NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Martin Luther King Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut.
The slain civil rights leader, whose birthday was observed Monday as a federal holiday, spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.
“On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”
Until then, King was thinking of other professions such as becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow Morehouse College students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.
“It’s clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life,” said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King’s experiences in Connecticut. “It’s possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don’t know about Martin Luther King’s life.”
In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary, King wrote that he made the decision that summer “when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”
“Perhaps if he hadn’t come to Connecticut, hadn’t picked tobacco up here, hadn’t felt like a free person, hadn’t felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement,” Conard-Malley said.
Nicole Byer, a junior at Simsbury High School who narrates the documentary, noted that King was roughly the same age as the students who produced the film. Such early experiences can have a profound influence on young people, she said.
“Everything right now influences us,” Byer said. “Any small experience can change the direction of what we do right now.” In a letter to his mother three days after he wrote his father, King marveled over a trip he took to Hartford.
“I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” King wrote. “And we went to the largest shows there.”
He wrote a week earlier of going to the same church in Simsbury as white people. His new calling as a religious leader was emerging, too.
“I have to speak on some text every Sunday to 107 boys. We really have good meetings,” he wrote.
William Duschaneck, an 88-year-old Simsbury resident interviewed by the students, said he played baseball with King in town. King was a strong pitcher, though the future preacher of nonviolence never drilled a batter, he said.
“He was a good ballplayer. He beat us a couple times,” Duschaneck told The Associated Press, laughing. “It was interesting to hear him talk. He had a nice voice. He talked about God and so forth.”