Did you know that Martin Luther King spent a few summers in Connecticut?

In the 1940s, a group of Morehouse College students came up from Atlanta to work on tobacco farms in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley as part of a tuition assistance program. King was one of them.

 

Some excerpts from his letters home:

“I had never thought that any person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate at one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” young Martin wrote to his mother from the farm.
It was an experience that helped reshape his worldview and prompted “an inescapable urge to serve society,”
“After we passed Washington, there was no discrimination at all,” he wrote to his father, adding that up North, “We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.” 

For recreation, the student laborers would head into town and on Sunday to one of the local churches. Even at 15, he was selected as a religious leader to direct his fellow student-farmhands in discussions about the injustices that Black people faced back home. 

It was that second summer in Simsbury that prompted the “inescapable urge to serve society” that pushed him toward the clergy, he would later write in his application to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. “In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”

The town of Simsbury, where King lived, will now preserve the farm on which King worked as public open space and nominated for historic designation.