing that they would work on the farm.

And they never left.

- At a time when, you know, in the early years of the 20th century when racial tension in this community was at an all time high.

There was a need for labor.

There was a demand for labor here that was not being met.

Especially as we move into the first World War era.

And the great, the effects of the great migration and exodus of large numbers of African Americans to the north and Midwest.

You know, the state passed fairly stringent vagrancy laws that were targeted at African American males in particular that said that if you were not gainfully employed, visibly so, if you were out loitering in a pool hall, perhaps, the state could round you up, in violation of the vagrancy law and you could be imprisoned and then made to work on farms.

So in 1912, in the fall of 1912, the police chief at the time, William Barrow, led the police to raid an African American pool room on Cotton Avenue, rounded up a group of African American males.

If we zoom ahead to the summer solstice of 1913, longest day of the year, an incident took place involving that same chief, William Barrow, and a young African American by the name of William Redding was tending a team of horses, wagon, and Barrow came along and ordered him to move along that there was a scuffle between the two.

William Redding, apparently, according to the testimony, panicked using the chief's gun shot the chief, and then a chase ensued.

A bystander was killed in the process.

He died later.

But, and then William Redding was broken out of the jail by mob and lynched in daylight, one block north of where we sit, at the intersection of Cotton Avenue and Lamar Street.

And a crowd numbering in the hundreds formed.

We're fortunate to have a letter that my grandmother then single was writing to her future husband, my grandfather, who was at the University of Chicago at the time.

It was mailed on June the 25th, 1913 from Americus at 7:00 PM.

Wednesday afternoon.

Dear Mr.

Hale, be glad that you are fortunate enough to be away from Americus and be especially glad that you were not here Saturday night.

Oh, it was terrible.

(Double underscore with an exclamation mark.)

Saturday afternoon, a negro shot, the chief of police.

And Saturday night, a mob made up of the lowest people here, forced (question mark, with a question mark) the jail and lynched him in front of Bailey's store.

They must have shot 200 times.

You see, it was back of our house.

Just a block - When she says shot 200 times... It is what I'm thinking it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That the body is, has been riddled with bullet holes because people bring their guns and they shoot into the body.

Bystanders, onlookers would collect souvenirs from the body of the victim.

Of course, the intent of all of this was to instill terror in the hearts and minds of the black population here, so that they would be compliant and would get to work as it were.

That is the context that sets the stage for the great migration.

You know, we say that migration occurs for two reasons, push and pull.

Well, there was a, certainly a push out of this place.

- What was it like in the sixties and seventies for the black Americans that were living in Hartford?

- The situation we used to refer to as being up north.

Why?

Because the issues of racism that were associated with the South was more subtle kind of racism up here.

But it was just as vicious in terms of the intellectual impact or the psychological impact it had on us.

So the ugly head of racism was, was here, but the jobs were better than in the South.

They were much better than the south.

And the chances of being attacked, well listen, but they was, the phenomena was still there.

My father, we had a thing he said, coming from Denmark, South Carolina, when I don't spit on the sidewalk here in Hartford.

He brought it to Hartford.

Know what that meant?

Don't give the ignorance of some people or a system, a reason to bust you.

Don't spit on a sidewalk.

- Arthur Johnson was a civil rights leader and activist who worked with the NAACP in Detroit.

He risked his life to protest segregation and racism.

He was a Morehouse student who spent a summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut.

- He was born and raised...he was born in Americus, Georgia.

Then he went to Birmingham, Alabama.

And he continued... He left Birmingham never to go back home first by going to Morehouse College, which was very important in his development.

- Now, what did he tell you about Americus?

Did he ever share any stories?

- He didn't like Americus.

- Really?

he didn't like the segregated south and the injustices he saw there.

And then going to Morehouse, under the tutelage of Benjamin Mays, you couldn't help but to make a difference in our society.

The family had no money to send him to Morehouse.

Arthur was the first to finish high school in his family.

And so just to go anywhere for college was a big step.

Morehouse had an arrangement to go to the Cullman Brothers tobacco farm.

- In Simsbury, Connecticut.

- Simsbury, Connecticut.

They recruited young men for Morehouse to go to work.

And the deal was, they got paid and they of course worked extremely hard, but it also would cover their tuition for the next year.

And they actually made the check out, a check out to Morehouse College.

When he arrived with the Morehouse classmates that year, those who went, they saw the conditions were unbearable.

And then the living conditions, the quarters were not good and the hours were way too long.

So being Morehouse men, they decided they needed to protest this and go to management and say, we need better working conditions, working and living since they were living there.

And they elected to have Arthur go to Hartford, Connecticut to investigate the labor laws.

And they selected Arthur because he had started the NAACP chapter at Morehouse.

He had also been on the debate team, so they thought he could make the argument and which he did.

And they did get better living and working conditions that summer.

But there's an irony to this.

Arthur was not allowed to go back.

And when he went to sign up, he was told that the farms said, do not have Arthur Johnson come back.

- What was his work like at the NAACP?

- So he also would go to state activities of the NAACP, representing students.

Now, one of his classmates was Martin Luther King Jr.

But Daddy King, who was Martin Luther King senior, had asked Arthur to attend some meetings when they were, when there was voting going on, and they wanted to make an impact, we needed people to go around and speak to all communities throughout Georgia.

And Daddy King asked Arthur to do that.

He had a way of telling people what they needed to hear, whether they wanted to hear it or not.

Someone said, you know, before Arthur throws a brick at you, he wraps it in Velvet - I often say that perhaps the most consequential, irresponsible choice I ever made was to go to Morehouse.

You know what, what I mean by that is when I identify colleges, I looked at many different schools and settled on Howard or Morehouse.

And Howard's application back then was, you know, multiple pages.

I shouldn't say this, but Morehouse application was like two pages.

And I was like, I don't got time for all this other stuff.

So I just, I applied to one school.

So it was very irresponsible to apply to one school.

And and fortunately it worked out.

And when I got there, it was absolutely transformative.

And I'll say, when I say consequential, the spirit of the college itself demanded that you grow tall enough to wear the crown above your head.

When you walked through the halls, when you walked across campus, you had professors, even had students that expected you to do big things.

I wanna talk about MLK and students who attended Morehouse making the trek up to New England.

So most HBCU students were from the south.

And not only were the schools in the south, the students were from the south.

So they were familiar with a particular space where there were constrictions in everything they tried to do.

So restrictions in going to a movie theater just could not go.

Or there might be one in town that would allow you on a certain day or a certain part of the movie theater in some cases.

Right.

And so those sorts of restrictions that were institutionalized and people expected did not happen here.

Those sorts of public accommodations in Connecticut.

In Hartford, you could go to a theater, you go to a restaurant.

That sort of thing must be liberating to some extent.

Right.

Because, you know, he was in a cocoon in Atlanta, like the Auburn area in Atlanta, you know, King, his dad was part of a black elite strata in Atlanta.

He saw black folks who were ministers and doctors and lawyers.

I suspect, I don't know for a fact, but I suspect the pediatrician he went to was a black person.

I suspect that all of his teachers were black people.

And I know that when he was at Morehouse, he saw black professors, saw people with PhDs, something you didn't see in Connecticut.

Right?

Right.

And so in some ways he saw black comfort in a way that most black people in Hartford didn't see.

Which is the irony.

Right?

Right.

It might be kinda ironic.

'Cause you know, there were no black colleges in Connecticut.

No black deans.

No black presidents.

You could imagine him being able to sort of combine his experiences.

- So I work for the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office.

We were moving to a new office building and as we were doing that, we were packing up boxes and unpacking boxes.

And I put this box in particular on the shelf and I noticed the label said MLK.

And that only means one thing to me.

And I think it only means one thing to everybody else.

- Only one thing.

Yep.

So I opened up the box and sure enough, it was the story of his time here in Connecticut, which I was surprised to learn.

So there's several reports that I came across first, and then I came across this: Martin Luther King Jr.

In Connecticut's Tobacco Valley.

And it was this report, you know, obviously reflected on the box title that really stood out to me.

And I think what surprised me was just how influential this time was on King.

- Wow.

- Within my office, we work within a federal program and that means designation as a NA on the National Register of Historic Places.

And so that's where my office became involved, is to have this area listed for its important associations.

And of course, always in mind long-term preservation of the site.

Really, the story of King in Connecticut was not known until his family letters were published.

And that occurs in the late nineties, as well as his autobiography comes out at the same time.

- Right.

- And it's really with the publication of those materials that this King connection to Connecticut is first understood.

These other students who came up and worked with him all describe this as going to God's country.

Right now you are standing in Simsbury, Connecticut on a property that we call Meadow Wood.

And it is in these fields, these barns and just beyond there, used to be a dormitory where Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

worked during the summer.

It is where he preached for the very first time.

And so this whole area was owned by Cullman Tobacco Brothers.

- And this is amazing.

As we, as we look out so much land, I can only imagine what it was like the days that they were here picking tobacco, cultivating it.

So I'm excited.

- Yeah, well, if you wanna see more, let me show you what's inside.

- I would love to.

- So June, this is what I wanted to take you to see written on the boards of the inside of this barn.

Some of the students took up pieces of charcoal and left their names and the locations where they're from.

So you can see clearly here, Morehouse College, Morehouse College Atlanta, sometimes we see the dates, you know, such as here.

- Right.

- July 5th, 1950.

But it's this that gives you that connection to the individual, you know, that they were here.

For myself, I was never a really big history fan.

But when I can touch history, I feel like history can touch me too.

- And these walls could tell stories.

I'm certain.... - Yeah, exactly.

And they do.

- The program is the War Food Administration.

Right.

And you notice that there's war in food, you know, in that title because with so many people leaving the US to go to fight in World War II, one of the biggest things the government was worried about was food security, right?

- Right.

- And so that's where the agricultural program comes in.

They knew, of course, that they needed workers in industry, but they also wanted to make sure that they were, they were food secure.

And so they're approaching West Indian governments through the British, because they're still colonies at the time, and asking what kind of workers they can get.

And the agreement is that the men are going to come and contract and they're going to send them and plug them in wherever they fit.

The men come, the first ones get here in 1943, but the government actively recruits until 1947.

And I bet these men were not even thinking, boy, we're gonna need our dominoes.

Right?

- Right, right.

- Or our cricket gear with us.

they're just thinking, we're going to America, we're gonna, we're gonna work.

But as soon as they get here, they realize that that recreational peace, you know, the kind of peace of mind that you get from having a little bit of home with you, this is where the dominoes, this is where the dominoes fit in.

So on a Friday night, you know, if you come back here at six o'clock, you're gonna, you're gonna hear it.

You might even hear them.

- Oh yeah!

[dominoes clanking on table] - Right that noise.

Yeah.

You hear that noise of the dominoes.

And it is a great entry point for just the sociability and the respect and the fun and the competition that goes along with being really good, being really good in this game.

- How important was the social club for those Jamaicans that came over here and set up places like this, safe spaces, entertainment spaces, place to celebrate everything about the culture?

How important was it?

- Well, you want a job, you go to the club.

- That's true.

That's true.

- Trying to find your core religion.

You know, you're trying to figure out, say you might wanna start off in this church, but you're actually Baptist, so you actually wanna find the Baptist denomination.

You come to the club and you ask about that.

You have a wife and a kid that you left back at home and you want to find out more information, you go to the club and they hook you up with a lawyer.

As they're socializing in Hartford, they're not actually having the best experience.

So they're going to the bars.

Some of the people who are behind the bar don't want the glass that the West Indian men are drinking from to be used by the white patrons.

- Wow.

- Right, so Mr.

Barnett tells a story about how, you know, one of the bartenders, every time a West Indian guy would drink something, every time a West Indian guy would drink something, then they break the glass.

- Wow.

- So then he and others, they go and they get all the West Indian guys and say, okay, they're gonna break every single glass in that place.

Right?

And that's how they kind of push back.

So when I was doing research, I found in one of the historical African American newspapers in New York, this very like sarcastic editorial that says, "You meet a West Indian and he wants to be the leader of everything."

- That sounds about right.

- And you know, you can, you can lose the history, you can lose the history behind that if you only pay attention to the sarcasm.

Right?

- Right.

- Because why is it that West Indians want to be the leader of everything?

It is because of that history of slavery that suppressed people's life chances and their opportunities and their skills and their talents.

- Mr.

Clark?

- Yes.

You came over on one of the first ships during World War II.

- Yes.

- How was that experience?

- Huh?

- How was that experience?

- It was all right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And you came from Jamaica?

Yeah.

Traveling where?

- And how old were you?

- 21 years old.

- Wow.

- Now, during that, during that time in World War II, the U-boats were out.

Were you afraid?

- No.

- Not at all?

- No.

- To pick tobacco.

- And how was that experience?

- How much money were you making at Cullman brothers?

[Laughs] - How many Jamaicans were with you picking tobacco at Cullman?

How many Jamaicans?

- Now, when you were traveling, you were telling me before that you would sing 'cause it would make you happy.

What songs were you singing?

- What song?

- Yeah.

- How did that verse go?

- How many friends that traveled with you from Jamaica are still alive?

- And you're 101 years old?

- Did you ever smoke cigars?

Huh?

Did you ever smoke cigars?

- But you picked the tobacco?

- Yes.

[Chuckles] - Thank you.

- I grew up in Hartford, in Hartford, Connecticut in the north end.

And that's where my family all grew up as well.

But they all migrated from Puerto Rico at different times.

So all my parents had come between, you know, the late sixties and early seventies.

My mom came from Bonte, Puerto Rico.

From the window of her apartment, she could see Puerto Rican tobacco workers getting picked up every day to get on the bus.

My mom eventually, when she got a little older, decided to go on the bus 'cause she wanted to get some extra money.

- So she went to the bus stop, got on the bus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So her and one of her cousins and one of her nieces, all three of them, she was the middle one, they all went and they were like, "We're gonna go on the bus."

So they did get on the bus and they came to some farm in Windsor and they worked and they got a paycheck, but then they were told that they were too young so they could not come back until they could prove that they were of age.

So hearing those types of stories as well as seeing the like cultural impact that Puerto Ricans have in Hartford, in terms of like seeing Puerto Rican flags, seeing Park Street, you know, growing up with Three Kings Day camels walking down the street.

- Right.

- And seeing all of that really made me wanna figure out like, what is this history and how can we tell it?

And so that really led me to tobacco workers.

- Now how were they recruited when they got here?

Or were they recruited from Puerto Rico to come to Connecticut to work on the farms?

- Yeah, so when you're thinking particularly about this region, like of Central Connecticut, a lot of the story kind of happens in the early 1950s.

Puerto Rico had this population of agricultural workers that didn't have jobs.

The Puerto Rican Department of Labor came up with the Farm Labor Program, which was basically a program that worked with the Puerto Rican government and the US government to bring Puerto Rican agricultural workers.

And so they tried them out the first year in 1952.

And it was about 200 Puerto Rican workers.

And they came specifically to work for farms that were a part of the Shade Tobacco Agricultural Association.

And that, you know, group of 200, within five years, ends up being, you know, 1200.

And then you just keep, keep bringing more.

- Economically, what does that mean for Puerto Rico?

- In the beginning, right, they were recruiting men that were family men that had family back on the island.

So a lot of it was like, we're gonna get money to then bring back to the island to then, you know, pay our bills, feed our family.

So that, I think, you know, in that way the Puerto Rican government thought that it was gonna go right back, right to Puerto Rico.

But then as people decided to settle, you know, some of that money and some of that stuff, obviously, you know, came here and then you get Puerto Ricans that are owning houses here, starting businesses and things.

In terms of like civil rights and thinking about that, Hartford is, has always been a segregated city.

And so part of what was happening was that Puerto Ricans were living, at least in the North End, they were living in really close proximity to Black Americans and West Indians.

And so a lot of the Puerto Ricans, like from that side of town, they end up becoming more involved in like the northern student movement and things like that because that's kind of where their involved.

There was people like Butch Lewis who grew up in that community who, you know, was really keen on making sure that Black Americans and Puerto Ricans were in conversation with each other in the North end.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

- So that was happening.

So you see a lot of these early examples in the north end more.

- Right.

- Which was a Black Panther.

- Exactly.

So that's very interesting that he was even bringing those two communities together.

♪ - My dad was hired in 1958 by the Greater Hartford Council of Churches to be chaplain to the migrant workers in the tobacco camps.

And so we moved to Hartford at that time.

I went to Weaver High School, which at the time had four Puerto Ricans, a freshman, a sophomore, a junior and senior.

- And what was your dad's connection to the tobacco workers and tobacco farms?

- Well, as Chaplain, he went to the farms every day almost.

He visited the workers.

He wasn't just about worship.

Really, it was reaching out.

So he would take movies, we'd make care packages with, you know, toothbrushes and towels and stuff.

So little gift packages.

And he would take the whole family.

There were five of us.

I was the oldest.

And take my mom.

So they would see family.

- But what about the culture?

Like how did they bring their food over?

How did they bring their music over?

Their entertainment?

- What food?

- What music?

What entertainment?

The frogs, the crickets.

You kidding me?

There was nothing.

Just the barracks.

And that was their, that was their stay at the harvest.

And so little by little those people started to not go back because, you know, it's a settlement in Hartford, they finally found a little footing, number one.

Number two, actually number one is they didn't have the money sometimes to go back.

'cause they were supposed to cover flight and medical.

And none of that really happened.

So a lot of these folks got stuck in Hartford.

- But your legacy is deeply rooted in Hartford because you were a principal at Betances School.

I wanna ask you about that.

Like, how did that come about?

For the longest time when that migration started, a lot of kids started hitting schools that didn't speak English.

When I was there, there were very few and they could just kind of put 'em in a room, teach 'em English and forget about them.

But when you have whole classrooms now with kids that don't speak English, you have an issue.

The Teacher Corps program was created by Maria Sanchez.

She and Dr.

Perry Zirkel from the University of Hartford, wrote a proposal, created a teacher corps program that was undergraduate that allowed them to bring in undergraduates to do student teaching in the schools and begin the process of training Spanish speaking Puerto Rican teachers, or at least Spanish speaking and bicultural teachers in the school system.

At first they brought teachers to talk a little Spanish, but all they wanted to do is, you know, keep parents at bay and do translations.

They weren't teaching, you know, the kids were sitting there until they learned English.

- So what did that mean for the education of the Puerto Rican?

- What education?

- Dropout rate, it was astronomical.

It was just, it was a disaster.

- What percentage are we talking about, in terms of dropout?

Oh, at one point, I mean, really 70, 80% sure.

Easily... That didn't make it to high school.

Didn't make it to high school.

Attributed to the fact that... - You wait until you're 16 and you're gone.

- And then that's it.

- Yeah, I mean, you can look at the statistics.

I was part of Teacher Corps, that was in 1970 and that became a model bilingual program.

We established bilingual programs in all Hartford schools that had 20 or more kids that didn't speak English.

- The black Americans were dealing with racism, civil rights.

- I was very deeply involved in that.

- How did that affect Puerto Ricans?

- I had been working with civil rights in Hartford forever.

I mean, we had the Northern student movement when I was in college.

We, NECAP was created Northern Community Action Project was a project, was our project.

And I lost a baby on a picket line.

When Teacher Corps came, what it gave me was, 'cause I had two years of college, it gave me the opportunity to go back to school and finish and to do something for my community.

- Right.

- When I met Maria Sanchez, she said to me, "Oh yeah, you're the black fighter."

- Do you feel like the Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans changed the face of Hartford during that time?

- Of course.

And how has it changed for you?

Very positive, I think.

You know, whenever you bring another breath of culture somewhere to me is enriching.

♪