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In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, a small farm in Colchester, Conn., was a dream for many Jewish immigrants trying to eke out a living in the tenement slums of New York's Lower East Side. Colchester and other Connecticut towns attracted hundreds and hundreds of Jewish farmers.

Land was cheap in Connecticut and help was available for Jewish immigrants who wanted out of the city.

By the end of the 19 th century, Yankee farmers were abandoning their farms in Connecticut. It was too hard to scratch a living out of the state's rocky soil, help was hard to find and farmers could earn more money in the cities. So many farms were on the market during that period the Connecticut State Board of Agriculture published catalogs of farms for sale.

Meanwhile, European immigrants were coming to the United States by the millions. Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe to escape persecution, arriving in America with little money. Jewish relief societies in the United States tried to help them. In 1889, a wealthy German Jewish banker named Baron Maurice de Hirsch donated $2.4 million for resettling Russian Jews in the United States. The Jewish Agricultural Society in New York and the Baron de Hirsch Fund gave Jewish farmers small loans to establish farms.

Jewish farmers settled in clusters in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam, and Newtown. By 1928, the Jewish Agricultural Society estimated Connecticut was home to 1,000 Jewish farms and 5,000 Jewish farm families.

Life was hard on the farms, and many farmers worked part-time in small local industries. In the photo above, farmers worked part time in the Levine coat factory. Mary Dralick, pictured at the top of this page was a sewing machine operator at Levine & Levine Ladies Coats. She was shown on her father's farm, where she helped with the milking and the chores after a day of work at the shop.

In 1940, Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano went to Colchester to photograph the Jewish farmers. He was Jewish, and he wanted to illustrate the plight of the part-time farmer. During the Depression, people who both farmed and worked part-time in light industry weren't eligible for federal relief programs aimed at helping farmers.

When Delano went to Colchester in November 1940, one-quarter of the town was Jewish - down from half in 1920. Colchester's Jews ran dairy and poultry farms, clothing factories and retail stores. The photo above shows Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lapping, Jewish poultry and dairy farmers. "They run a small farm and take in tourists during the summer," wrote Delano.

Delano also took photos of Colchester's synagogue and Hebrew School, below.

Below, children at the Hebrew school examine a map of Palestine.

Connecticut was close enough to New York that its Jewish farmers and small businesspeople could maintain family and social ties with the city. Some found a market for their products in New York. Alphonsine and Jacques Makowsky fled the Nazis and settled on a poultry farm in northeastern Connecticut to raise African guinea hens. A fire destroyed their henhouses and they began to cross breed Cornish gamecocks with hens. The result: the Cornish game hen. The Makowskys sold as many as 3,000 a day to New York restaurants like the 21 Club.
With thanks to the Connecticut State Library, Jewish Farmers in Connecticut, and Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, by Colleen McDannell.

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Flashback Photo: Jewish Farmers of Connecticut - New England Historical Society

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a small farm in Colchester, Conn., was a dream for many Jewish immigrants trying to eke out a living in the tenement slums of New York's Lower East Side. Colchester and other Connecticut towns attracted hundreds and hundreds of Jewish farmers.

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Travel north from Bridgeport through Fairfield to Sport Hill Road in Easton and you eventually come to Helen Keller Middle School. Go west a ways to the other side of Easton and you can see the house where Keller lived from 1939 until her death in 1968. If you don't know the house's location, however, you'll have a hard time finding it, for there's no stone or plaque marking the spot (at least none's that's easily visible) even though Keller lived there longer than anywhere else.

This last is a bit surprising, for there was a time when Keller was one of the most famous people in the world, better known than presidents and kings. Circa 1920, she was perhaps the second most recognizable Westerner on the planet behind only Charlie Chaplin -- also a radical who, like Helen, used his brilliance on behalf of the unrepresented.

Born in 1880 in Alabama with sight and the ability to hear, Keller lost both senses at 19 months due to disease. Her parents were of some means and she was thus spared institutionalization, the fate that befell thousands of blind, deaf and mute working-class children of the time.

As a young girl, Keller developed a homemade sign language she used to communicate with those close to her. Treatment options and educational opportunities were few, however, and her quality of life was minimal. Despite the love of her devoted but heartbroken mother, Kate Adams Keller, Helen lived much like an untamed animal.

In 1887, an extraordinary young woman named Anne Sullivan traveled to the Keller home to be Helen's teacher. Severely visually impaired, Sullivan's early life was something out of Dickens or Engels. She lived many years in a Massachusetts institution where, among other horrors, she watched in agony as her younger brother slowly died of neglect despite her best efforts to protect him. Thereafter, she burned with a determination to ensure that other children would not share his fate.

Just 20 years old when she arrived at the Keller home, Sullivan began a remarkable relationship with Helen that lasted five decades. In a few months of incredibly intense work, Sullivan drew on teaching techniques she had barely just learned herself and helped Keller find herself. And the self she helped Keller find contained one of the greatest hearts and minds of that or any time.

Keller learned to read and write and eventually graduated from Radcliffe College with honors. Shocked members of the scientific and teaching communities studied Keller and Sullivan's innovative teaching methods. Medical experts were put in the awkward position of having to explain why so many of the great minds of the time had been so thoroughly upstaged by an undereducated woman with a will of iron.

From Sullivan, but especially from her own experiences, Keller came to understand that health problems such as hers were often socio-economic in nature. Some sought to portray her situation as an unfortunate but ultimately holy burden delivered from on high, but Keller was having none of that. She instead indicted industrialism and capitalism as the main causes of disease, blindness and deafness included. While advocating for better treatment, Keller spent the rest of her long life standing up for the trod upon, emphasizing poverty and unsafe working and living conditions as the root of illness.

In her 20s, Keller joined the Socialist Party and campaigned for Eugene Debs. She soon flew past the Socialists' conservative electoralism, however, and joined the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. She walked picket lines, marched with the unemployed and, after developing the ability to speak, addressed rallies and forums around the country. The well-heeled who had flocked to her side to bask in the radiance of her fame were positively scandalized, but Keller was just getting warmed up.

She joined the vibrant women's movement of the 1910s that shook the country to its core. Keller allied herself with the radical wing of the movement and became an impassioned advocate of, among many other causes, easily accessible birth control. Echoing not the Suffragettes so much as anarchist Emma Goldman, she dared to suggest there might be more to female sexuality than reproduction. A whole bunch of her benefactors got into the wind as a result (the men anyway); more left her side when she came out against World War I and in support of -- gasp -- the Russian Revolution.

Like millions around the world, Keller recoiled in horror at the butchery of the Great Imperialist War. She was appalled that working class boys and primarily female non-combatants died by the millions so a select few who already had too much could accumulate still more. She lectured tirelessly against the carnage and, when dissent became virtually illegal after the U.S. entered the war, she stood strong and true behind the thousands who were locked up for demanding peace.

Keller remained engaged through most of the rest of her life. She wrote extensively and traveled the world in solidarity with the oppressed. Her books were translated into many languages and she championed the rights of the deaf and blind into her 80s. She lived to see the elimination of many of the dangerous conditions she worked against as well as the implementation of important teaching techniques she advocated.

Keller saw things that many sighted people miss, heard things that many who can hear don't. To say that hers was a life well-lived would be the understatement of the millennium. All these years later, her story still inspires. The climactic scene in The Miracle Worker of Anne and little Helen at the water pump remains incredibly powerful even after multiple viewings.

But those who relegate Keller to perpetual childhood do her legacy and themselves an injustice, for the day when Anne Sullivan reached through the darkness was the turning point of Keller's life, not its end. The young girl bursting with life is inseparable from the adult who stood arm in arm with the immigrant women who led the great Bread and Roses Strike. Although she lived in relative comfort, Keller refused to turn away from the ugliness of class society, choosing instead to do what she could to eradicate it. Amidst the darkness and ugliness that surround us, perhaps the best lesson to draw from the life of one of Fairfield County's most luminous beacons is that we collectively attempt to do likewise.

Andy Piascik, of Bridgeport, writes for Z Magazine and www.zmag.org. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

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If you don't know the house's location, however, you'll have a hard time finding it, for there's no stone or plaque marking the spot (at least none's that's easily visible) even though Keller lived there longer than anywhere else. Treatment options and educational opportunities were few, however, and her quality of life was minimal.

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Revisiting The Carpenters New Haven Roots

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The Carpenters still hold the record for most consecutive top-ten hits--and their story began right here in the New Haven area.

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Connecticut Suffragists Appeal to the President - Today in History: July 12

On July 12, 1918, Connecticut suffragists-men, women, and children-rallied in Hartford and Simsbury to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson for help in getting women the right to vote. A telegram published in the July 13, 1918 edition of the Hartford Courant was sent to the president asking him to intervene in passing a suffrage amendment. It read:

"Resolved, That we citizens of Connecticut, assembled in meeting in Simsbury, Conn., do petition the President to use his undoubted power on behalf of the women, as he has already used it on behalf of many measures, to bring about the passage by the Senate, of the federal suffrage amendment; and thus to give liberty to the magnificent democratic sentiments he has expressed as spokesman of America, and uphold the great principles of democracy as a leader among nations."

The appeal directly to President Wilson was based in no small part on frustration felt by local suffragists regarding the opposition of Connecticut Senators George P. McLean and Frank B. Brandegee to the passing of the legislation. The rally started at City Hall in Hartford and then moved to Simsbury, Senator McLean's hometown. There, Mrs. W. O. Ascough, Connecticut chairman of the National Women's Party, declared that Senator Brandegee's mind belonged to an earlier generation and compared it to an antique, "interesting to observe, but not for present day use."

The Connecticut rally and telegram were contributions to a long-standing national movement that led to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment less than a year later. The amendment was adopted by the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919, and then approved in the Senate on June 4, by a vote of 56 to 25. Two of the 25 opposing votes belonged to McLean and Brandegee. The amendment was ultimately ratified on August 18, 1920. McLean and Brandegee, despite being on the losing side of such a high-profile issue, remained very popular politically, serving out terms of 18 and 19 years respectively.

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Connecticut Suffragists Appeal to the President - Today in History: July 12 | ConnecticutHistory.org

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On July 12, 1918, Connecticut suffragists-men, women, and children-rallied in Hartford and Simsbury to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson for help in getting women the right to vote. A telegram published in the July 13, 1918 edition of the Hartford Courant was sent to the president asking him to intervene in passing a suffrage amendment.

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Ms. Trout explained that most New Haven ships were built for the coastal trade or the West Indies. But Ebenezer Townsend, the local merchant who commissioned the Neptune, had more ambitious plans. His ship was to hunt seals in South America, trade the skins -- which were much prized in China -- for porcelain, silk and tea, then sell the merchandise in the United States.

During the early 1790's, Ms. Trout said, New England merchants broke into the sealskin trade with China, a market that had previously monopolized by Russians and western Europeans. ''I like sealing well,'' wrote Dr. Forbes, who joined the captain and the rest of the crew in the endeavor. As the ship moved from island to island in search of rookeries, more than 80,000 seals were taken during the two-year hunt, their skins packed in the cargo hold until there was no more room.

En route to China, the Neptune made a stop in the Sandwich Islands. By that time, the lack of fresh fruit was beginning to take a toll on the men's health.

''A number began to complain of the scurvy at that time, which increased, and on our arrival at Owyhee several were black to their hips with it,'' reads the diary of Ebenezer Townsend Jr., the supercargo, or business manager. ''We were fearful of losing some, but they got well astonishingly almost immediately on our arrival. We are now all in good health.''

The son of the Neptune's owner reported of Hawaii that ''the lands are in the highest state of cultivation, everything of luxurious growth . . . you see here the bread fruit, coconut, plantain, sweet potato, taro, yams, bananas.''

Food was not the only delight Hawaii offered. ''At 6 P.M. at night there came . . . several canoes with girls,'' John Hurlbut, the mate, wrote in his diary. There were also reports of ''Sandwich Island girl disease.''

An engraving by the British artist John Webber, who had sailed with Captain Cook in the 1770's, shows Hawaiian canoes meeting a ship, just as the American logs describe it.

Canton was the next and most important stop, the only Chinese port open to Westerners. Their trade was welcome, but as ''foreign devils'' they were restricted to the waterfront area and not allowed in the city itself.

An oil painting done in 1795 shows warehouses, wharves and buildings flying the stars and stripes, the Union Jack and other Western flags, while sailing ships lie at anchor in the bay.

The Neptune did exceptionally well in Canton. The seal skins fetched $3.25 each, for a total of $280,000 -- a vast sum in 1798. With these earnings, the crew bought bolts of silk and nankeen, a sturdy cotton cloth to be made into knee britches; thousands of crates of tea, the most popular beverage back home, and porcelain dinnerware, both for sale and for personal use.

Several pieces of elegant white china rimmed in blue and gold are featured in the exhibition, part of a dinner set commissioned by a member of the Townsend family. A lacquered dressing table, 2 1/2 feet high with oval mirror, was brought back by John Hurlbut for his financee and bears her name. It is considered the earliest piece of China trade furniture in New England.

Although most of the day at sea was devoted to keeping the ship in good order, viewers will note that there was also time for comradeship and relaxation. Musical instruments on display -- fife, drum and violin -- evoke the frolics described in several diaries. One was held with a group of Patagonian Indians who wanted to trade fresh meat for American liquor and biscuits. Another was a ball held in honor of a visiting captain in the Falkland Islands.

Other pastimes illustrated in the display are games like cards, dice and checkers, and books, which were read aloud, either for entertainment or teaching, particularly navigation.

The exhibition will be on view through June 29 at the New Haven Colony Historical Society, 114 Whitney Avenue, New Haven. Hours are 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Tuesday through Friday and 2 to 5 P.M. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $2, $1.50 for older people and students and $1 for children age 6 to 16.

On March 15, from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. the society will present ''The Neptune Symposium: New Englanders in China and the Pacific,'' with scholars discussing 18th-century seafaring, exploration, decorative arts and the China trade. Admission is $5 for society members, $10 for non-members with reservations and $15 for people paying at the door.

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women's seamen's friend society of connecticut

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Bicentennial of voyage to China by the Neptune, the largest sailing ship ever built in New Haven, is marked by New Haven Colony Historical Society with an exhibition based on four first-hand accounts written by members of the crew; photos; drawings (M)

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The Great 1938 Hurricane took almost everyone by surprise. Sept. 21, 1938, was supposed to be a breezy fall day in New England. Few paid attention to the storm barreling up the coast.

By 4 pm, one of the most powerful and destructive hurricanes ever to hit Southern New England made landfall between and Bridgeport New Haven, Conn.

The damage was horrific. Estimates vary, but at least 400 people died that day and maybe as many as 800. The Great 1938 Hurricane crossed over the tip of Long Island, slammed into New London and raced up the Connecticut River Valley at 50 miles per hour. Cemeteries were destroyed, boats slammed into shore, orchards uprooted and structures smashed into splinters.

The hurricane chewed away at roadbeds, like Shore Drive in Winthrop, Mass., above. It washed away railroad tracks, sent bridges downstream and downed electrical wires, leaving some New Englanders without electricity for weeks.

The hurricane altered the shoreline of Long Island, washed away bridges, severed train service between New York and Boston and between cities in Connecticut and Rhode Island. It brought down 20,000 miles of power and telephone lines.

In New London, Conn., a five-masted ship, Marsala, was pushed by high waters into a warehouse and started a fire that demolished a quarter-mile section of the city's business district. The hurricane also tossed the lighthouse tender Tulip, pictured above, ashore.

Houses were washed off their foundations, like the one above that landed in the Cape Cod Canal.

The Connecticut River was forced over its banks, inundating cities and towns with floodwater. In Hartford, the river reached 35.4 feet, 19.4 feet above flood stage. Above, Bushnell Park in Hartford after the storm.

Parts of Falmouth and New Bedford, Mass., were submerged under eight feet of water.

Rhode Island got the worst of it. Parts of downtown Providence were under 14 feet of water, with people sheltering on the second and third floors of buildings. According to the National Weather Service, a storm surge of 12 to 15 feet destroyed most coastal homes, yacht clubs and marinas on Narragansett Bay.

Above, the steamship Monhegan sits at a pier in Providence after sinking during the hurricane. Two-thirds of the boats in New Bedford Harbor were sunk. Before the storm, 100 boats fished the waters between Point Judith, R.I., and New London. Afterward, there were only three.

In New Hampshire, Peterborough was in flames and part of the Cog Railway on Mount Washington was blown down. And in Vermont, the storm caused a train derailment and uprooted maple trees and apple orchards. The hurricane blew this house onto railroad tracks.

It was one of the most costly hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland, with damage estimated at $308 million. A total of 4,500 homes were destroyed and 25,000 damaged. About 26,000 automobiles were totaled and 20,000 electrical poles blown over. An estimated 2 billion trees were knocked down in New York and New England, devastating forests.

Funeral homes were filled. Homeless refugees crammed into town halls, armories and fire stations. Clinics ran out of typhoid vaccine. It took a week to restore power in Provincetown. Two hundred men spent a week trying to open the roads to Newport, R.I.

Cleaning up timber damaged by the Great 1938 Hurricane took years.

The storm blew down so many trees that paper mills were still processing them nine years later.

The blowdowns posed a dilemma: What to do with enough woody debris to nearly fill Rhode Island? And how to do it quickly enough so it didn't set off tremendous forest fires?

President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration to clean up the mess. There were then 50 CCC camps and 15,000 WPA workers in the stricken region. The clean-up continued for two years.

To see newsreel footage of the Great 1938 Hurricane, click here.
This story was updated in 2017. With thanks to The Great Hurricane: 1938 by Cherie Burns.

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The Great 1938 Hurricane, A Once-In-A-Lifetime Storm - New England Historical Society

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The Great 1938 Hurricane took almost everyone by surprise. Sept. 21, 1938, was supposed to be a breezy fall day in New England. Few paid attention to the storm barreling up the coast. By 4 pm, one of the most powerful and destructive hurricanes ever to hit Southern New England made landfall between and Bridgeport New Haven, Conn.

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Listen to OAG anytime. Subscribe to the podcast. iTunes | Stitcher | RSS link

According to Wikipedia, Vin Baker's basketball career was "damaged due to substance abuse."

Wikipedia's not known for precision - OK, accuracy - but in this case, the fault is understatement.

But when we spoke recently, Baker didn't want me to lose his message in the ugly details.

"So many people wait for the trainwreck," Baker says. "Like, in my situation, we wait for 'Vin Baker's lost money. Vin Baker's house foreclosed on.' But when I get a chance to turn the story around, and I fight my butt off and get to 6 1/2 years sobriety, I get it. I understand what people want to hear. But the fact of the matter is, I'm here to shed light on recovery and speak to a world where sometimes people don't want to be honest."
Scoring 41 Points Stoned

For a long time - almost too long - Vin Baker was one of those people who didn't want to be honest. Now, he's opening up about, for example, the first time he played an NBA game high. It was Jan. 5, 1996. He and several of his Milwaukee Bucks teammates had gathered at forward Glenn Robinson's place to get haircuts. There would be a game that night. Baker says Robinson was smoking marijuana. Baker, who'd never before indulged on the day of a game, joined in ... and then began to worry about how he'd play that night.

"Went to the game feeling kind of disoriented," he says. "It was the anxiety of, 'Am I going to be walking on air? Am I going to pass out?'"

Nope. Neither of the above. Baker, about half-stoned, shot out the lights.

"Statistically, it was my best game ever as a pro. I scored 41 points," he says. "It was a weird coming out party for me, because in some ways it said, 'Wow, I've arrived on this level, to score 40 points, which is a big deal in the NBA.' But at the same time, the cost of arriving, I didn't see that night."

A year later, the 6-foot-11 Baker, whom the Bucks had picked eighth overall in the 1993 draft, was traded to the Seattle SuperSonics. There he averaged just under 20 points per game. Which was, at least in retrospect, astonishing, because while he was playing for the Sonics, Baker was drinking before, after and sometimes during games.

That didn't go entirely unnoticed - sometimes Baker's teammates could smell alcohol on him at practice - but management saw only his upside. In 1999, Seattle signed Baker to a contract worth $86 million over seven years.
Out Of The NBA
But three years later, Seattle dealt Baker to Boston, where he underwent a physical. The doctor employed by the Celtics found signs of liver damage associated with alcoholism.

"And, of course, being in the state I was, I lied and said, 'No, there's no issues, and I'm not drinking as much as you guys may think,'" Baker recalls.

Baker says the doctor told him, "Of course, if you play better, this all goes away."

Baker also recalls that in 2003, two men hired by the league to surprise him with random drug tests told him they'd warn him about when the tests were coming if he'd pay each of them $50,000. He thought about it.

In any case, he didn't play better. By then he was constantly drunk or hungover. He became a part-timer the Celtics could do without. Eventually he began drinking Listerine, figuring nobody would complain about the odor.

Over the next two years, the Knicks, the Rockets and the Clippers came to the same conclusion the Celtics had reached.

In 2006, Baker was out of the NBA. His substances of choice had multiplied to include Xanax, Librium and pretty much whatever else he could find to help him forget what might have been. He spent his days, as he says, "shuffling around" an empty house "in slippers and sweats" with a glass of cognac in his hand. He was, he says, "skeletal." He vomited blood a lot.

And then, Vin Baker made what he figures was about his sixth attempt to get sober.

"What was different about the time that worked?" I ask.

"Well, I think I had to take out all the conditions that weren't realistic," he says. "So, in other words, 'I gotta get sober to save my career.' 'If I get sober I'm going to be an All-Star again.' Those are, like, some of the crazy thoughts I had when I was in Boston."

This time he didn't put conditions on it. For a hard year and a half, Baker maintained his sobriety. Then he began thinking about an additional goal.

"I needed to get back into a place to provide for my family and for my kids," he says.

OK, good intention. But who was going to employ him? Baker came up with the name of a former boss, Howard Schultz. He'd owned the SuperSonics when Baker had played in Seattle, and Schultz also ran a coffee company. Place called Starbucks.
Caramel Macchiatos And Coffee
"It must've took me about a month to call Howard," Baker says. "I was like, 'What am I going to say? And I had just left bible study at my church in Old Saybrook, and I pulled over, got my nerves together. I prayed. And I called him, and his voice - he was excited. He was like, 'Vinny!' And I'll never forget his excitement in his voice. And he said to me, 'You sound great!' Like, 'You sound terrific!'

"We met. And we came up with a plan. And we exercised that plan, and part of the plan was to make caramel macchiatos and serve coffee at Starbucks."

Vin Baker went into the management training program. That meant he showed up dependably. And, as with his job in pro basketball, he put on a uniform.

"To actually grab the green apron - that was a little bit short, by the way - grab the green apron and throw it on and then walk out, it was surreal," Baker says.

"Surreal," as in getting up at 3:45 a.m. to open the store. And, at least initially, Baker didn't even like the taste of coffee. But he handled the job.

"From the work perspective, it wasn't that difficult. Because I don't mind working," Baker says. "But, obviously, the story behind it was difficult some days, but I ultimately said, 'This is all for the best.'"

"Do you remember what the figure was on your first paycheck from Starbucks?" I ask.

"I don't. Um, I don't remember," he says with a chuckle. "I can tell you this: same signature from Howard, but it wasn't the same amount as I got when I worked for him in Seattle. I can tell you that much."

"A couple of zeroes missing," I say.

"Yeah, a few zeroes missing."
Recovery, One Day At A Time
Vin Baker can laugh now. He's been in recovery for 6 1/2 years. And he's not much inclined to look back at the nearly $100 million he lost.

"I'm not going to be on the cover of Business Insider or Forbes any time soon, but that's OK with me. Right? That's OK with me," Baker says. "Because in the world of recovery, we don't talk dollars and cents. We talk recovery, one day at a time. Win the day. So when I got the job at Starbucks as a store manager in training, it was the upswing. I was happy. I was ecstatic.

"I came from a dark, dark place. And to be able to open a store up at 4:30 in the morning, 5:30 in the morning, and run a shift, and be responsible for a store is a big deal to a person in recovery. You know, it talks about responsibility. And so, it wasn't $100 million to Starbucks. It was, 'Wow, I'm the store manager at Starbucks.' That's how I felt when I went in there every day to work."

People would recognize Baker, of course. There aren't a lot of 6-foot-11 baristas. Probably also not a lot of baristas of any height as happy as Vin Baker was to have a job. Which, he eventually began to understand as more than a job.

"At some point, I realized I might be the face of hope," he says. "Like, at some point, you have to take it on, the responsibility of, OK, everything has happened. I had this amazing career. I had all this money. And that's fine. And it's gone. But now there are people that are like 'Wow, it's an inspiration.' And I enjoyed it. I embraced it. If every day I walk out of here and I'm showing up on time, people will go home and they'll Google, and they'll say, 'Holy cow.'"

These days, those inclined to see Vin Baker and say "holy cow" are out of luck if they're looking for him at Starbucks. He's moved on to broadcast and development work with the Milwaukee Bucks, another former employer happy to see him healthy. He's working with a group to open rehabilitation centers in Milwaukee and New Haven. And Baker's reasons for gratitude don't stop there. His son, Vin, Jr., will be playing basketball and studying this year at Boston College, much to Baker's delight.

"Ah, man, I cried. It's one of the top five moments in my life to have my son sign at B.C." he says. "When you see things like this happen in your life, with your kids, like, I don't think about losing whatever I lost in the past or whatever I did in the past. I'm looking like the choices that I made to get sober are now starting to pay off in my kids' life. And so that's what makes me excited each and every day about living a sober life."
Learn more about Vin Baker's story in his recent book, "God and Starbucks: An NBA Superstar's Journey Through Addiction and Recovery."

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From NBA All-Star To Starbucks Barista: Vin Baker's Journey To Sobriety

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Listen to OAG anytime. Subscribe to the podcast. iTunes | Stitcher | RSS link According to Wikipedia, Vin Baker's basketball career was "damaged due to substance abuse." Wikipedia's not known for precision - OK, accuracy - but in this case, the fault is understatement.

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Travel the Amistad Freedom-Seeking Story, Connecticut (U.S. National Park Service)

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On Sept. 3, the Friends of Fort Griswold in Groton will hold its annual ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Groton Heights, which occurred on Sept. 6, 1781. Although there are many who recognize the significance of this battle, not only to Groton but also to our country, there are unfortunately far too many who know very little, or sadly nothing at all, about the sacrifices made by those who fought there.

As a historian, I have read numerous articles written by several survivors of the battle, detailing their personal recollections of the engagement from beginning to end. These accounts not only detail some the heroic actions performed by so many of the defenders of the fort, but also describe the horrifying carnage inflicted by the British soldiers upon the defenders of the fort, even after their surrender.

I hope by relaying a few facts that readers would be encouraged to learn more about this battle, which is an intimate part of Groton's history.

Upon observing a fleet of about 32 British enemy ships in the New London harbor, the order was given by the commander of the fort to give the specified "larum" (warning) signal to advise the volunteers and soldiers of Groton to respond to the fort. The specific larum in this case was to fire two consecutive cannon shots.

The British forces, being knowledgeable of this particular signal, subsequently fired a third cannon shot. This third shot was misinterpreted by a large number of volunteers, who were expected to respond to the fort, as being a false alarm, or one of the usual multiple cannon shots used by pirates when they returned to port with their plunders.

This third cannon shot contributed to the lack of reinforcement by an additional 200 or so volunteers to the 160 defenders.

Approximately 800 British soldiers landed at Eastern Point, in the area close to where the UConn Avery Point campus is currently located. It was here that they began their long journey to Fort Griswold. At the time, the terrain between the landing and the fort was thick with rocks, trees, brush and swamps.

A "lame boy named Bill Herrin" was compelled by the British troops to act as their guide. He led the way and brought them safely, and in a timely manner, to the area in the back of "Packers Rock" - where the Colonial Ledyard Cemetery is located today. Without this guide, I am sure there would have been considerably more time for the defenders at the fort to obtain additional reinforcements.

Three persons of color - two African-Americans (Jordan Freeman and Lambo Latham) and one Pequot Indian (Tom Wansuc), participated in defending the fort.

Although accounts vary, Jordan Freeman is credited with killing Major William Montgomery, the British commander leading the charge on the fort. He reportedly did so with a 10-foot spike.

Lambo Latham is reported to have killed a British captain, who killed the fort's commander, Col. William Ledyard, with his own sword, while surrendering the fort.

By all accounts there were no eye-witnesses as to who killed Col. Ledyard; however, two names have been mentioned - Captain George Beckwith or Captain Stephen Bromfield. After killing the captain, British forces turned upon Latham, who died after suffering 33 bayonet punctures.

Little is mentioned about Tom Wansuc, except the fact that he was said to have been from Groton and that he had received a bayonet stab wound to the neck.

There are conflicting accounts as to the number of soldiers, both American and British, who were killed or wounded during the actual battle. The best estimates place the numbers at 88 Americans and 15 British killed; 60 Americans and 142 British wounded. These numbers are chilling when you take into consideration that it has been estimated that the actual battle at the fort lasted 40 minutes.

After the battle, the British buried their dead, including their commander, Major Montgomery, near the entrance to the fort. Some years later one of the most bizarre (and considered by some to be repulsive) incidents occurred at that location.

During a business trip to New London, an Irish gentleman, who had indicated he was from the same town from which the Major had come, asked to be taken to the burial site. He stated he had been charged by the sisters of the Major to locate the grave of their brother, if possible, and procure the Major's skull to bring it "home: to be buried in the family plot."

The visitor was successful in recovering the sought-after relic, and it was returned to the family members.

The anecdotes relayed in this article are but just a few of the many conveyed in the articles written about the battle. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the readers took a few minutes from their busy days, or the time spent browsing through their social media computer programs, to read one or more of various accounts about the Battle of Groton Heights. I think they would find it interesting and educational to learn about this significant piece of Groton's history.
Jim Streeter is the Groton Town Historian.

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History Revisited: Stories of the Battle of Groton Heights, as told through first-hand recollections

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On Sept. 3, the Friends of Fort Griswold in Groton will hold its annual ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Groton Heights, which occurred on Sept. 6, 1781.

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Touring the Fort

The fort was built between 1776 and 1780 to defend the wealthy privateers in New London who raided British ships. Besides the attack on Fort Griswold, Arnold, who was born 12 miles away in Norwich and became known in Revolutionary War as Connecticut's Dark Eagle, also set fire to the town of New London, directly across from the Thames River.

Today, the stony ruins of Fort Griswold are part of the 16.5-acre Fort Griswold State Park, which also includes the Ebenezer Avery House, a red-shingled Colonial home where many of the wounded were taken after the battle, as well as a granite monument and museum.

Connecticut park officials, who have been conducting and overseeing archeological and historical research at the fort for more than 10 years, hope to restore it to its original state someday.

They also request that visitors to the fort refrain from walking along the fort's walls because traffic over the years has caused great deterioration of the structure. The nearby flagpole area serves as the best viewing spot of the fort and the river battery.

A Holiday Encampment

The 134-foot monument, which resembles the Washington Monument, was dedicated in 1830 to the men who defended Fort Griswold, which was manned during the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War. An antiaircraft battery was placed on the site during World War II.

Each Labor Day, the battle is re-enacted by volunteers in authentic dress, using cannons and muzzleloaders firing blank charges. A sort of play-by-play of the British advance is broadcast to onlookers on a public-address system.

On Wednesday, the Fourth of July, starting around noon, about a dozen volunteers in authentic dress will hold an educational encampment at the fort, which is open to the public daily from 8 A.M. to sunset.

The museum and monument are open from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily from Memorial Day through Labor Day and on weekends from Labor Day through Columbus Day.

The Ebenezer Avery House is open from 1 to 5 P.M. on Saturdays and Sundays in June, July and August. Admission is free for the house, museum, monument and park. To reach Fort Griswold State Park, take Interstate 95 to Exit 87 in Groton and follow the signs to the fort. Information: (203) 445-1729.

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Surrender, Then Massacre At a Fort in Connecticut

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Touring the Fort The fort was built between 1776 and 1780 to defend the wealthy privateers in New London who raided British ships. Besides the attack on Fort Griswold, Arnold, who was born 12 miles away in Norwich and became known in Revolutionary War as Connecticut's Dark Eagle, also set fire to the town of New London, directly across from the Thames River.

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American and British accounts of the subsequent events are at odds. The American version holds that after Colonel Ledyard gave up his sword in surrender, he was immediately killed and the American wounded were massacred.

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Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

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Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

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Stories about the people, traditions, innovations, and events that make up Connecticut’s rich history.

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A mere accusation could send an innocent person to the gallows, a public hanging.

In 17th century America, a colony founded on religious tolerance offered no mercy for persons accused of witchcraft.

The Connecticut Colony hanged 11 persons accused of practicing witchcraft, including Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert, of Windsor.

A ceremony was held, on May 26 at Northwest Park, to remember Young, the first person hanged in Connecticut for witchcraft - 370 years ago - and the other victims.

In February, the Windsor Town Council adopted a resolution exonerating Young and Gilbert, a move the other communities that were affected by the trial have yet to do.

Mayor Donald Trinks said author Beth Caruso's book, One of Windsor, The Untold Story of America's First Witchcraft Hanging, an account of Young's and Gilbert's trials and hangings, was a catalyst to push for the exoneratio., both locally and at the state level.

"It got a lot of us thinking, 'How did we let that happen?'" Trinks said.

After several meetings with Caruso and Tony Griego, who has pressed for a state-level pardon for the victims, a resolution was drafted. A direct descendant of Young sent an email to Trinks. The descendant stated Young was her 10th generation grandmother.

"She was awed a town would look at trying to clear her great-grandmother's name," he said.

The mayor wanted Windsor residents to understand the witch hysteria in the 17th century and the events that led up to Young's hanging, and eventually a trip to the gallows for Gilbert.

"We know it wasn't witchcraft. We're comfortable with that 400 years later," Trinks said.

He praised the efforts of Caruso, Griego, and others for their research and advocacy on victims' behalf. He called the testimony before the Town Council "compelling," testimony drawn from historical facts.

Trinks said a version of witch hunts continue today, attacking people deemed different. In 17th century New England, the witch accusations were likely spurred by greed, personal vendettas, or dangerous beliefs.

"These were two young women, residents of Windsor, who lost their lives because of the hysteria," Trinks said.

The resolution at least admits the accusations and the hangings were wrong.

He added Connecticut does not grant legal pardons, especially for the deceased who were tried under the king's court.

Griego's research began in 2005, after he attended a lecture by then state historian Walter Woodward, who spoke about the Connecticut witchcraft trials. Several audience members, including Griego, asked if anything had been done to clear the victims' names.

Woodward told the group no efforts had been made.

Griego learned quickly the state's parole board does not grant the deceased, even the innocent, pardons. The researchers then assumed because the authority of the court's in 17th century America was under the crown's control, Queen Elizabeth II could grant pardons.

A letter was sent to the queen, but the response mirrored that of the state's.

"The queen felt each case would have to be reopened, which is almost impossible because so many of the colonial records are gone," Griego said.

In 2008, the group appeared before the Connecticut General Assembly. Several of the victims' descendants spoke. A resolution, like Windsor's, was not passed. An attempt to secure a Governor's Proclamation also failed.

According to Griego, a letter to Gov. Dannel Malloy on the subject went unanswered.

"I got disappointed and we decided to take another direction," he said.

Letters to other state officials went unanswered, too.

After meeting with Caruso last year, the two decided to pursue the Windsor resolution, which was better received by the town officials and the First Church of Windsor, the parish that existed during Young's and Gilbert's trials.

The Town Council unanimously approved the resolution that cleared the names of Young and Gilbert. Several of the victims were hanged at the Old Meeting House in Hartford, according to Griego.

He added hangings occurred in Stratford (Goodwife Bassett) and Fairfield (Goodwife Knapp). Griego assumed Young and Gilbert were hanged on the grounds of the Old Meeting House.

"It's a big relief, simply because in my heart, I knew these hangings were wrong. Nobody has taken any steps, within state government, to correct this," he said. "However, history was made right here in Windsor with the Town Council."

Jeff Marsted, of Canton, thanked the Town of Windsor for recognizing his descendant, Lydia Gilbert. Marsted, along with other volunteers, read the names of the victims, rang a ceremonial bell, and spoke about the victims.

Marsted said three years before the witchcraft accusation, a Windsor man, Henry Styles, died during a militia exercise on the Town Green. A man named Thomas Greene "carelessly mishandled his gun," which resulted in Style's death.

However, a rumor began less than two years later, accusing Gilbert had used witchcraft to bring about Style's demise. By 1654, blame shifted from Greene to Gilbert. She was convicted and hanged the same year.

The following victims were honored: Alice Young, Windsor; Mary Johnson, Wethersfield; John and Joan Carrington, Wethersfield; Goodwife Knap, Fairfield; Goodwife Bassett, Stratford; Lydia Gilbert, Windsor; Mary Sanford, Hartford; Nathaniel and Rebecca Greensmith, Hartford; and Mary Barnes, Farmington.

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A mere accusation could send an innocent person to the gallows, a public hanging. In 17th century America, a colony founded on religious tolerance offered no mercy for persons accused of witchcraft. The Connecticut Colony hanged 11 persons accused of practicing witchcraft, including Alice Young and Lydia Gilbert, of Windsor.

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Samuel Wyllys (Witness to Trials) Papers

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Samuel Wyllys (Witness to Trials) Papers

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1639-1663

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Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society : Connecticut Historical Society : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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If everyone chips in $5, we can end this fundraiser today. Right now, a generous supporter will match your donation, so you can double your impact. All we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a library you can trust. We have only 150 staff but run one of the world's top websites.

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Connecticut State Museum of Natural History

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Connecticut State Museum of Natural History

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This Museum of Connecticut History contains information about Connecticut History.  One of the best search strategies is to use the search bar.

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The Mashantucket Pequot Museum explores the American Indian journey in Connecticut. The exhibits are not limited to the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, other tribes are included in their exhibits.

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After more than 375 years, the Pequot War (1636-1637) remains one of the most controversial and significant events in Colonial and Native history of America.
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is identifying and preserving battlefields and historical sites associated with the Pequot War.
The primary goal of the Battlefields of the Pequot War project, with support from the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, is the identification of battlefield sites and obtaining physical evidence through non-invasive archaeological investigations.

Partnering with the Office of the Connecticut State Archaeologist, the Connecticut State Historian, and local historical societies and museums, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center has undertaken a comprehensive study to research all aspects of the Pequot War.

The Pequot War consisted of far more than the single attack (the Battle of Mistick Fort) by the Enligsh and Native allied forces on the Pequot fortified village (Mistick Fort) in Mystic, Connecticut on May 26, 1637. The war lasted for more than two years with major battles in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. Indigenous people, including the Sasqua of Fairfield, the Quinnipiac of New Haven, the Western Niantic, the Mohegan, the Narragansett, the Nipmuck, the Wangunk, the Podunk and the Mohawk of New York fought both with and against the Europeans and the Pequot. The Pequot War was as much English vs. Native as it was Native vs. Native.

In 2006, the History Channel included the "Massacre at Mystic" as the first episode in its highly-acclaimed series 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America.
This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.

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mashantucket pequot museum & research center

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Welcome to Battlefields of the Pequot War! | Battlefields of the Pequot War

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After more than 375 years, the Pequot War (1636-1637) remains one of the most controversial and significant events in Colonial and Native history of America. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is identifying and preserving battlefields and historical sites associated with the Pequot War.

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This website contains research from the Mashantucket Pequot tribe's research into the Pequot War. One of the first conflicts between American Indian tribes and Europeans in the 1600s.

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Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

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Jim Calhoun - Special Assistant to the Director of Athletics - Staff Directory

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University of Connecticut Hall of Fame Head Coach Jim Calhoun has established himself as perhaps the greatest program builder in college basketball history. Having

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Benjamin Franklin . Citizen Ben . Founding Father | PBS

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Benjamin Franklin founded or helped found numerous organizations and institutions-fire-fighting clubs, academies, hospitals, libraries, and insurance companies. Although important, his roles in those institutions take a back seat to his part in helping found the United States of America.

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"The Most Brainiest Man?" The Red Scare and Free Speech in Connecticut

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations.The Red Scare reflected the same anxiety about free speech and obsession with consensus that had characterized the war years. The Nation, on April 17, 1920, recounted how a clothing salesman received six months in jail for saying that Vladimir Lenin was smart. Connecticut had established a Sedition Act that made it illegal to utter any speech deemed "injurious" to the United States.

A Bond salesman named Herbert Warner walked into a clothing store in Waterbury, Connecticut, in January. He had been told that some one there might buy bonds. Joseph Yenowsky, a salesman, met him. Yenowsky's savings consisted of $300 in Liberty bonds, and he refused to convert them. The result was an argument about bonds, sugar, and Lenin, followed by Yenowsky's conviction under the Connecticut Sedition law, and his sentence to six months in jail

This Connecticut Sedition law, be it said, is one of the shortest and most comprehensive laws on the statute books. "No person," it declares, "shall in public, or before any assemblage of ten or more persons, advocate in any language any measure, doctrine, proposal, or propaganda intended to injuriously affect the Government of the United States or the State of Connecticut." The measure advocated, it will be noted, need not involve force or illegality; the sole test of its criminality is some one's opinion as to what is "injurious."

Now Yenowsky is a Socialist and a member of the American Legion, and on both counts he disliked a bond salesman who had never been in the army. When Warner suggested opportunities for rapid wealth, Yenowsky retorted "There is only one way of making money quick, and that is to steal it." "Steal in a legal way," he explained. "Rockefeller, he can go out and steal millions and get away with it."

Here the testimony diverges. According to Warner, "We talked on some things which I do not remember." According to Yenowsky, Warner thought Rockefeller's method "a good way to get ahead." This naturally led the discussion to wander. It touched the price of sugar, and led to a copy of the Liberator lying on the table. Yenowsky pointed to a picture of Lenin.

"There is what I consider one of the brainiest men in the world," he says he remarked. According to Warner, however, he declared that Lenin was "the greatest, the most brainiest man on earth today."

"Are you sure he used that expression?" the Magistrate asked, when the case came up in court.

"Yes."

"The most brainiest man on earth?"

"Yes, the greatest and the most brainiest man."

"Which did he say?"

"He said the most brainy man on earth today."

"He said the most brainy, not the most brainiest, man?"

"Yes."

"On earth today?"

"Yes."

This matter settled, the Court relapsed into silence.

Warner, however, had more to day. He insisted that a third man had intervened to declare that Yenowsky was a "Bolsheviki." According to Warner, Yenowsky had also said he did not like the government of the United States, and would like to see a soviet form of government here, but that he would not go back to Russia because he was going to "stay here and fight for the freedom of the government." At that, Warner reported, "I got so thoroughly wrought up I could not stand it any longer." So he went out and got a detective to arrest Yenowsky.

This entire conversation was denied by Yenowsky. It was also denied by Abraham Lichtenstein, proprietor of the clothing store, who heard the discussion, and by another employee. The man, who according to Warner, had intervened to declare Yenowsky was "a Bolsheviki," could not be discovered, and the only other weirdnesses at the trial were character witnesses for the defendant. Lichtenstein remembered the argument about bonds, but had heard nothing about the government of the United States or soviets. "They were arguing about bonds, see," he testified, "and he said he has got enough bonds, and he showed him the picture, That is were that man got hot-headed. . . . Mr. Yenowksy said 'He [Lenin] is a brave man,' and that is all." Louis Levine, the other clerk, heard them "arguing about sugar, twenty-five cents a pound, and then they were talking about bank bonds, and then when the argument was all over Mr. Warner got hot-headed and asked Mr. Yenowsky for his name, and Mr. Yenowsky refused to give him his name, and he went out and he brought a detective with him and they took Mr. Yenowsky to the station."

Charles M. Peach, twice Socialist candidate for mayor of Waterbury, and John W. Ring, secretary of the Socialist local, testified to Yenowsky's reputation for truth and veracity, and that they had never discovered symptoms of communism or anarchism in his conversation.

The Court was once more aroused to interest. "You did not talk about the principles of Lenin or Trotzky or any of those people?" The Court was back on the trail of the most brainiest man. "No," Ring replied, "I know nothing about them only what I have read in the newspapers here."

"And more than most of us want to know about them," came from the Magistrate.

The defense rested. There was no summing-up.

"I will take jurisdiction," the Court announced immediately. "Six months in jail. Bonds for an appeal, $51,000."

Source: L. S. G., "The Most Brainiest Man," Nation 110 (April 17, 1920): 510-511.

See Also:"Sailor Wounds Spectator Disrespectful of Flag": The Red Scare, 1919-1921
"An Eminently Safe Citizen": Robert Benchley on "The Making of a Red"
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer Makes "The Case against the Reds"

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"The Most Brainiest Man?" The Red Scare and Free Speech in Connecticut

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The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A.

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The raid was no small affair. The damage inflicted by the British amounted to the costliest maritime loss of the entire War of 1812. Now, historian Jerry Roberts and archaeologist Kevin McBride, of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, are heading a team seeking to confirm and document the logistics of the raid so it may be designated as a National Battlefield Site on the National Registry of Historic Places.

"The British Raid on Essex was once known throughout the country during a very short time in its immediate aftermath," says Roberts. "The attack made headlines in over 90 newspapers across the country. But the fame was short-lived, for when the British burned Washington, D.C., only two months later, the attack on Essex was completely eclipsed."

The attack, which took place on April 7-8, 1814, was a major military assault involving a high-risk nighttime attack deep into the Connecticut hinterland. It resulted in the torching of 27 vessels valued at the unprecedented and staggering sum of over $200,000. At the time, the community itself was eager to put the devastating event behind them, and more recently, was acknowledged only through a local Commemoration Day parade held each year, often referred to tongue-in-cheek (and more importantly, inaccurately) as the "Loser's Day Parade." The annual event was organized by the Essex Sailing Masters Fife and Drum Corps. If not for their efforts, the catastrophic attack on Essex during the War of 1812 likely would have slipped entirely out of public consciousness and been relegated to the dusty archives of history.

In the last several years, Roberts has turned his attention to a reexamination of the events of that l day, revealing a story filled with a turncoat, flames, and more than its fair share of mysteries. Roberts is publishing his findings in his forthcoming book titled, The British Raid on Essex: The Forgotten Battle of the War of 1812 (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). Roberts says: "As I began to research the battle, I realized almost immediately that the little that people thought they knew about this event was based on local myths and almost completely wrong."

It all took place late in the night of April 7, 1814, when 136 British sailors and marines rowed six shallow-draft boats, loaded with weapons, about six miles up the Connecticut River with the river seaport town of Pettipaug (known today as Essex), as their destination. With their nighttime assault, at about 3:30 a.m., the British were able to successfully exploit the element of surprise. Rumor had it that it was a local man, exactly who no one could say for sure, who assisted the marines in their navigation of the tricky shifting sandbars that had previously protected the village from attack. Essex was a prime target for the British, who identified the village as a hotbed for the construction of privateering vessels. As the British arrived in the harbor, they were met by a volley fired by a handful of armed but disorganized men, certainly no match for the overwhelming force of the British marines. When the marines landed, they quickly cleared the town using their overwhelming firepower. To avoid a deeper more time-consuming conflict, the British chose to spare the buildings of the town and attack only the sailing vessels along the waterfront. The British proceeded to commandeer all available valuable maritime supplies and to burn every ship under construction, seizing two privateers, the 18-gun Young Anaconda and 16-gunner Eagle as prizes of war. The sailors worked thoroughly and quickly, eager to leave before daylight and risk conflict with the increasing number of townspeople gathering in the area as daybreak arrived.

At 11 a.m., the British began their return to the mouth of the Connecticut River and the safety of the guns of the warships guarding the entrance. Meanwhile, the Americans began mobilizing their forces. As the news of the raid spread to the surrounding countryside, armed men began making their way to the banks of the Connecticut River in an attempt to trap the British. Around 12:30 p.m., the Young Anaconda had run aground. Instead of wasting time meddling with the foundering vessel, Captain Richard Coote decided to transfer its contents to the Eagle and burn it. Coote and his men now faced the daunting prospect of the growing force the Americans were mounting along both the east and west banks of the narrowest part of the river, approximately three quarters of a mile wide. It was at this point that Commander Coote made an important and shrewd decision. He anchored his ships, along with the Eagle, and had his men duck low below the height of the side walls of their boats for cover, for they were still within musket shot of shore. They would not risk passing through the narrows further downriver in daylight, but would wait and attempt to pass under the cover of darkness that night. While anchored in the river, a local man named Captain Charles Harrison approached the barges in a boat flying a white flag and carrying a message from his senior militia officer, Major Marshe Ely. The American, Harrison, presented Coote with the following message:
"To avoid the effusion of human blood is the desire of every honorable man. The number of forces under my command are increased so much as to render it impossible for you to escape. I therefore suggest to you the propriety of surrendering yourselves prisoners of war and by that means prevent the consequence of an unequal conflict which must otherwise ensue."
In his personal papers, Coote recorded his response to the brazen demand: "My reply was verbal, and merely expressed my surprise at such summons, assuring the bearer, that though sensible of their humane intentions, we set their power to detain us at defiance."

As evening approached, Captain Ely's threat became a reality. Local militia were out in force and had finally positioned a six pound cannon putting the anchored British vessels within range. They met immediate success. Two British were killed, and the danger of further casualties forced the British to abandon their position. By now it was about 7 p.m., and Coote determined that it was dark enough to risk escape through the gauntlet of American forces. Since speed and secrecy were of the essence, Coote chose to order the Eagle to be burned before weighing anchor. By now, the combined American forces of about 400 men included local residents, town militia, and hundreds of marines from the military fort located 20 miles away in New London. The weaponry varied but was considerable, including six to eight 6-pound cannons, the standard artillery pieces of the state militia of the day. The men were clamoring along the banks of the river trying to find the optimal positions from which to fire their guns.

Fully aware of Coote's plans, Americans on both sides of the river built massive bonfires in the hope of producing enough light to spot the British boats as they passed. Silently drifting, and with no moonlight to reveal their position, the British slipped quietly down the river. Because of the mist along the water, the frustrated Americans were essentially shooting blindly into the darkness, not knowing when or precisely where the British were actually passing. Coote recalled, "I have reason to suppose it must have proved much more destructive to their friends [on the opposite side] than to [us]." By turning nature to their advantage, the British were able to elude the Americans largely unscathed. The Americans knew the game was up when they heard British sailors and marines cheering, "God save the King!" as they escaped the range of American firepower into Long Island Sound.

Through their extensive archaeological efforts, Kevin McBride and his team have been able to shed significant new light upon the battle.

"It is clear from the archeological evidence that the Battle of Essex took place in many more locations and with far greater intensity than we ever could otherwise have known," McBride says. Indeed, his team has found concentrations of bullets at many locations from which the Americans tried to slow, trap, and ultimately capture the British troops. There is even the possibility that one of the burned British prizes has been found in the river, although, while the location and size of the wreck is promising, its identity may never be confirmed. Jerry Roberts, working in conjunction with Amy Trout of the Connecticut River Museum, among others, has uncovered many important details to the story. That turncoat local who guided the troops up the river? He is referred to as Torpedo Jack, of New London, and his fascinating fate is detailed in the book. Just as importantly, Roberts and his team have discredited many local legends surrounding the event, such as the perception that the Essex residents offered little resistance as they passively watched their livelihood go up in flames. The team's research reveals the extent and willingness of the people of the Connecticut Shoreline to put up a fight, a fact obscured by names like the 'Loser's Day Parade' and by numerous other myths.

McBride, Roberts, and their team are in the process of submitting an application to the National Register of Historic Places, requesting that the Essex waterfront, and various locations along the banks of the river, be recognized as an official historic battle. Roberts' book is due out in May 2014. It will represent a central contribution to the bicentennial festivities of the British Raid on Essex. Dozens of organizations from the Essex community and across Connecticut will be hosting events during the "Bicentennial Week," as well as the rest of the year. Roberts reflects, "It will be a great opportunity to commemorate an event that is important to our community and nation's history. It is also an important and rewarding opportunity for us to begin to set the historic and public record straight."

So what accounts for the overwhelming exclusion of the Battle of Essex from the history books over the years? For a long time, it wasn't the type of event locals were interested in celebrating. The perceived lack of resistance, and the existence of a purported local turncoat, were not points of pride for the community. But they turned out largely to be just that, perceptions rather than facts. An impressive effort was made to prevent the British from escaping. It is now our obligation to set the record straight by placing the Essex raid in its rightful position in the history of the War of 1812.

Image Credits: Mural by Russell Buckingham, courtesy of The Connecticut River Museum

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Rethinking the Raid on Essex - Coastal Connecticut Magazine

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The raid was no small affair. The damage inflicted by the British amounted to the costliest maritime loss of the entire War of 1812. Now, historian Jerry Roberts and archaeologist Kevin McBride, of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, are heading a team seeking to confirm and document the logistics of the raid so it may be designated as a National Battlefield Site on the National Registry of Historic Places.

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Nearly 20 years after his tragic death, the legacy of Owen Hart lives on despite his notable absence from the WWE Hall of Fame, something that continues to baffle his older brother.

"I think for what Owen gave to wrestling that it would be important for him to be in the Hall of Fame," five-time WWF champion Bret Hart said during a conversation on CBS Sports' "In This Corner" podcast. "I think it would have meant a lot to my dad [the late Stu Hart], and it would mean a lot to me. I don't think the Hall of Fame is the same without him.

"I know that Mark Henry, as an example, made a strong speech this past year about getting Owen to the Hall of Fame, and I totally agree."
Big fan of WWE? Subscribe to our podcast -- In This Corner with Brian Campbell -- where we go in depth on everything you need to know in WWE each week.
Owen, the youngest of 12 in the legendary Hart pro wrestling family from Calgary, died in May 1999 following an accidental fall from the rafters due to an equipment malfunction at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, during his entrance at WWE's Over the Edge pay-per-view card.

Henry, a former stablemate and friend of Owen, used a portion of his own Hall of Fame induction speech during WrestleMania 34 weekend in April to make a very public and emotional plea aimed at Owen's widow, Martha Hart, who has long objected to WWE honoring her late husband.

"Owen brought so much joy to my life," Henry said. "I wish that he could be here with us, and I miss him dearly. And Martha, let that camera zoom in here, please. This is not from the company, this is not from other wrestlers, this is from his other brother. He needs to be here, and I hate that I haven't kept up like I should have. I would love to be able to look down one day and see [Owen's son] Oje able to be among us. This is his birthright."

Martha, 51, has long been at odds with both WWE and the extended Hart family following Owen's death. She has been involved in multiple lawsuits attempting to protect his name and image.

Bret, whose extended candid interview can be heard on Tuesday's episode of the "In This Corner" podcast, pulled no punches when asked whether he believes WWE should push past the wishes of Martha in order to honor his brother.

"Oh yeah, I think Martha, Owen's widow, is a very obtuse, square-headed person," Hart said. "I think she has done more to erase my brother Owen's memory than she ever did to remember him. I think it really bothers me that the fans that love Owen so much don't get a chance to remember him. You do these kind of things for the people that are here left to remember them."

Although Bret -- a 2006 WWE Hall of Fame inductee -- said he won't lose any sleep over it, he hopes to see Owen honored during his own lifetime mostly to remind others what kind of person he was in and out of the ring.

"Owen was the nicest, kindest, most adored wrestlers for his kindness," Bret said. "Like, he's not remembered for his high-flying, and he may be remembered for his practical jokes, but more importantly he is remembered for the kind of guy he was and being a real friend to people when they were struggling or got depressed and were bummed out about being away from their home all the time. Owen was one of those kind of guys where it was almost like magic where he could pick your spirits up and make you smile to get through the day.

"You can leave Owen Hart out or leave Dynamite Kid out of it or some of these great wrestlers, but why are you leaving them out of it? There are a lot of great wrestlers who haven't got their pat on the back at the Hall of Fame and it started bothering me to the point where I don't think I will go again to any of the ceremonies until they put in proper, deserving candidates."

It's because of the notable names who have been left out of the WWE Hall of Fame that Bret isn't afraid to say he believes the entire thing has lost its luster. Among the most glaring omissions, according to him, are the British Bulldogs, Demolition and Sweet Daddy Siki.

"Just about anyone can be in it, and it doesn't really matter if you were a great wrestler or what your accomplishments or contribution were to wrestling," Bret said. "Then you have the Rock 'n' Roll Express, who never even made it in WWE, they are in it. Terry Gordy and the [Fabulous] Freebirds are in it when they were too drunk to make most of the towns. I was there in the dressing room when Andre the Giant fired all three of them. They were not great role models or hard workers.
Bret Hart stars alongside fellow wrestling legend "Superstar" Billy Graham in the documentary "350 Days," which gives a behind-the-scenes look the world of professional wrestling through interviews, photographs and rare in-ring footage featuring a who's who of history. The movie, which also features the likes of Greg "The Hammer" Valentine, Paul "Mr. Wonderful" Orndorff and Tito Santana, will air in theaters nationwide for one night on July 12. Tickets and more information can be found at www.fathomevents.com/350days.
"You look at the people they have in the Hall of Fame, even some of these celebrities in there, and you go: For me personally, with Owen not being in the Hall of Fame, there is a lot of people that belong in the Hall of Fame that are not in it. If it turns out that WWE is going to keep being a Hall of Fame that caters to suck ups and people that are in the company that feel they owe a favor to but never contributed to the business as wrestlers, I question the whole Hall of Fame itself, and I wonder if there will ever be a real Hall of Fame that really caters to just the wrestlers.

"For WWE, I hope Vince McMahon and all of them will step up from a historical perspective and take care of the wrestlers who really did make the company."

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Bret Hart on why Owen Hart should be in the WWE Hall of Fame and what's keeping him out

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Nearly 20 years after his tragic death, the legacy of Owen Hart lives on despite his notable absence from the WWE Hall of Fame, something that continues to baffle his older brother.

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The first years of the 1800s in America were loud with canal talk. The enormous success of the Erie Canal had aroused engineering instincts in every American. Even the barnyard was invaded; inventive farmers were building small canals from their farms to the nearest river, some had devised sluiceways from barn to barn for floating heavy loads instead of hauling them in wagons, and others made canal ways from their land to the nearest mill to float logs and grain boats instead of braving the yard-thick mud of the roads. The wheel seemed doomed to obsolescence. Oxcart hauling was two-mile-an-hour transportation limited to good weather; a level highway usable in every weather seemed the answer to all travel.

The canal era was the first American school of engineering; only after the Erie Canal did civil engineering become a recognized profession. The great names of early American engineering were largely those of men who had served apprenticeship on the Erie project; but the men who gouged the countryside with a maze of smaller canals are forgotten. Long before excavating machines were devised, men were digging hundred-mile canals through mountainous country with nothing but picks and shovels. The vast extent of such hand labor is almost beyond conception.

One canal, dug by hand shovel through the rocky New England hills, is a classic example, for it embodies the spirit of the canal era at the very moment when America turned to railroads and sounded the era's knell. The Farmington Canal line stretched from New Haven on Long Island Sound, through the middle of Connecticut, and into the center of Massachusetts-a distance of over eighty miles. To tell the average Yankee of today that hand shovels once built a waterway to float huge boats through New England all but exhausts his credulity. The Farmington has long since vanished into the landscape, transformed into roadbeds for railroads and automobile highways. Many towns that were built along its banks are nowadays unaware that it ever existed. But though the full story of American canals is too complex or obscure to be recorded fully, antiquarians like those who "collect" covered bridges are now delving into canal history, identifying thousands of ditches-their strange stone abutments overgrown with alders-that dot the back country.

It was in 1822, at a meeting in Farmington, Connecticut, that New Englanders began to speak of equaling the Erie Canal with a waterway from Long Island Sound to Canada. The project would run directly through New England, making the region the center of commerce of all America. The same year a charter was granted, and the Farmington Canal Company began getting estimates on quantity orders for shovels and wheelbarrows. The year after, a survey had been completed and an estimate made of the cost of the canal through Connecticut: $420,698.88. The Mechanics Bank of New Haven was chartered on condition of its subscribing $200,000 of the canal company's stock, and after another year the necessary money had been raised. On July 4, 1825, a ceremony was set for Granby, near the Massachusetts line, where excavation was to commence.

July 4 fell on a Monday that year, but the preparations were so great that spontaneous celebrations broke out on the day before, and accusations by the clergy who had gathered for the occasion led to prophecies of doom because of the Sabbath-breaking. Another evil omen occurred when the gilt shovel with which Governor Oliver Wolcott was turning the first spadeful of earth broke in half. The cautious Yankees were doubtful about the canal from the beginning, and every event seemed to hint of failure. But the celebration was the biggest that New England had ever seen: three thousand people were in attendance, the Simsbury artillery performed, and a canalboat on wheels drawn by six horses came all the way from New Haven with Captain George Rowland aboard. A procession two miles long followed, and a supper was served on the green.

After two years, the little hole begun by Governor Wolcott had deepened into a ditch 36 feet wide from the Massachusetts line to the waters of the Sound. The heaviest machine that had been used was a horse scoop no bigger than the one any farmer kept in his barn. The tools were picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows.

During the building of the canal, the whole state of Connecticut boomed. Taverns were built along the banks, and land was sold as being "close to the canal." Industries grew beside the ditch even before it held water.

"On June 20, 1828," Deacon Hooker recorded, "a multitude of people collected to witness the launching and sailing of the first canalboat seen in Farmington." The Deacon went on to say that "bell-ringing, cannon-firing and music by the Phoenix Band were accompaniments. The boat (named James Hillhouse) was drawn by four large gray horses handsomely decked and rode by as many black boys dressed in white." It was launched and the canal was at last in use.

From 1828 till 1835, when construction was completed to the Connecticut River at Northampton, Massachusetts, the canal enjoyed a period of romantic activity. Pleasure excursions were the canal's specialty, but wood products, cider, maple sugar, and meal actually floated down its surface from the north, while salt, oysters, rum, coal, and hardware sailed back into the New England hills. Itinerant vendors with floating stores wandered along the route, underselling the shops ashore and incurring frowns and even hostile ordinances from canalside towns. Yankee peddlers abandoned their well-known wagons and built scows festooned with flags and advertisements. Some were small enough to be poled by hand rather than drawn by horses. Citizens attended town meetings, did their shopping, and even went to church by boat.

But the picture was not all rosy. To begin with, farmers were most unfriendly to a project which had cut their lands in two and drained their bog meadows. Planned "disasters" occurred almost daily: embankments were dug away, tributary streams blocked, and bridges toppled over. One farmer who had a grudge against a neighbor made a break in the canal bank and flooded his antagonist's farm. Lawsuits took up more of the canal officials' time than anything else. In the second place, droughts and floods were unkindly toward the Farmington; in 1843 floods damaged it and the whole fall trade was lost; 1845 saw it close down for lack of water. And finally, repairs and maintenance were costing more than tolls-the canal's only source of revenue-brought in; by 1846 the stockholders had refused to make further advances. The canal had yielded $75,000 a year in its best times, yet overall it had shown the staggering loss of $1,377,156.54.

Then, in 1847, a railroad opened to Plainville, and in that same year a break in the canal caused a barge full of coal to be swept out into the river and overturned. Public sentiment turned away from the canal and concentrated upon the railroad. Almost overnight the canal ceased to be. Taverns became dwellings, farmers moved in and blocked up portions of the canal for their own use, muskrats and rushes took over the banks, and small boys commandeered unused stretches for fishing places. The Farmington Canal was dead.

It was not, however, a complete loss. It opened a shorter route through the middle of New England and prepared a level roadbed for railroad travel. It stimulated business in regions which might otherwise still be back-country farms today, and it sparked the Yankee imagination. One of the Farmington's little-known claims to fame, for example, was an early propeller-driven canalboat. Connecticut inventor Benjamin Beecher designed it a few years before Ericsson's propeller had been perfected. He built his boat in an abandoned sawmill, taking it to Cheshire during the winter on an ox-drawn sled and launching it in a frozen creek.

Beecher's boat was run by a steam engine he had designed himself; from the prow extended his "water-gimlet," a reverse-action propeller which pulled the boat instead of pushing it. On her first trip the craft carried a group of financial backers four miles upstream and back, but the speed was disappointing. Not only was she slower than paddle-wheel boats, she could be beaten even by horse-pulled barges. A later trip, designed to interest the same group in financing changes in the propeller, ended in engine failure. The passengers had to walk back, and the boat was beached indefinitely. Long after the canal was abandoned, she lay on her side near Cheshire Center, like a monument to the inventiveness and hopelessness of the great ditch itself.

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The first years of the 1800s in America were loud with canal talk. The enormous success of the Erie Canal had aroused engineering instincts in every American.

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Alse Young of Windsor, Conn., was the first person who was recorded as being executed for witchcraft in New England. Some accounts say she was hanged in Hartford's Meeting House Square, which is now the site of Connecticut's Old State House. Credit Credit Jessica Hill for The New York Times

As Halloween approaches, crowds will head to Salem, Mass., the longtime epicenter of witch-related tourism. But few will visit Connecticut, where practicing witchcraft became a crime punishable by death in 1642, decades before it was outlawed in Salem.

The Connecticut Colony sent colonial America's first condemned witch - Alse Young, a resident of Windsor - to the gallows in 1647. A total of 11 people, nine women and two men, were executed by 1662. The men were the husbands of the convicted women. In total, 35 residents were accused of witchcraft. Fearing for their lives, many left their communities.

By 1750, witchcraft was no longer on the books as a crime.

"Not much comfort to those hanged," said Anthony Griego, a retired New Haven police officer who lives in Hamden, Conn., and is a member of a group called CT Witch Memorial. The middle word of the organization's name is an acronym for Witch Interrogations, Trials & Colonial Hangings.

Mr. Griego said he learned of Connecticut's witch trials 20 years ago and was surprised that no one had sought to clear the names of the victims, who he said were treated unfairly "by a judicial system made of men who felt divinely inspired."

Scant documentation of the trials remains, and Beth Caruso, a Windsor resident and a founder of CT Witch Memorial, said Ms. Young's name had been unknown until old diary entries mentioning her surfaced in the early 20th century.

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The notebook of Matthew Grant, first surveyor and second town clerk of the colony of Windsor, Conn. Grant's entry on this page of Alse Young hanged is the first recorded entry of a person executed for witchcraft in New England. Credit Jessica Hill for The New York Times

Ms. Caruso, who lectures about the Connecticut trials at libraries and historical societies, wrote the novel "One of Windsor: The Untold Story of America's First Witch Hanging." She and Mr. Griego created the CT Witch Memorial page on Facebook in 2016 to share stories about the trials and spread word of relevant events.

Walter Woodward, a Connecticut state historian who is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, said the state's witch history has been overlooked.

"Historians of New England have long treated events in Massachusetts as if they represented the entire history of New England," he said. "This has only begun to change significantly in recent years."

Professor Woodward believes that another reason for Salem's prominence is that its witch trials were much more condensed, spanning just 15 months, compared with the decades of less frequent trials in Connecticut.

The Windsor Town Council, prompted by CT Witch Memorial, voted 9-0 in February to clear the names of Alse Young and Lydia Gilbert, who were hanged.

Now Ms. Caruso and Mr. Griego hope other Connecticut communities - Fairfield, Farmington, Hartford, Stratford and Wethersfield - will follow Windsor's example.

Bricks commemorating weddings, citizens of the year and other notable people from Windsor, Conn., are placed in a circle near the town green. Among them are bricks for Alse Young and Lydia Gilbert. The Windsor Town Council voted 9-0 in February to clear their names. Credit Jessica Hill for The New York Times

Paul Montinieri, the mayor of Wethersfield, said he had "never heard any commentary or expression on this topic" from the community. However, if a grass-roots endeavor arose, he said the "town leadership would investigate it."

John Q. Gale, a lawyer and member of Hartford's Court of Common Council, said he had "never had occasion to consider" clearing the names of the women convicted in Hartford. However, "there should always be an effort to right all injustices," he said.

Ms. Caruso said increased publicity about the state's history could benefit its tourism industry.

"The exhibits about the Salem witch trials are some of the most visited tourist attractions in New England and bring an enormous amount of cash flow into Salem," she said.

Professor Woodward said increased acknowledgment of Connecticut's witch history could have "great potential for boosting tourism." However, he said, "many of the exact locations of particular events are either unknown or have been effaced through the centuries. There are also very few artifacts remaining from the period of the witch trials, so this would have to be a created story largely presented in imagined or simulated spaces."

Randy Fiveash, the director of Connecticut's Office of Tourism, said he believed the state had not promoted its witch-trial history because no "physical place or venue that speaks to the events" exists. "So, really, there isn't a there, there."

Peter Gillespie, the director of planning and economic development in Wethersfield, said there could be significant tourism value in the history of the witch trials. But he also said he thought the witch trials were "a part of the state's history that we are not very proud of and therefore not greatly interested in promoting."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The First Witch Trials Were in Connecticut, Years Before Salem. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Where Was the First Woman Condemned for Witchcraft? Not in Salem

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As Halloween approaches, crowds will head to Salem, Mass., the longtime epicenter of witch-related tourism. But few will visit Connecticut, where practicing witchcraft became a crime punishable by death in 1642, decades before it was outlawed in Salem. The Connecticut Colony sent colonial America's first condemned witch - Alse Young, a resident of Windsor - to the gallows in 1647.

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Norwich - The scents of fresh asphalt and woodchips filled the air this past week as workers put the finishing touches on a project decades in the making, with more twists and turns than the steep, winding path to the ruins of the Ellis Walter Ruley homestead.

Norwich dignitaries, guests and spectators will gather Friday to dedicate the Ellis Walter Ruley Memorial Park on the 3-acre Hammond Avenue property where the self-taught folk artist created dozens of colorful paintings and raised his family.

The park is a lasting symbol of the city's reversal of what family members and advocates say were deeply felt societal wrongs against the African-American painter.

Ruley's nephew, Harry Ruley, now deceased, for years had lobbied the City Council to recognize and honor his uncle, to no avail.

"Ellis Ruley is surely a treasure in Norwich," Harry Ruley said to the City Council on Feb. 19, 2004. "His name should be placed prominently with others in the city of Norwich. I respectfully ask that this City Council establish some kind of memorial for the lasting memory of Ellis Ruley."

The City Council created the Ellis Walter Ruley Project Committee in 2015 amid a high-profile new investigation into the deaths of Ruley and his son-in-law.

The new park was designed as an artist's reflection site. An art exhibit of Ruley's work is planned for September at the Slater Memorial Museum.

For Dianne Laiscell, Ruley's great-granddaughter, visiting the homestead will be a homecoming. Laiscell lived there with Ellis and his wife, Wilhelmina Ruley, as a young girl. She accompanied Ruley Project Committee members there in 2015 and told them of his favorite trees, the house and features of the land her "Papa" loved.

"I think it's a good thing," Laiscell, of Providence, said of the park. "I hope people enjoy it. It's an honor, and I hope people enjoy it."

The rustic character of the land was retained with minimal development. The winding dirt driveway was paved for safety as a handicapped-accessible path, and thick wooden steps break up a steep path through the woods. Paved parking lots are at the edge of the property off Hammond Avenue.

At the top of the hill, a small circular patio with three stone benches and a square concrete water fountain at the center overlooks the fieldstone foundation where Ruley's house once stood. Three plaques with images of his paintings describe the land, the artist and the well, a key feature in the story.

Local stoneworker Juni Rodrigues was hired to rebuild the well top and install a protective grate over the top.

The wild woods and giant boulders Ruley painted with fantastical scenes of animals and people remain undisturbed, along with the stone walls he built.

"It's a beautiful piece of property," Ruley Project Committee Chairman Frank Manfredi said last week, checking out the finishing touches. "I can see how someone who lived here would want to paint."

Manfredi said the park, which will be part of the Norwich Freedom Trail, cost about $40,000, funded through donations and a $55,000 grant from the city's Sachem Fund for the park and other Ruley projects.

Norwich Public Utilities did extensive work pro bono to run electricity and water lines up the hill and provide woodchips and mulch. Hyde Park Landscaping donated mulch and chips, and LeFrancois Floral & Gifts donated two ornamental apple trees and plantings around the patio.
Plywood and house paint
Ruley's father, Joshua Ruley, escaped from slavery by jumping a ship headed north, settling in Norwich. Ellis, a construction worker, used an insurance payment in 1933 from a car accident in 1929 to buy the 3-acre property. Also in 1933, Ruley married a white woman, Wilhelmina, whose image appeared repeatedly in his paintings.

Ruley taught himself to paint using plywood or Masonite and posterboard for canvas and house paint. He sold his works for small amounts at art shows on the Slater Museum lawn and stored them in his cottage home.

Resentment and racism aimed toward the family persisted.

On Nov. 20, 1948, Ruley's son-in-law, Douglas Harris, was found dead, his 6-foot-plus body head-first in the narrow, shallow well. Authorities ruled his death accidental drowning.

On Jan. 16, 1959, Ruley was found dead at the base of his long driveway, with a trail of blood said to be 100 feet long. His death was ruled accidental. Months later, the house burned to the ground, with much of his artwork lost. The city took the property for back taxes in 1988, and it sat abandoned for 30 years.

Attitudes about Ruley's art started to change in the mid-1990s, when California filmmaker, artist and author Glenn Palmedo-Smith published a biography of Ruley, "Discovering Ellis Ruley: The Story of an American Outsider Artist." A traveling exhibit of 62 Ruley paintings toured eight cities across the country.

It took longer for attitudes toward the Ruley family to turn. In 2014, the city, businesses and residents embraced the effort to exhume the bodies of Harris and Ruley for autopsies conducted by retired New York chief forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden. New coffins, headstones and services were donated, and a large crowd attended the re-interment on Oct. 20, 2014.

In a July 27, 2015, news conference, Baden announced he could not determine whether Ruley's injuries resulted from a fall or an assault. But Harris, he said, was strangled before his body was crammed into the well.

Norwich police opened cold case investigations but nothing has been announced in the cases.
'A redeeming experience'
Twenty years ago, when Palmedo-Smith came to Norwich to research Ruley's life and death, locals told him to go home, mind his own business and stop trying to revive things best forgotten. He said his hotel room was broken into, and he was accosted in the City Hall basement archives.

Palmedo-Smith, who led the exhumation effort, plans to attend Friday's park dedication. He marveled at the city's turnaround to now embrace Ruley.

"It's a redeeming experience that I don't think too many people have seen in my lifetime," Palmedo-Smith said last week. "I'm looking very much forward to being at this activity. The dignitaries there. Just the warmth coming from that place."

Ill feelings still might linger, Palmedo-Smith said. An Emmy-award-winning documentarian, he filmed extensive footage on Ruley's life, art, the autopsies and Norwich's transformation in embracing Ruley. But Palmedo-Smith said he has been rejected multiple times by prominent Northeast foundations for funding to get the film produced.

Norwich Arts Center at 62 Broadway will air Smith's five-Emmy Award-winning documentary on the Korean War, "Hold at All Costs: The Battle of Outpost Harry," at 6 p.m. Friday, followed by a 10-minute trailer for the Ruley documentary, called "unRuley." Admission is free.

Laiscell also has honored her Papa's request to keep the family story alive. In June, Laiscell's book, "Young and Innocent: the Lives of Ellis and Wilhelmina Ruley" was published in paperback - $12.95 on Amazon.com - by Page Publishing in New York.

"It's a true story I wrote," Laiscell said. "It's a true story about Ellis and Wilhelmina. I'm following what Ellis asked me to do. He asked me to tell the story to the people and that's exactly what I'm doing."
c.bessette@theday.com

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From outcast to treasure: Norwich park honors Ellis Ruley

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Norwich - The scents of fresh asphalt and woodchips filled the air this past week as workers put the finishing touches on a project decades in the making, with more twists and turns than the steep, winding path to the ruins of the Ellis Walter Ruley homestead.

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Venture Smith, 1729?-1805. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America. Related by Himself.

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A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America. Related by Himself. By Venture Smith, 1729?-1805

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HARTFORD, CT - A total of 584,881 people died of cancer in the United States in 2014.

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death right behind heart disease in the United States, according to HealthGrove, a health data website.

HealthGrove worked with the National Cancer Institute to determine which states have the highest cancer rate in the country and other key health issues.

The authors of the report note that while Connecticut has one of the highest cancer rates in the U.S., it also has one of the lowest cancer-related mortality rates. Connecticut has a high number of doctors living in the state, the report notes.

The most common cancers are breast, lung, prostate, and colon cancer.

Among all 50 states, Connecticut's cancer incident rate per 100,000 people is 469, which ranks tied for sixth-worst with New Jersey.

Connecticut's mortality rate per 100,000 people is 152, and that ranks 42nd. In Connecticut there are 122.4 doctors per 100,000 people and the number of doctors in the state is sixth-highest based on population figures.

Kentucky has the nation's highest cancer incident rate per 100,000 people at 505.2 and its mortality rate per 100,000 is 201.2.

Followed behind Kentucky are Rhode Island, No. 2, Louisiana, No. 3, Delaware, No. 4, and the District of Columbia, No. 5.

On the other end of the spectrum, the states with the lowest cancer rates are: Utah, No. 5, Alaska, No. 4, Wyoming, No. 3, Arizona, No. 2, and New Mexico, No. 1.

New Mexico's cancer incident rate per 100,000 people is 365.4 and its mortality rate is 148 per 100,000 people.
Read the full HeartGrove report here. --Photo via Shutterstock
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Connecticut's Cancer Rate is One of the Nation's Highest: Report

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HARTFORD, CT - A total of 584,881 people died of cancer in the United States in 2014. Cancer is the second-leading cause of death right behind heart disease in the United States, according to HealthGrove, a health data website.

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29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers: First Black Regiment in the Civil War for CT

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29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers: First Black Regiment in the Civil War for CT

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Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project - Stories about the people, traditions, innovations, and events that make up Connecticut's rich history.

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29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers Fought More than One War - Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

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The state’s first African American regiment of the Civil War distinguished itself by battling Confederate forces and 19th-century prejudices.

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After all the chest-thumping about Southern "traitors," after the flag-waving, the brass bands and the grand farewells, three regiments of Connecticut volunteers finally faced real war on a hill in Virginia.

Although the first Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, was a demoralizing loss for the North, the state's soldiers performed relatively well both during and after the fight.

"We do not claim for Connecticut troops in the battle of Bull Run a degree of courage and manly bearing superior to their loyal brothers from other States; but it is known, that, in retiring from the field, they maintained a degree of persistent good order and soldierly discipline not generally exhibited by the men of any other regiments," W.A. Croffut wrote in the 1868 volume "The Military and Civil History of Connecticut During the War of 1861-65."

Most other accounts agree that the Connecticut regiments fought more nobly than some of their counterparts, but that was little consolation for the Yankee army's wild-eyed run from the field, known ever after as "The Great Skedaddle."
Enthusiasm Dampened
Months earlier,on April 12, martial eagerness had consumed Connecticut after Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

By mid-May, an enthusiastic response to Connecticut Gov. William A. Buckingham's call for troops had filled three regiments, a total of 2,394 soldiers.

The 1 s t, 2 n d and 3 r d Connecticut Volunteer Infantry regiments were among a great funneling of 90-day volunteers from throughout the North intoWashington, D.C.

On July 16, 1861, more than 30,000 Union men marched south from Washington under Gen. Irvin McDowell. The ultimate goal was Richmond and a quick end to the war. First, however, McDowell sought to take Manassas, an important railroad junction.

On July 18, Union columns, with the Connecticut men in the lead division, reached nearby Centreville. Across a stream 5 miles away called Bull Run, about 22,000 Confederate troops had gathered under Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard.

The first great clash of the war began on the morning of July 21.

McDowell's first attempt to fold the rebels' right flank failed. He then shifted attention to the enemy's opposite flank, and that attack was at first successful. The Union soldiers beat the secessionists back to Henry House Hill, where Confederate Gen. Thomas J. Jackson earned his nickname, "Stonewall," for standing fast against the insistent blue lines.

Still, euphoria briefly swept the Union troops. Reacting to early dispatches from Washington, The Hartford Daily Courant on July 22 reported "EXCITING NEWS! BULL'S RUN TAKEN!"

But Confederate reinforcements were streaming in by rail, and the battle was soon to turn the other way.

The Connecticut Brigade, composed of the state's three regiments and one Maine unit, became immersed in the fight early in the afternoon after crossing Bull Run. Commanded by regular U.S. Army Gen. Erasmus Keyes, the brigade was in a division led by Connecticut native Gen. Daniel Tyler.

At about 1 p.m., the First Brigade was ordered to attack Confederate artillery and infantry on Henry Hill. Holding the 1st and 2nd Connecticut Regiments in reserve, Keyes ordered the 3 r d Connecticut and 2nd Maine forward.

"For almost twenty minutes the two sides exchanged shots, with the Virginians, joined by the Hampton Legion [South Carolina], firing from the wood line, while the Maine and Connecticut regiments remained in the open ground around the Robinson House," Ted Ballard wrote in "Battle of First Bull Run," a guide published by the Center of Military History.

Croffut includes Keyes' description of the battle:

"'My order to charge was obeyed with the utmost promptness. [Leaders of the 2 n d Maine and 3 r d Connecticut] pressed forward their regiments up the base slope about one hundred yards; when I ordered them to lie down, at a point offering a small protection, and load. I then ordered them to advance again, which they did, in the face of a movable battery of eight pieces and a large body of infantry, toward the top of the hill. As we moved forward, we came under the fire of other large bodies of the enemy, posted behind breastworks; and, on reaching the summit of the hill, the firing became so hot, that an exposure to it of five minutes would have annihilated my whole line.'"
'Nothing Like So Terrible As This'
But Croffut said the enemy fire "was nothing like so terrible as this, and if the order of Gen. Tyler had been given to Gen. Keyes during the last year of the war" - when heavy losses were expected - "it probably would have been executed."

Instead, the Connecticut and Maine units fell back in the face of heavy fighting. The battle drew to its humiliating close at about 4 p.m., when fresh rebel forces hit the Union right flank on Chinn Ridge.

A rout ensued and the Union Army fled the field.

The 2 n d Connecticut and the 2 n d Maine guarded the retreat, and as Matthew Warshauer writes in his book, "Connecticut in the American Civil War," the New Englanders repulsed a charge of about 800 Confederate cavalrymen.

"Connecticut troops had been the first on the field of battle and were the last to depart," Warshauer wrote.

State troops also stopped at camps that other regiments had abandoned to pack and load materiel so it would not fall into rebel hands.

Differing accounts list Connecticut casualties at Bull Run as four to six killed, 22 to 26 wounded and 32 to 37 captured.

Overall, the Union suffered about 2,900 casualties. The Confederates' losses totaled about 1,900.

Although Bull Run was a definitive victory for the South, the clash was a sobering lesson to both sides in the cost in human suffering the war would bring and that the conflict would not end quickly.

Nevertheless, Croffut wrote, the 90-day Connecticut volunteers - "almost without an exception" - re-enlisted.

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Civil War's 'Great Skedaddle': State Troops Uphold Honor

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After all the chest-thumping about Southern "traitors," after the flag-waving, the brass bands and the grand farewells, three regiments of Connecticut volunteers finally faced real war on a hill in Virginia. Although the first Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, was a demoralizing loss for the North, the state's soldiers performed relatively well both during and after the fight.

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Literacy Tests and the Right to Vote in CT (Specifically Simsbury I believe)

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Literacy Tests and the Right to Vote in CT (Specifically Simsbury I believe)

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The right to vote is an expression of political participation, human dignity, and control of one's destiny. For the majority of people of African descent in Connecticut in the 1700s emancipation from slavery, the rights of citizenship, and voting rights were linked. Connecticut legislators passed a Gradual Emancipation Act in 1784 that eliminated hereditary enslavement (freeing only those born into slavery after March 1, 1784 at age 25, that age was lowered to 21 in 1797), and finally abolished slavery in 1848. Numbers of African Americans in Connecticut obtained their freedom, purchased property, organized churches and other institutions, and attained education. Despite these achievements, the state of Connecticut limited the full rights of citizenship even for the free African Americans who fought for the independence of the United States from England.

Throughout the 18th century and for much of the 19th century African Americans expressed their goal for achieving political empowerment in part by electing "Negro Governors," or "Black Governors." [See "Monument to the Black Governors," Summer 2004, ctexplored.org/monument-to-the-black-governors/.] These terms conveyed honor and leadership within the African American community, though the position carried no political authority within the white power structure. A second avenue to political participation was through voting in state and local elections. Some African American men were able to vote before 1812. A September 7, 1803 editorial in the Connecticut Courant suggested that "two citizens of colour" in Wallingford who were Democrats (the contemporary Democratic Party) and "free" had voted. The editorial, more than 200 years old, read:
It seems that in the town of Wallingford there are two citizens of colour, both democrats, and both admitted to be free of this state by the democratic Justices and Select-Men of that town. Question I. In case the aforesaid citizens should at the next election of representatives to the General Assembly, obtain a clear majority of votes to represent said town, whether they would be returned as duly elected? Question II. If chosen and returned as aforesaid. Would they be admitted to seats in the House of Representatives of this State? A plain answer by some persons who is acquainted with the laws and the rights of the people of this State would greatly oblige.
The designation "freeman" was a social designation denoting a property owner with voting rights and other rights to participate in political activities. The editorial suggests that African Americans not only voted but held elective office as well. Between 1812 and the passage of the new state constitution in 1818, Connecticut political authorities enacted laws to restrict the suffrage to white adult men. African Americans protested invoking the language of the Revolutionary War patriots: "no taxation without representation."

In 1814, the General Assembly denied the franchise to African Americans. Bias Stanley and William Lanson of New Haven asked that they be exempt from paying taxes since they could not vote. Lanson was not exempted from tax obligations. New Haven records (in the collection of the New Haven Museum) contain Lanson's receipts showing proof of payment of his taxes.

More petitions of protest followed Lanson and Stanley's 1814 petition. In 1817, Josiah Cornell, William Laws, William Harris, Deppard [sometimes Dedford]Billings, Ira [sometimes Tossett]Forset, Olney M. Douglass, Anthony Church, Thomas Hamilton, Joseph Facy, and John Meads-free persons of color from New London and Norwich-presented petitions against paying the poll tax when they could not vote. (A poll tax was a monetary fee African Americans were required to pay in order to vote.) The Connecticut General Assembly rejected the petition. The 1818 Connecticut constitution enacted Article VI, Section 2. It affirmed the right of all white males to vote if they were 21 or older and possessed property worth at least seven dollars, among other requirements.

The issue of voting-rights restriction emerged again in 1823 when Isaac Glasko in Griswold, a man of African American and Native American descent, presented a petition asking for exemption from taxation due to a lack of voting rights. The general assembly rejected the petition.

In the 1830s, Amos Gerry Beman moved from Middletown to New Haven, where he connected with the interracial abolitionist community and continued to work for African American voting rights. His sister-in-law Clarissa Beman carried on her family's involvement in the antislavery struggle as a founding member of the Colored Female Anti-Slavery Society of Middletown. African American voting-rights activists linked their advocacy for political inclusion to a wider objective to abolish slavery and fulfill democratic principles enshrined in the nation's Declaration of Independence. The 1839 petition by residents of Middletown argued,
[T]he last reason is of much weight-the violation of it was the great moving cause of the revolution-and if to enforce that principle a whole nation took up arms, your petitioners ask whether it should by your Hon. body be regarded as a ... chimerical principle; or one of practical application? Some of us ... fought and bled in a glorious struggle to establish that very principle which (as regards application to us) has been denied. Have we not reason to complain?
The Connecticut State Library Archives contains 26 sets of papers from African Americans in Hartford, New Haven, New London County, Middletown, and Torrington regarding the right of African Americans to vote. These additional petitions were presented to the General Assembly between 1838 and 1850. In 1845 members of Hartford's African American community, followed in 1850 by members of New Haven's African American community, petitioned the General Assembly to amend the State Constitution by removing the provision that granted the franchise only to white adult men. African American men and women signed the petitions. The general assembly rejected all the petitions. In 1842, residents of Hartford presented a petition that said:
To the Honorable, the House of Representatives of the State of Connecticut: The undersigned Free People of Color of the town of Hartford in the County of Hartford respectfully pray your honorable body to pass a resolution proposing such amendment of the second section of the sixth article of the Constitution of this State as shall secure the elective franchise to all men the requisite qualifications, irrespective of color.
Among those who signed the document were James Mars, James W.C. Pennington, and George Jeffrey and Leverett Beman from Middletown. George Jeffrey was a barber by trade and a political activist who became a pivotal member of the congregation at Parker Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Meriden during the late 19th century. Jeffrey was a prime mover in the Meriden-area Lincoln League that African Americans organized to advocate for black voting rights during the late 19th century. Named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, this organization drew African American members from around the country to carry on the unfinished work of achieving full citizenship, voting rights, and economic opportunity.

Although Connecticut's legislators rejected the petitions, African Americans mounted pressures to transform the political system. The 1850 petition from New Haven's black community listed signatures from both men and women. This is important, as it demonstrates that African American men and women joined together in a common effort to obtain the franchise for men. The petition requested that the legislature "take the necessary measures for amending the Constitution of this State by expunging the word white in the first line of the 2 nd Section of the 6 th Article of Said Constitution."

In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment, which stated that no one should be denied the right to vote based on race or previous condition of servitude (though women, black or white, would be excluded until 1920). After considerable and often acrimonious debate, the Connecticut General Assembly amended the state constitution to comply with the federal amendment, which empowered most African American men with the right to vote. Still, voter intimidation, poll taxes, the grandfather clause, and other devices disfranchised many eligible African American voters across the United States. Some of these tactics included literacy tests requiring the prospective voter to interpret passages of the U.S. Constitution, while the grandfather clause based a person's eligibility to vote on whether the person's grandfather had voted. In Connecticut these tactics were not as pervasive as in other parts of the country, but even so voting rights remained insecure for African Americans. When the states ratified the 19th Amendment that granted women voting rights in 1919, African American women's access to the franchise was still curtailed due to race.

While African American women in Northern states such as Connecticut had greater legal access to the polls, in Southern states and other states such as Oklahoma, literacy tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause were among the many legal restrictions that disfranchised African American women and men. Drawing attention to disfranchisement and the under-representation of black women voters, the NAACP's Crisis published two "Votes for Women" issues, one in September 1912 and the other in August 1915. Determined to secure political participation, African American Mary Townsend Seymour, co-founder of the local NAACP in Hartford, was a leading advocate for social justice and voting rights. [See "Mary Townsend Seymour: Audacious Alliances," Summer 2003]

Despite late-19th-century court challenges over practices such as those listed above that limited or prevented black voter participation, it was not until the 1960s phase of the civil rights movement that activists were able to secure federal safeguards for the franchise. The African American community's effort to achieve this important right of citizenship was based on coalition building that attracted national attention. Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 24th Amendment ratified in 1964, outlawed the poll tax. The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited literacy tests and the grandfather clause. Signed into law in 1993 during the William J. Clinton administration, the National Voter Registration Act reinforced the right of all citizens to participate in the political process. Still, new challenges on the state and national levels continue to restrict the full exercise of political rights. But the inclusion of young people and members of the Latino and Latina communities and other underrepresented groups in the political process has been an important result of the African American struggle for the franchise. For African Americans in Connecticut, these events could be viewed as a fulfillment of their efforts to expand the electorate and the democratic process.

This essay is adapted from Katharine Harris's essay in African American Connecticut Explored (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).

Over 50 essays by many of the state's leading historians and edited by Connecticut Explored's publisher Elizabeth Normendocument the long arc of the African American experience in Connecticut from the earliest years of the state's colonization around 1630 and continuing well into the 20th century. The voice of Connecticut's African Americans rings clear through topics such as the Black Governors of Connecticut, nationally prominent black abolitionists like the reverends Amos Beman and James Pennington, the African American community's response to the Amistad trial, the letters of Joseph O. Cross of the 29th Regiment of Colored Volunteers in the Civil War, and the Civil Rights work of baseball great Jackie Robinson (a twenty-year resident of Stamford), to name a few.

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"No Taxation without Representation": Black Voting in Connecticut

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The right to vote is an expression of political participation, human dignity, and control of one's destiny. For the majority of people of African descent in Connecticut in the 1700s emancipation from slavery, the rights of citizenship, and voting rights were linked.

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By Mike Messina for Your Public Media

August 12 is the anniversary of the death of the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, also known as Metacomet or King Philip,the name given to him by the English. His death in 1676 essentially ended King Philip's War, a violent and bloody conflict between the Wampanoag and English colonists. While most of the fighting took place in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, people from Connecticut took part in the many of the battles and had an important influence on the outcome of the war.

The underlying cause of the war was the colonists unrelenting desire for more and more land, but the immediate cause for its outbreak was the trial and execution of three of Metacom's men by the colonists. Metacom and his men began attacking and destroying English settlements and kidnapping and killing English settlers. For a while, it looked like the colonists might have to abandon the frontier and withdraw into a handful of fortified seaside towns.

Connecticut troops, together with members of the Pequot and Mohegan tribes who served as an auxiliary force with the Connecticut militia, played a prominent role in the Great Swamp Fight, near South Kingston, Rhode Island, in December 1675. Fearing that the Narragansett tribe was going to join with Metacom, the colonists, including five companies from Connecticut, marched through freezing conditions to attack the Narragansett camp, a fortified village of five acres housing about 1,000 men, women, and children. After hours of battle, the colonists gained control of the fort and burned all wigwams. Nearly all of the inhabitants died including women, children, and elders.

Skirmishes and massacres continued into the spring of 1676. Metacom's men attacked Simsbury on March 26. According to legend, Metacom sat in a cave on Avon Mountain and watched the burning of the town. Other attacks that spring took place at Plymouth and Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Providence, Rhode Island, was burned on March 29. But by summer, Metacom's support was beginning to melt away. In June, Connecticut troops repelled an attack on Hadley, Massachusetts, and Major John Talcott of Simsbury began capturing large numbers of Metacom's followers, transporting them from New England, and selling them as slaves. Captain Benjamin Church pursued Metacom to a hiding place in Mount Hope, Rhode Island, where he was killed on August 12.

King Philip's War has been called United States' most devastating conflict. One in 10 soldiers on both sides was killed, 1,200 colonists' homes were burned, and vast stores of foodstuffs destroyed. The effects of the carnage and property damage were felt for years by colonists. The war's ramifications for Native populations of southern New England included not only loss of life and, for some, enslavement but the continued erosion of sovereignty, land rights, and communities as well.
Mike Messina is the Interpretive Projects Associate at the Connecticut Historical Society.
© Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network and Connecticut Historical Society. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared on Your Public Media.

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America's Most Devastating Conflict: King Philip's War | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project

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By Mike Messina for Your Public Media August 12 is the anniversary of the death of the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, also known as Metacomet or King Philip,the name given to him by the English. His death in 1676 essentially ended King Philip's War, a violent and bloody conflict between the Wampanoag and English colonists.

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This map represents the journey of the whaler Neptune (Mystic Seaport Museum O-LOG 23) of New London, Connecticut. Chronicling the ship's voyage from October, 1840 - April, 1842, this map depicts the ship's day-to-day events as it traveled to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans as they were described in the ship's logbook.

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While training for combat on the fields of Yale University in 1917, Private J. Robert Conroy found a brindle puppy with a short tail. He named him "Stubby", and soon the dog became the mascot of the 102nd Infantry, 26th Yankee Division.

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Sheff v. O'Neill Settlements Target Educational Segregation In Hartford

by Brigit Rioual
In 1989, Milo Sheff, then a fourth grader, and 17 other children filed a lawsuit through their parents. The plaintiffs called attention to the inequalities between Hartford's schools, which largely served minorities, and suburban schools, which had predominantly white student populations. The lawsuit's goal was to provide an integrated, equal educational opportunity to both urban and suburban students. After years of deliberation, a decision was made in 1996 when the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 4-3, in favor of Sheff. The court stated that the separation of suburban and Hartford students violated the segregation clause in the Connecticut Constitution and it ruled that the state was obligated to provide equal educational opportunity for all students. With that, the court urged the State to find ways to promote desegregation but did not set any specific goals or timetables.

2003 Settlement Proposes Action Plan and Benchmarks

After the ruling in 1996, the Sheff plaintiffs were dissatisfied; they saw little in the way of substantive change or planning. As a result, they filed a proposal in 2000 and in 2003 the parties reached a legal settlement. The settlement included specific plans to be implemented according to a four-year timetable, and it called for at least 30% of Hartford minority students to be in reduced-isolation settings. These were defined as schools where minorities constituted less than 75% of the student body.

The settlement proposed three means of reducing economic, racial, and ethnic isolation for students: interdistrict cooperative programs, interdistrict magnet schools, and the Open Choice program, also known as Project Choice. The goal for Open Choice, a voluntary two-way transfer program designed to enable Hartford students to attend suburban schools and suburban students to attend schools in the capital city, was to have 1,600 students enrolled by 2007. Another outcome stipulated by the settlement was that additional magnet schools, with special themes to attract suburban and city students, would be created in the Hartford region.

Five years later, program evaluations showed that Open Choice has met with mixed results. Although the interdistrict magnet schools were intended to attract a diverse body of students, enrollment data showed that the racial composition of their student populations varied immensely. While some met the criteria of at least 25% but no more than 75% minority students, others had too few or too many minorities. Additionally, many of the minority students attending these magnet schools were not even Hartford residents; they were instead residents of the surrounding suburban towns. Even though there was an increase in magnet schools during this time, the main goals of the settlement were not met. Only 17% of Hartford minority students were in reduced-isolation settings and only 1,070 students were enrolled in Open Choice.

Falling Short of Goals, Parties Reach New Settlement

Since the goals of the 2003 settlement were not met, the parties negotiated a second settlement in 2008. This time, measures of success focused on increasing the number of Hartford-resident minority students attending reduced-isolation schools. With that, two goals were created: 1) that at least 80% of Hartford minority students wishing to attend reduced-isolation schools would be accommodated and 2) that at least 41% of minority students from Hartford would be enrolled in a reduced-isolation school. In addition to this, the settlement included a descriptive plan for magnet, Project Choice, and other participating schools to follow.

The date for reaching these settlement goals was the 2012-2013 academic school year. By this time, 72% of Hartford minority students who applied to reduced-isolation schools had been accepted. This fell short of the targeted 80%. Also, only 37% of Hartford minority students were enrolled in a reduced-isolation school. Although this represented an increase since 2003, the 2008 settlement goal of 41% was not achieved. Because the programs did not meet these critical benchmarks, state officials and the Sheff plaintiffs will meet to negotiate a new settlement-and the effort to address the educational imbalances brought about by ethnic, racial, and economic segregation will continue.
Brigit Rioual, a junior at Trinity College in Hartford during the 2012-13 academic year, is a double major in Educational Studies and Sociology.

LEARN MORE

Websites

"Sheff Movement," 2013. Link.

Video

Sheff, Elizabeth Horton. Oral History Interview on Sheff v. ONeill (with video) - Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project. Interview by Candance Simpson. Pdf file, video, July 28, 2011. Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford. Link.

Documents

Connecticut Superior Court. "Sheff vs. O'Neill Stipulation and Order (Phase I, 2003)," January 22, 2003. Link.

Connecticut Superior Court. "Sheff vs. O'Neill Stipulation and Proposed Order (Phase II, 2008)," April 4, 2008. Link.

Books

Dougherty, Jack, and and Colleagues. "Part 4: Challenges of Desegregation & Choice." In On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs. Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2011. Link.

Dougherty, Jack, Jesse Wanzer, and Christina Ramsay. "Sheff v. O'Neill: Weak Desegregation Remedies and Strong Disincentives in Connecticut, 1996-2008." In From the Courtroom to the Classroom: The Shifting Landscape of School Desegregation, edited by Claire Smrekar and Ellen Goldring, 103-27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2009.

Articles

Thomas, Jacqueline Rabe. "State Falls Short on School Desegregation Requirements." The Connecticut Mirror, November 15, 2012. Link.

Co-publisher of

Major support provided by

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Sheff v. O'Neill Settlements Target Educational Segregation In Hartford | ConnecticutHistory.org

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by Brigit Rioual In 1989, Milo Sheff, then a fourth grader, and 17 other children filed a lawsuit through their parents. The plaintiffs called attention to the inequalities between Hartford's schools, which largely served minorities, and suburban schools, which had predominantly white student populations.

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On September 21, 1938, one of the most destructive and powerful hurricanes in recorded history struck Long Island and Southern New England. The storm developed near the Cape Verde Islands on September 9, tracking across the Atlantic and up the Eastern Seaboard.

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WETHERSFIELD - So great was West Hartford resident Edna Purtell's ardor for the right to vote that in 1918 she was arrested four times in one day while demonstrating in Washington D. C.

Jail failed to dampen Purtell's convictions: guards reportedly broke two of her fingers when she refused to remove her purple and white suffragist sash.

Purtell's story is among many interesting and unusual tales that historian Tracey Wilson will relate in a March 26 lecture on the Suffragette Movement in Connecticut. The talk will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Webb Barn at the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

American women did not win the full and universal right to vote until passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. It marked the end of a lengthy battle that began in the 1840s, museum Media Specialist Julie Winkel said.

"It took a long time," she said. "There were a couple of generations of women working on it."

The Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association was organized in 1869 as the first state organization to fight for women's votes in the Nutmeg State, according to the website Connecticuthistory.org. Among the prominent figures who fought for the female right to vote was Katherine Houghton Hepburn of Hartford, mother of the famous actress, Winkel noted.

Connecticut however, was late in allowing women the vote. It was not among the 15 states that had granted women full suffrage before passage of the 19th Amendment. In fact, the state legislature voted to ratify the amendment only after the required three-quarters of the states had done so.

Although Connecticut was home to many suffragists, it also had women's groups fighting to keep their sex out of the voting booth, Winkel said.

Why? A leader of the anti-suffragettes explained "that the 'suffs' were allegedly allied with the 'Reds' and trying to incite race and class hatred," Winkel said.

Arguments for women's suffrage followed two veins, Winkel said. One school said that women were more moral and caring than men and their full participation would clean up the political process. The other said that men and women were equal and suffrage was a fight for justice, she said.

Wilson, a history teacher at Conrad High School in West Hartford who holds a masters degree in history from Trinity College, will delve into these issues, stories and more during her lecture.

The event is free and requires no preregistration.

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A Look At Movement To Give Women The Vote

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So great was West Hartford resident Edna Purtell's ardor for the right to vote that in 1918 she was arrested four times in one day while demonstrating in Washington D. C. Purtell's story is among many interesting and unusual tales that historian Tracey Wilson will relate in a March 26 lecture on the Suffragette Movement in Connecticut.

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On April 11, 1986, eighty-six years to the day after the birth of the Submarine Force, Historic Ship NAUTILUS, joined by the Submarine Force Museum, opened to the public as the first and finest exhibit of its kind in the world, providing an exciting, visible link between yesterday's Submarine Force and the Submarine Force of tomorrow.

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Historic Synagogues of Connecticut - American Jewish Heritage Month: National Register of Historic Places Celebrates American Jewish Heritage Month, 2007

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The Historic Synagogues of Connecticut fall into three broad categories. The largest number of synagogues listed in the National Register from Connecticut are buildings constructed as synagogues in urban locations, followed by buildings constructed as synagogues in non-urban locations, and, lastly, buildings, usually churches, constructed for another purpose which were adapted as synagogue.

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Ellis Island Part of Statue of Liberty National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)

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Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration Home Page

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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Cristobal Rodriguez Hidalgo/Citizenship and Rights for Puerto Ricans in CT

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Cristobal Rodriguez Hidalgo/Citizenship and Rights for Puerto Ricans in CT

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One hundred years after the U.S. entered World War I - The Great War, the "War to End All Wars" - the main chamber of the State Library is deathly quiet on this Friday morning.

The walls are lined with the portraits of Connecticut's governors. There's a poorly executed painting of John G. Rowland, down on the left, next to the security camera, where he belongs.

You try not to think of him while wandering among the display cases that contain the artifacts, newspaper clippings, letters and matter-of-fact military records of Connecticut's heroes from so long ago.

Your eyes tear up over the 99-year-old letter that Ruth Hovey of Hartford wrote back to her mother from an undisclosed location with Mobile Hospital 2, American Expeditionary Force "At the front in France."

Then 28, Hovey described working around the clock to try to save the lives of the wounded. A German artillery attack on her field hospital spared her fellow nurses and doctors. "Two patients were killed in their beds and others wounded, and through it all, mother, everybody stuck to their posts and nobody lost their heads for a moment," she wrote.

In July of 1919, eight months after the war ended, France awarded her the Croix de Guerre for bravery in combat and service to the allies.

On the other side of the display case is a poignant letter from Marian Doyle of Fairfield Avenue in Bridgeport, whose fiancee, Cristobal Rodriquez Hidalgo, became the first Puerto Rican fatality of the war. He was a secretary at Remington Arms, the iconic Bridgeport munitions factory.

"He might easily have chosen domestic happiness and perhaps escaped the draft," Doyle wrote to state officials in 1923. "He was intensely patriotic and wrote poems expressing his willingness to die in the cause of liberty." He would write to her: "The sunshine of your smile - and my country forever."

Rodriquez Hidalgo was in a front-line trench near the Marne River on July 15, 1918, when a high-explosives shell landed on him at age 30. His combat group, the 38th Regiment, earned the nickname the "Rock of the Marne," from the French allies.

In the same display case is a yellowed newspaper clip with the weird headline: "Have you seen the man with the dead man's eyebrow?" Nearby is a 1919 photo of a clearly damaged soldier named Lawrence Thomas Hager, an actor whose address was Triangle Street, Danbury. He's 26 in the photo but looks much older, his face not quite-well-retouched by the photographer.

On Oct. 15, 1918, less than a month before the end of the war, he was with a group of 14 soldiers sent forward to "draw fire" to determine the Germans' position. Hager, a machine gunner by training, was the only survivor, ending up with a silver plate in his forehead, a silver chin bone and an eyebrow a surgeon collected from a fresh corpse.

"Now, he closely resembles his photographs before entering the service," the newspaper clip shouts from nearly 100 years ago. "Closely," is a word.

In the next room is a permanent case celebrating Bridgeport's role. The first brass shell from the assembly line at Remington Arms; a military pistol from Remington, circa 1911; a photo of the sprawling plant off Boston Avenue that was sold to General Electric in 1920 and finally torn down just a few years ago.

Jane F. Cullinane, digital projects librarian, says that a substantial number of records were collected in the years immediately before and after the war by the State Council of Defense. In 1916, the state began asking for information about manufacturers and their workers.

"I think Gov. ( Marcus H.) Holcomb saw the future, saw what was coming and knew that the United States wouldn't be able to stay out of the world war," she says.

David Corrigan, curator of the State Library Museum, says the inquiries included what factories were creating, their personnel strength, the type of machinery and raw materials used. "We had textile companies making fabric in Eastern Connecticut that was made later on, in other places, into uniforms and overcoats," he says, adding that he's putting together a database. "They were making gas masks in Hartford Rubberworks. They were making poison gas in Stamford, at some point."

Lizette Pelletier, state archivist, says the uniqueness of the items is why they were selected for this relatively small exhibit. They're part of The Voices of World War I project that is available in audio files for people with visual problems through CRIS Radio.

They are still collecting memorabilia at www.CTinWorldWar1.org.

Nearby, another display case contains the memorabilia of Jacob Bernasconi, a Swiss-born soldier from New Britain, wounded in the Marne campaign. There's his Purple Heart. Here's the inch-long chunk of metal pulled from near his pelvis 17 years after the war.

Maybe the most-moving artifacts are the flattened, long-dried poppy flowers Bernasconi collected from the American Expeditionary Force Cemetery at Chateau Thierry.

Ken Dixon can be reached in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or at kdixon@ctpost.com. See twitter.com/KenDixonCT. His Facebook address is kendixonct.hearst. Dixon's Connecticut Blog-o-rama is at blog.ctnews.com/dixon/

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Ken Dixon: Connecticut's part in the War to End All Wars

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"Two patients were killed in their beds and others wounded, and through it all, mother, everybody stuck to their posts and nobody lost their heads for a moment," she wrote. On the other side of the display case is a poignant letter from Marian Doyle of Fairfield Avenue in Bridgeport, whose fiancee, Cristobal Rodriquez Hidalgo, became the first Puerto Rican fatality of the war.

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Early Tuesday, I awoke to a flurry of text messages from friends: "Have you seen this video? KKK robe. Bonfire. Trump flag. East Windsor, CT." Having grown up in Somers - eight miles from East Windsor - I was curious, if uneasy.

What I saw was noxious.

In a 45-second video depicting a celebration of Donald Trump's presidential victory, I watched a young white man clad in makeshift Ku Klux Klan regalia triumphantly circling a bonfire on a dirt bike while brandishing a flag emblazoned with the words "TRUMP: Make America Great Again." At least 20 other people gleefully watched and filmed the performance. The moonlit gathering irrevocably transformed an innocuous gravel pit into a theater of white supremacy.

Most local white residents reacted to the video with incredulity: How could this happen here?

I understand such a response.

As a white person from Somers, I'd share a similar disbelief over this latest incident if I didn't study race and racism for a living. After all, only three paragraphs in my 880-page high school history textbook covered the KKK. Worse, only one paragraph mentioned Klan activity north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

We New Englanders are steeped in an unearned, progressive racial smugness. But the truth is that Connecticut's history is riddled with strains of white supremacy - and specifically Klan activity - that we New Englanders typically reserve for the Reconstruction-era South. Simply stated, the KKK proliferated in Connecticut during the first half of the 20th century. Exposing its roots, though, poses a threat to how we in the Northeast view our historical and contemporary entanglements with white supremacy.

Historically, as the argument goes, Connecticut has been on the noble side of race politics. The state entered the Union in 1788 with roughly 2,000 enslaved black men, women and children, a far cry from Virginia's 300,000 slaves. Today, this history problematically gets taken up under the banner of "race-isn't-an-issue-here."

The KKK emerged from the Civil War as a vigilante movement using intimidation and violence to prevent black citizens from exercising their newly won rights. Between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-20th century, the KKK and Klan affiliates lynched at least 3,400 black citizens. Beginning in the early 1920s, the society migrated north to challenge the political ascendancy of Italian, Irish, French-Canadian and Jewish immigrants perceived as "not quite white" - as well as black citizens - which it perceived to imperil the stability of the native-born, white Protestant hierarchy. Connecticut was an effective laboratory for Klan activity throughout the 1920s because there were plenty of people to hate: immigrants and Catholics accounted for 27 percent and 40 percent of the state's population, respectively.

According to a Washington Post article from 1930, over the first four years of Klan activity in Connecticut - from 1921 to 1925 - the KKK admitted roughly 75,000 members. The society enjoyed considerable strength in Connecticut during this period, as Klan members constituted close to 5 percent of Connecticut's total population and 15 percent of the share of native-born whites in the state. Crosses burned in at least 15 Connecticut towns throughout the 1920s and, in 1925, close to 15,000 KKK members attended a rally at Double Beach in Branford. In 1926, the Klan organized a 3,000-member march in Woodstock.

Klan membership in Connecticut declined precipitously in the late 1920s as a result of infighting between klaverns (local chapters) and the emergence of a new ideological dictate: fighting communism. The Connecticut Klan lost membership when it pivoted from the preservation of white racial purity to the extirpation of communism. In 1932, J.W. Perry, grand dragon of Connecticut, remarked that "Communism is Christ's most deadly enemy today." By 1930, a paltry 453 Klan members remained in Connecticut.

Emboldened by the racial dog-whistle politics of Ronald Reagan - whose campaign slogan was "Let's Make America Great Again" - and threatened by the economic and political gains made by people of color throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Connecticut Klan reappeared briefly in the early 1980s. Its rallies were poorly attended and many members ended up in prison on drug or firearms charges.

Connecticut's brief but intense dalliance with the Klan should interrupt our self-congratulatory narrative of racial liberalism - the very assumption that grounds widespread disbelief over the recent incident in East Windsor - and suggest that this latest episode has a powerful and problematic historical precedent. A truthful confrontation with the Klan's former presence in Connecticut should bring into relief vestiges of a nearly forgotten history and influence the way we choose to respond to these events today and in the future.
Christopher Petrella, Ph.D., is a lecturer in American cultural studies at Bates College. Learn more about his work at christopherfrancispetrella.net and follow him on Twitter @CFPetrella.

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Forgotten Shame: Ku Klux Klan No Stranger To CT

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Early Tuesday, I awoke to a flurry of text messages from friends: "Have you seen this video? KKK robe. Bonfire. Trump flag. East Windsor, CT." Having grown up in Somers - eight miles from East Windsor - I was curious, if uneasy. What I saw was noxious.

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The Debate Over Who Could Occupy World War II Public Housing in West Hartford

by Emily Meehan
In 1943, a dispute erupted between West Hartford residents and federal housing officials over whether or not African Americans should be allowed to live in the World War II public housing tract called Oakwood Acres. During this period, public housing tracts were created to shelter the many war workers and their families drawn to the Hartford area by the availability of defense-related jobs. The United States government funded these developments; therefore, local housing officials needed to abide by federal laws regarding occupancy. Federal Housing authorities eventually did require West Hartford to admit African Americans; however, town residents and leaders prevailed by specifying residency criteria in such a way as to maintain the demographic makeup of their virtually all-white community. Racist actions such as these, even when they occurred decades ago, have been factors in shaping the present-day demographics of West Hartford and other towns in the state.

War Industry Jobs Create Demand for Housing

The advent of World War II brought significant changes to a country that had been in the grip of a deep financial depression. Across the nation, as people moved into cities looking for jobs in wartime defense industries, demand for housing soared. Often, that demand far exceeded the availability of properties to purchase or even rent. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United States Congress established the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and authorized it to build public housing units with the goal of providing adequate living quarters for war workers.

An influx of war laborers, both white and African American, and their families came to the greater Hartford area in the 1940s. They worked in defense factories, such as the Pratt & Whitney Machine Tool plant and the newer Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company. As a result, housing options were limited in the Hartford area. By August of 1943, 8,000 new housing units had been developed in Hartford and New Britain to accommodate the growing population. These apartment-style homes were built under the Hartford Housing Association (HHA) and paid for with federal funding from the USHA.

According to a 1943 Hartford Courant report, "Connecticut has about half of all the government war housing constructed in New England. Half of the government housing in this state has been put up in the Hartford-New Britain area...." With these statistics, one might think that workers' need for housing in Greater Hartford had been met. However, families and single African American war workers found it more difficult to procure homes. The Courant noted that "400 housing units for white in-migrant families" were being constructed and, in "the case of Negroes," it was thought that "temporary dormitories" might be built if additional government grants could be obtained. Berkley Cox, chairman of the HHA called this situation "satisfactory."

The Fight to Keep African Americans Out of Oakwood Acres

One unit developed under the HHA was the Oakwood Acres Housing Tract. Located on Oakwood Avenue in West Hartford, it spanned the area between St. Charles Street and Seymour Avenue. Contemporary descriptions present the Oakwood Acres' living spaces as new, simplistic, and affordable. In 1943, only 14 out of the 300 apartments in the building were occupied at a time when many African Americans either had no place to live or could only find substandard accommodations. The federal government planned to use the complex to provide housing for these workers and their families.

Because the government funded Oakwood Acres, the unit needed to abide by federal law, which stated that officials could not legally reject African Americans applying for housing. West Hartford homeowners, living near Oakwood Acres, were quoted in a September 1943 issue of the Metropolitan News as being "alarmed" and "horrified" at the idea of "Negroes" living in their neighborhood. One woman said she and her family would move out the day after any African Americans moved in. The paper itself described the situation in harsh, racist language, calling it an "infiltration," and reported the prevailing sentiment among community homeowners as being: "We don't want them here." The consensus among West Hartford realtors and homeowners, the newspaper reported, was that real estate values would show "an immediate and sharp" drop if "Negroes in any considerable number moved into town."

Furiously, homeowners wrote to the HHA and West Hartford Housing Authority (WHHA) asking if African Americans would indeed be admitted to Oakwood Acres. When the Hartford Courant posed the question to WHHA chairman Richard F. Jones, he equivocated, saying, "I won't say we are and I won't say we're not going to admit Negroes.... At the present time that is a topic we'd rather not publicize too much." This prompted West Hartford residents to send petitions to their senators, Francis Maloney and John A Danaher, and congressman, William Miller. Miller responded that he would look into the issue.

The United States Housing Authority responded with an ultimatum. They stated that it was unlawful to exclude occupants from Oakwood Acres based on race. Local housing officials were advised that unless the race restrictions were lifted, the federal government would step in. Under this decision, African Americans would be admitted if they applied for a unit. This angered many West Hartford homeowners, prompting the town's housing officials to find a loophole. They decided to accept applications only from "Negroes with essential West Hartford industry jobs." Officials made this ruling knowing that, at the time, only six African American families fit this criterion-and they had not expressed interest in living in Oakwood Acres. Ultimately, with this restrictive technicality in place, no African American war workers moved into the housing tract. The white West Hartford housing officials and their supporters had trumped the federal government. They found a way to circumvent federal guidelines and discourage African Americans from living in publicly-funded housing with the town's borders.

Aftermath

In 1956, Oakwood Acres was demolished. It had become dilapidated and the people of West Hartford feared it made their neighborhood look like a "slum." By destroying the unit, West Hartford also erased the physical remnants of this racist chapter in the town's housing history. Today, West Hartford remains a predominately white community. One can argue that its demographics have been shaped, in part, by discriminatory housing practices of which the standoff over Oakwood Acres is but one example.
Emily Meehan, a sophomore at Trinity College during the 2013-2014 academic year, is an Educational Studies major and a resident of Duxbury, Massachusetts.

LEARN MORE

Books

Dougherty, Jack, and colleagues. On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs. Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2011. Link.

Szylvian, Kristin M. "The Federal Housing Program During World War II." In From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Articles

"1877 Worker Visits New Tool Plant." Hartford Courant. August 14, 1943, sec. ProQuest - Hartford Courant Historical Newspaper database - Available through iCONN.org. Link.

"Housing Official Noncommittal on Racial Question." Hartford Courant. October 21, 1943, sec. ProQuest - Hartford Courant Historical Newspaper database - Available through iCONN.org. Link.

"Housing Reaches 8000 Mark in City and New Britain." Hartford Courant. August 14, 1943, sec. ProQuest - Hartford Courant Historical Newspaper database - Available through iCONN.org. Link.

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The Debate Over Who Could Occupy World War II Public Housing in West Hartford | ConnecticutHistory.org

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by Emily Meehan In 1943, a dispute erupted between West Hartford residents and federal housing officials over whether or not African Americans should be allowed to live in the World War II public housing tract called Oakwood Acres.

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Experts in the psychological field would never have predicted we would medicate people rather than have them in controlled environments. Information from this blog comes from the Abandoned Asylum Website, which has since been shut down. Information from this blog though has been published on Yahoo Voices, Asylum Projects, and Opacity.

The Norwich State Hospital opened in 1904 with ninety-five patients in one building.

One of the hospital's first superintendents believed mental health care could best be provided through mechanical restraint and hydrotherapy.

Two patient buildings were built in 1905 with a third opening in 1907.

Thirteen patient buildings opened during the next eight years.

An administration building, three physician cottages, a carpenter and maintenance shop, a main kitchen, garage, laboratory, staff house, and an employees' club house had been built and the inebriate farm and the colony were added to the campus in 1913.

Between 1920 and 1930, seven new buildings were built and another building was purchased for patients' use.

In 1930 there were 2,422 patients.

In addition to new patient facilities, two more cottages were erected for physicians, a female employees' home, a paint shop, a greenhouse, a superintendent's residence, and two garages were built.

Tubercular patients were housed between 1931 and 1939 in Seymour which led to the closure of the Pines buildings.

Two more cottages for physicians, male employees' home, and a nurse's home were also built.

Each time a new patient building was constructed, an old building was closed and abandoned. All the buildings were never occupied at the same time.

In 1956, the Lodge building was completed which housed patients that were living in Butler, Cutter, and Dix.

A powerhouse, laundry facility, pump house, fifteen physician cottages, an incinerator, the Occupational Therapy Building, employees' building, a chapel, a research and clinical laboratory building, and the Kettle Building were built in 1959.

In 1966, Dr. Martin was appointed superintendent and his mission was to create diversified programs for patients by increasing patient freedom and creating a democratic administration to meet needs of patients and staff. The hospital slowly decreased in population by 1973 with only 1,148 patients.

The population decreases occurred as a result of increasing discharges, shorter periods of hospitalization, the development of special programs for alcohol and drug dependent and geriatric patients as well as increasing emphasis on crisis intervention. Administration operations moved to the Kettle Building.

The hospital closed in 1996 while the Southeastern Connecticut Mental Health Authority occupying space in the Kettle and Lodge Buildings remained until their offices were moved to the Uncas on Thames Hospital.

The Norwich State Hospital buildings have became victims of age, neglect, flooding due to bursting of pipes which thawed and froze each year, vandals, thieves, and explorers.

The next part of the series will explore proposals for these buildings and will explore the television shows that have featured the Norwich State Hospital.

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Norwich State Hospital Series: The Unique History of a Large Campus

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Experts in the psychological field would never have predicted we would medicate people rather than have them in controlled environments. Information from this blog comes from the Abandoned Asylum Website, which has since been shut down. Information from this blog though has been published on Yahoo Voices, Asylum Projects, and Opacity.

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Once upon a time, the Ponemah Mill in Taftville was reported to be the largest textile mill in the world under one roof.

Once upon a time, the Ponemah Mill in Taftville was reported to be the largest textile mill in the world under one roof.

The mill has rooms 750 feet long and 75 feet wide. There are no support beams. All floors are suspended. I took today's picture about 1950 when there were still white picket fences around most of the houses in Taftville, and the Ponemah Mill was a majestic structure.

Taftville was a monument to the power of the textile giants who used to move into an area and literally create an entire town. They built the mill, the housing, the stores, and they owned and controlled everything.

Baltic, Occum, Taftville and, to a lesser degree, Greeneville, owe much of their housing to the mills. By 1950, however, Ponemah had sold many of its homes, giving people who lived there first choice. They started to sell the homes in the mid-1930s, and I believe a duplex house could be purchased for about $2,500. When the mill owned all of the houses, they were maintained, as were the picket fences around them, by the company.

Storybook town
Before the 1938 hurricane, Taftville was like a storybook town with huge trees bordering both sides of Providence Street. By 1950, much of Taftville was beginning to change.

In 1950, Bill O'Brien, the Chevrolet dealer, was chairman of the Knights of Columbus building committee and had just completed the home that stands on South Second Avenue. As you walk north along South Second Avenue, you pass the Taftville Pharmacy, which has enjoyed the same location for more than 100 years.

Next, in the Ponemah House, Dr. Raymond Nowosadko, a dentist, once shared an office with Dr. David Rousseau. About that time, the First National store had just moved in next to them, and on the corner of the Ponemah House was Emery Roy's package store. The Ponemah House was a boarding house upstairs, and the American Legion was downstairs.

As you cross Providence Street, the second Ponemah House housed Joe Beauchemin's Soda Fountain and News Store. Felix Soja ran a dry goods store, and the new post office had just moved into the recently vacated First National store site.

Bart Auger's People's Market also shared that single site with the post office, and Henry Pion ran Henry's ESSO station on the corner. Dr. Henry Archambeault's home and office was across the street.

Huge vegetable garden
In the photograph, you can clearly see the Taftville Congregational Church. In the lower left of the photograph, gardens planted by various families were a carryover of the war years when everybody had a victory garden, and all the land around the church was one huge vegetable garden.

In those days, the Ponemah Mill was a joy to behold. Its wrought iron fences were meticulously maintained. The lawns were cared for, and the original structure had not been violated as it is today. To be sure, the Ponemah Mill today is functional and provides many jobs, but it was quite different 50 years ago and, as I said before, majestic in its heyday.

The people of Taftville had very high values and a strong sense of family. As the mill provided jobs and the church, at the other end of the village was the heart of the community. Father Maurice Sullivan, the curate, and Monsignor Frederick DesSureault, the pastor, officiated. Today's pastor is Monsignor Henry Archambeault. Sacred Heart Church, the convent, school and rectory provided a compound which, as a boy, I always thought of as a miniature Vatican. Sermons were given there in French, and the church was beautifully decorated, complete with velvet tapestries. This was the church before the fire.

Across the street, was the volunteer fire company, and farther up Providence Street was the SHYMA Club that produced so many athletes and thus helped make Norwich Free Academy a basketball threat statewide.

Back in the 1950s, there were no school buses in Taftville. There were two big, white wooden schools across from Sacred Heart Church on Providence Street. One school accommodated the lower grades and the other handled the older children. There were no school buses to Norwich Free Academy either. The Connecticut Co. provided bus service to the area, and it ran buses from Taftville to Franklin Square and then to NFA.

That also was true of the students from Occum, Baltic and Montville. The only school buses to NFA in those days were from towns such as Preston, Franklin and Bozrah.

Lefty Dugas
There was a baseball field where Lefty Dugas had learned to play ball as a child. He lived right next to the ball field, and his whole life was baseball. Lefty, during the 1930s, was the toast of Taftville and Norwich because he was a Major League Baseball player and a home-run hitter. His batting average, when he played for Kansas City, was .419, which for years was Lefty's license plate - 419. Lefty also played for Pittsburgh, Washington and Philadelphia, and they still celebrate him in Montreal as Canada's Babe Ruth.

Getting personal, Lefty married my mother's sister, Doris Buteau, and when my brother, Jim, and I visited Taftville in the 1930s, it was completely different than it is today. Most people didn't have automobiles. Croquet courts stood where the volunteers have their fire station today.

The backyard swing that seated four was as popular then as television is today. Everybody has their own well and vegetable garden, and most of the streets did not have sidewalks, but every house had a white picket fence.

The greatest war heroes from Eastern Connecticut were Bill Johnston from Colchester and Albert Dugas of Taftville. Both men had won the highest military honor the nation gives - the Medal of Honor.

Al marched in every parade and was such a credit to his community and his nation and an inspiration to everyone.

Speaking of people who made the community, we must mention Ray Boenig, who, for years, was the only policeman for Taftville, Occum, Norwichtown and East Great Plain. Ray Boenig, Car 5, and his dog, Sheriff, were on duty 24 hours a day, or at least on call.

It was not unusual to see Ray in police uniform helping to serve dinner at the Knights of Columbus function, or making chowder for the American Legion, for the volunteer firemen. Ray Boenig was perhaps the finest and the hardest working policeman the old town district of Norwich has ever had.

The town district in those days was run by a Republican first selectman who, like Ray Boenig, served East Great Plain, Norwichtown, Occum and Taftville. Tom Dorsey was his name.

Taftville isn't that way anymore. Once upon a time in Taftville, most people spoke French. The village was built by Irish and French Canadian immigrants, and it has a proud heritage and strong values that should be remembered. Many of those second- and third-generation families that settled Taftville still live there and still hold to those strong family and religious values.

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Once Upon A Time: Taftville's character was built by Ponemah Mill

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Once upon a time, the Ponemah Mill in Taftville was reported to be the largest textile mill in the world under one roof. Once upon a time, the Ponemah Mill in Taftville was reported to be the largest textile mill in the world under one roof.

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The Rise of the Black Panther Party in Connecticut

By Steve Thornton
At a "Colored Men's Convention" in Hartford on January 26, 1899, Connecticut's first black lawyer took to the stage with an uncompromising message. "It is the right of the colored man to fight for his rights," Walter S. Miller told the crowd. "When a white man shows a revolver, I want the Negro to show one also. In that way only will he be granted his rights by demanding them and being ready to insist upon them."

From the 1920s to the 1960s, Connecticut's African American activists formed a number of membership groups for self defense. The Anti-Lynching Crusaders (led by Mary Townsend Seymour), the Negro Defense Council, and the Hartford League of Struggle for Negro Rights were just some of the organizations that protested police and vigilante violence on a local and national scale.

In 1961 the US Civil Rights Commission found that as the civil rights movement grew, a majority of African Americans feared racist backlash. They feared police violence and harassment as well. The commission reported that when racial violence took place, the black community came to expect that "the police will side with the white mob." The same report found that "Negroes feel the brunt of brutality proportionately more than any other group in American society."

Divided by Race and Class

In Hartford, Connecticut, downtown separated the black, poor North End from the stable, white working-class South End. The two areas reflected America's race and class divisions, particularly the wide gap between how Connecticut's black and white residents viewed the 1960s urban rebellions.

This racial divide encompassed discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. Police brutality ranked high on the black community's grievance list as well. Authorities released a confidential analysis of Hartford police/community relations in June 1969 just as they lifted a city-wide curfew, previously triggered by clashes between police and young black men. Respected criminal justice scholar Dr. Sol Chaneles wrote the study at the behest of the local authorities. His "top secret report on crime in Hartford" showed that African Americans believed the Hartford police force spent more time "harassing ghetto residents" than protecting them.

Dr. Chaneles, who previously worked for the US Chamber of Commerce, reported that whites, not blacks or Puerto Ricans, committed the overwhelming percentage of major crimes in the city. Yet according to Chaneles's report, a "disproportionate amount of time was spent protecting downtown business establishments" from petty infractions. Meanwhile a dozen organized crime rings operated freely. Hartford's police chief denied every accusation.

The Panthers Organize

In Bridgeport, Josė Rene Gonzalves of California organized the first Black Panther Party chapter in Connecticut. "We have members in thirty seven states and we didn't get there by killing," Gonzalves explained. "We got it by organizing and telling people what the problem is. We are dealing with the needs of the Black community." He soon started chapters in New Haven, Waterbury, and Hartford. After establishing local leadership, national figures like Ericka Huggins came to the state to run political education courses and organize Panther programs. "This is a revolution," Gonzalves told a Stamford crowd. "It's a revolution against the system that teaches a man to be less than a man. A revolution against ignorance, fear and hate." The Panthers' goal, he said, was to "take the strength from the few and give the power to the people."

Walter "Rap" Bailey grew up in Hartford. He described how black youths from the projects experienced more violence and deprivation "than any child is meant to see." His motivation to join the Panthers came after marching with John Barber, leader of the Black Caucus. On September 18, 1967, Barber led protestors on an "open housing" march from the North End to south Hartford. Their target was the practice of segregated housing that made buying or renting homes in the South End practically impossible for African American families. The marchers (an integrated group that included white students from the Community for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) in Voluntown) proved militant but peaceful.

Police stopped the protestors before they reached downtown. Bottles and rocks then began flying through the air, but apparently not from the hands of marchers. Regardless, according to Bailey, police waded into the crowd, hitting and arresting people at random. Word of the arrests spread fast, and that night Hartford experienced its first full-scale riot. When the Panthers started recruiting, Rap Bailey was among the first to join.

Charles "Butch" Lewis, a well-known and respected figure in the black community, helped organize the Black Panther Party in Hartford. Lewis grew up in the South, moved to Hartford, was drafted and served in Vietnam for 14 months. As a veteran and a respected community figure, he became Field Captain. Lewis understood white people's perception of the Panthers. "I know a lot of people fear we're a gang of thugs and hoodlums," he said during an early Panther demonstration, "but we're a political party, not a gang. We're an army of people who are fighting for the people, the oppressed people."

The Black Panther Presence

When the Panthers took to the Hartford streets in the summer of 1969, their first priority was to "patrol the police." Panther leader Don Mounds told a public forum: "What we were doing was patrolling the police for the simple reason that we knew, like a lot of people know, that the police make false arrests, shoot tear gas into the houses. The police came into the area like storm troopers. We were threatened to be arrested and a few of us were arrested."

Some police officials saw the Black Panther presence, and the party's use of the Second Amendment to carry arms, as a direct threat to police authority. Yet even when neighborhood groups attempted to protect black lives and property, they found their efforts blocked by local police departments. In Waterbury, Mayor George Harlamon made an agreement with a group of youths (who called themselves the Young Black Militants) to patrol city streets on their own block, equipped only with bullhorns. The police union vehemently objected, declaring that the mayor had "sold out the police department." On the first two nights of civilian patrol, however, one officer admitted that it was the quietest time on the streets he had ever seen.

Hartford residents faced the same resistance. The Oakland Civic Association formed an unarmed patrol of men to watch their neighborhood. This effort had some funding behind it and the men wore berets and carried whistles and walkie-talkies. The Hartford police forced the men to abandon their berets and equipment, but still, disturbances dropped significantly while they patrolled the streets.

One Connecticut event eclipsed all the work local Panthers undertook, however. In 1969, police arrested 14 New Haven members for the murder of Alex Rackley, a Panther from New York. While the prosecutor called it an "ordinary case of murder," the trial became a showdown between the federal government and the Panthers. Authorities arrested Ericka Huggins and Black Panther founder Bobby Seale for the crime, which many in the movement believed was part of an effort to disrupt the Panthers' organizing efforts and force the group to spend all of its time entangled in the legal system. In the end, three men faced conviction in 1971 for Rackley's murder. The remaining defendants, including Seale and Huggins, were released.

Conflicting Views of the Black Panthers

The legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in Connecticut many times, including an 1879 talk in Hartford on John Brown (the anti-slavery activist both celebrated and damned for his armed rebellion at Harper's Ferry). Douglass called Brown a "moral earthquake," a metaphor that conjured up death and destruction on a righteous scale.

Many viewed the Black Panthers in the same conflicting light. Whites often feared and loathed the Panthers, charging them with fomenting violence and being behind much of the 1960's urban riots. This was not a universal opinion, however: "Violence was there all along in back alleys and ghetto streets," wrote an international observer. "What the Panthers did, by standing up armed, was to become lightning rods attracting those flashing bolts of violence, and the concentration of fire power coming from police guns lit up the night."
Steve Thornton is a retired union organizer who writes for the Shoeleather History Project

LEARN MORE

Video

"Butch Lewis Video Collection Documenting Civil Rights Era, Hartford." Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library, 2014. Link.

Documents

"Black Panther Party Hartford, New Haven - Volume 1." Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. New Haven (Connecticut) Field Division, 1978 1957. National Archives. Link.

"Black Panther Party Hartford, New Haven - Volume 2." Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. New Haven (Connecticut) Field Division, 1978 1957. National Archives. Link.

"Black Panther Party Hartford, New Haven - Volume 3." Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. New Haven (Connecticut) Field Division, 1978 1957. National Archives. Link.

"Black Panther Party Hartford, New Haven - Volume 4." Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. New Haven (Connecticut) Field Division, 1978 1957. National Archives. Link.

"Black Panther Party Hartford, New Haven - Volume 5." Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. New Haven (Connecticut) Field Division, 1978 1957. National Archives. Link.

"Justice: United States Commission on Civil Rights Report, Volume 5." U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961. Link.

Books

Bass, Paul. Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2006.

Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Hilliard, David, and Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

"The FBI's Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party." In Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United State Senate - Book III, 185-223. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. Link.

Articles

"Major Crime Is Often 'Immune' in Hartford, Researcher Says." Hartford Times. June 11, 1969.

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The Rise of the Black Panther Party in Connecticut | ConnecticutHistory.org

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By Steve Thornton At a "Colored Men's Convention" in Hartford on January 26, 1899, Connecticut's first black lawyer took to the stage with an uncompromising message. "It is the right of the colored man to fight for his rights," Walter S. Miller told the crowd.

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The Amistad

In early 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of African people in Sierra Leone and transported them aboard the slave ship Tecora to Havana, Cuba, for auction to the highest bidder. Two Spaniards, Don Pedro Montez and Don Jose Ruiz, purchased 53 of the captives (members of the Mende people) in Havana and loaded them aboard the schooner Amistad for a trip to a nearby plantation. Just three days into the journey, however, the would-be slaves revolted, when 25-year-old Sengbe Pieh (known as Cinque) escaped from his shackles and set about releasing the other captives.

The Mende killed members of the ship's crew, including the captain, and ordered Montez and Ruiz to sail for Africa. The ship sailed east during the day, using the sun's position to determine its direction, but at night, the slave traders quietly redirected their course away from Africa. This process continued for over two months until, on August 24, 1839, the Amistad reached Long Island, New York. There the federal brig Washington seized the ship and its cargo.

American authorities charged the Mende with murder, imprisoned them in New Haven, Connecticut, and towed the Amistad to New London.

Local Courts and International Relations

Upon learning of the capture of the Amistad, Spain's foreign minister argued that the holding of the ship and its cargo constituted a violation of a 1795 treaty between the United States and Spain, and he demanded their return. Fear of inflaming relations with Spain induced President Martin Van Buren to acquiesce, but Secretary of State John Forsyth stepped in and explained that, by law, an executive, such as the president of the United States, did not have the power to interfere in judicial proceedings. The American court system needed to decide the fate of the Mende captives.

At a US Circuit Court trial in Hartford, a judge ruled in favor of dropping murder and conspiracy charges against the enslaved Mende, but felt that competing property claims filed by the Spanish, as well as the crew of the Washington, fell under the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court. A district court judge then ruled that, as former free men living in Africa, the Spanish had no right to enslave the Mende. He ordered the captives released and returned to Africa. Once again, however, considerations of international diplomacy complicated the case. Under pressure from the Spanish government, Van Buren's administration ordered an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court began hearing the case in January of 1841. American abolitionists rallied to the defense of the Mende, raising money to hire future Connecticut governor Roger Sherman Baldwin and former US president John Quincy Adams to represent them in court. Arguing in favor of the basic rights of human beings, Adams and Baldwin convinced the court to set the Mende free. The decision came in March of 1841, and later that year, five American missionaries and the 35 remaining Mende (18 having died at different stages of their voyage or while in prison) sailed for Sierra Leone.

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Websites

"Governor Roger Sherman Baldwin - PDF." Connecticut State Library, 2016. Link.

"Teaching with Documents: The Amistad Case." National Archives, 2016. Link.

"The Amistad Case, 1839: Milestones - 1830-1860." US Department of State - Office of the Historian, 2016. Link.

Places

"Amistad: Seeking Freedom in Connecticut - A National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary." National Park Service, 2016. Link.

"Connecticut Historical Society," 2017. Link.

"Connecticut's Old State House," 2017. Link.

"Farmington Historical Society," 2016. Link.

"New Haven Museum," 2017. Link.

"The Amistad Center for Art & Culture." Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2016. Link.

Documents

"Affidavit of Kimbo, an Amistad African," 1839. Library of Congress, American Memory, Lewis Tappan Papers. Link.

"Affidavit of Singweh, an Amistad African," 1839. Library of Congress, American Memory, Lewis Tappan Papers. Link.

"Drawings of the Amistad Prisoners, New Haven." Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2016. Link.

"Research Guide to the 'Amistad Affair.'" Connecticut State Library, 2016. Link.

"Trial of the Century: La Amistad - Warrant for Habeas Corpus, United States v. Cinque and the Africans," 1839. National Archives at Boston. Link.

Books

Barber, John Warner. A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board: Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York: With Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans; Also, an Account of the Trials Had on Their Case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, for the District of Connecticut. John W. Barber, 1840. Link.

Lawrance, Benjamin Nicholas. Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rediker, Marcus. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. New York. NY: Viking, 2012.

Articles

Ragsdale, Bruce A. "'Incited by the Love of Liberty.' The Amistad Captives and the Federal Courts." National Archives - Prologue Magazine, Spring 2003. Link.

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amistad captives imprisoned in new haven

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In early 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of African people in Sierra Leone and transported them aboard the slave ship Tecora to Havana, Cuba, for auction to the highest bidder.

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Blood on the Hill: The Battle of Groton Heights, September 6, 1781

By Richard Malley
By 1781 it was becoming apparent to both sides that outright British victory in the American Revolution was unlikely, in part due to the commitment of French troops and other resources that would culminate in the successful Yorktown campaign in October 1781.

Connecticut native Benedict Arnold, a skilled military leader who switched his allegiance to Britain, was ordered to attack the port of New London in an attempt to divert some of General George Washington's army away from the developing Virginia campaign, punish New London for its successful privateering operations against British shipping, and possibly to establish a base for future British military operations in New England.

The citizens fled the town, and Fort Trumbull, guarding the west side of the river, was quickly abandoned as Arnold's force of about 1,700 men landed from the British ships anchored off New London. The British troops set to destroying military and naval supplies and accidentally caused a fire that soon spread, burning much of the town. Meanwhile, across the river in Groton, militia forces commanded by Colonel William Ledyard had manned Fort Griswold, a substantial fortification atop Groton Heights, a hill overlooking the Thames River. American cannon fire caused considerable casualties among the British when they attacked the fort, but additional assaults finally breached the fort's defenses.

Fort Griswold Massacre Remains a Matter of Debate

What happened next is a source of controversy. Colonel Ledyard, seeing his troops were outnumbered, ordered the surrender of the garrison. According to some accounts, Ledyard was run through and killed with his own sword when he surrendered it to the British officer in charge. Other evidence suggests Ledyard may have died from a bayonet wound instead. What is clear is that confusion reigned, and it is possible that Ledyard's order to surrender was not received by all the militia, leading the British to continue firing at the Americans. Following the battle the British withdrew, leaving death and widespread destruction on both banks of the Thames.

More than 100 Americans were killed and scores more were wounded. Many of the captured militiamen were taken to New York and imprisoned for months. Public passions were stirred by reports of the "massacre" and its particulars remain a topic of debate to this day. Fort Griswold was rebuilt and today is part of Connecticut's state park system.
Richard Malley is Head of Collections at the Connecticut Historical Society.© Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network and Connecticut Historical Society. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared on Your Public Media.

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Places

"Connecticut Historical Society," 2017. Link.

Documents

"Catalog Record for the William Ledyard Letters, 1778, 1780." Connecticut Historical Society Library Catalog, 2013. Link.

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Major support provided by

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Blood on the Hill: The Battle of Groton Heights, September 6, 1781 | ConnecticutHistory.org

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By Richard Malley By 1781 it was becoming apparent to both sides that outright British victory in the American Revolution was unlikely, in part due to the commitment of French troops and other resources that would culminate in the successful Yorktown campaign in October 1781.

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Former NBA Star Returns to CT to Help Others Fight Addiction

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On Saturday, Old Saybrook native and former NBA all-star Vin Baker returned home to help those battling drug and alcohol addiction.