Blacks in Connecticut

By David 0. White, The Museum of Connecticut History

It is likely that a few Africans lived in Connecticut shortly after the arrival of Europeans. Free blacks are known to have been in the colony during the 1600s, although most blacks in Connecticut until after the American Revolution were slaves. During the entire Colonial Period Connecticut's blacks never were more than three percent of the total population of the colony. In 1756 there were 3,019 blacks, free and slave, comprising 2.7% of all the people in Connecticut, and by 1774 the 5,101 blacks made up 2.6% of the population. Yet, during this time Connecticut had more blacks than any other New England colony and only Rhode Island had a higher percentage of blacks in its total population. Most lived in the eastern part of the colony or along the coast. In 1774 Hartford had 150 blacks (3.1%) and Middletown 198 (4.3%), while New London, Groton and Stonington had 1,338 blacks, amounting to nearly 10% of the total population of these three towns.

Throughout most of New England slaves were treated less harshly than in the South or in the other Northern Colonies. Connecticut needed the labor that slaves provided, and Puritans saw Africans as heathen who benefited by enslavement by being brought under the influence of Christian teaching. Some owners made efforts to convert their slaves and taught them how to read the Bible and had them attend church.

Black slaves in Connecticut were instructed to be obedient to their owners, not to steal, to be content with their life, and to seek their reward in heaven. These guidelines were aimed at keeping slaves in line as much as they were in converting their souls. The conversion policy generally failed, for most blacks in Connecticut were unaffected by Christianity. Yet, from those blacks who did accept Christian teachings came strong and active church people in the nineteenth century.

Connecticut did grant rights to blacks, including the right to attend church, to protection under the law, to participate in holidays and celebrations, and to marry. In employment, most worked at farming, as servants, or in the maritime industries. A few were able to acquire property or own their own businesses, but nearly all had to rely on white patronage, had to live with white families, and had little control over their lives. Blacks were required to carry passes in order to travel from one town to another, had an evening curfew, could not buy alcoholic beverages, could not argue or fight with whites, and could not serve in the military. As with many laws, these were not always strictly observed, but in general the lives of slaves and free blacks were restricted in ways foreign to whites. Some slaves used the ambiguity of being slaves as well as individuals under the law to successfully petition the government for freedom. Some slaves purchased their liberty with funds they earned through extra work. Other slaves simply ran away from their owners. As the Colonial Period came to an end, there still existed a good number of slaves as well as a sizeable free black population in Connecticut.

Although blacks were not allowed to serve in the Connecticut militia during times of peace, several found their way into military units when war broke out. When the initial battles of the American Revolution took place in Massachusetts in 1775, several blacks from Connecticut responded to the call for troops. From 1777 through the war's end in 1783, some 400 Connecticut blacks served in the conflict. Some slaves fought with the agreement that when their duty was over they would be free. The salaries that they earned as soldiers were often used to pay their owners for this freedom. For a period in 1781 and 1782 Connecticut formed an all-black unit, but for most of the war the troops were integrated. Some slaves, who did not serve in the Army, were emancipated by their owners moved by the liberal spirit of the time. In 1784 Connecticut passed a gradual emancipation law that allowed for a slave's freedom when he or she reached the age of twenty-five (later reduced to age twenty-one). Children born to a slave under this age were considered slaves until they reached their twenty-fifth birthday. Thus, there were still a few slaves in the state in the nineteenth century, although by 1820 their number had decreased to less than one hundred.

With the increase in the number of free blacks in Connecticut, came their movement from the rural areas to urban centers. There were few job opportunities for blacks in the country, and most had little money to buy land. In the cities there was a demand for people to provide services for an expanding urban population. Many blacks became servants, drivers, gardeners, dressmakers, and clothes cleaners. While a few blacks owned businesses, most worked for others.

Throughout the nineteenth century the immigration of Europeans to Connecticut kept the percentage of blacks to the total population small. In 1800 blacks were 2.5% of the state's population, and while their actual numbers slowly increased during the first half of the century, by 1850 blacks made up only 2.1% of the people living in Connecticut. Because of the work that they did for whites, many blacks lived in or near white dwellings in the cities. Others were forced to live in poor sections where crime and vice prevailed among both whites and blacks. But law-abiding blacks could not escape these surroundings, and all blacks suffered from the stereotypes that blacks were inferior, immoral, and not capable of full citizenship with whites.

Blacks in the cities were forced by prejudice and discrimination to organize their own societies and institutions for protection, freedom of movement and expression, and recreation. The first of these institutions were churches that were formed in the 1820s. Churches were followed by schools, lodges, and self-help societies that were operated by and for the black community. Black community leaders got together on the state level to seek the right to vote, to organize against unjust treatment, and to promote the uplifting of blacks in America. During the decades before the Civil War, two ministers, Amos Reman (1812-1874) of New Haven and James Pennington (1809-1870) of Hartford, were Connecticut's best known and most effective black leaders.

The major reform movement that occupied the time and attention of blacks in Connecticut was in bringing an end to slavery in the South. Some black leaders thought that equal treatment of free blacks was not possible so long as slavery existed. There were many white allies in this effort, but few of these whites had any real interest in improving the quality of life for Northern blacks. The black churches spearheaded the antislavery movement in the state's black communities with their leaders and ministers hosting meetings and attending those in other states. Several black-operated newspapers were briefly published in the state and several blacks wrote books and pamphlets protesting slavery and discrimination.

During the decades from the 1830s to the Civil War, there developed in Connecticut somewhat of a dual attitude toward blacks. While there was sympathy for slaves in the far-away South, there appeared to be little compassion for the free blacks who lived in the state. Two events of the period reflect the dual attitude.

One episode involved Prudence Crandall's school in Canterbury. When Prudence Crandall opened her previously all-white girls academy to blacks in 1833, she met local white opposition that lasted for eighteen months and eventually forced her to close her school and send her students home. There is reason to believe that had such an effort been attempted in any Connecticut town of that era the reaction would have been similar to that of Canterbury's. Some towns in Connecticut had already permitted district schools for blacks that were not opposed, but the Crandall effort sought to teach black girls in their late teens advanced subjects that only white students had previously been taught. While residents argued that the school would cause intermarriage between the races, would bring an influx of blacks to the town, and would lower property values, the crucial factor was that whites would not tolerate the idea that blacks were not intellectually inferior to them. Since the Crandall school would prove that blacks could learn just as well as whites, Canterbury's whites apparently decided that Crandall's efforts had to be terminated.

In contrast to the reaction of whites to Prudence Crandall was the Connecticut reaction to the Amistad affair. The Amistad was a vessel on which Africans were being sent to the United States as slaves. But the Africans successfully rebelled and forced the crew to sail back to Africa. The crew by design steered a northerly course and the Africans were captured in Long Island Sound in 1839 and taken to jail in New Haven. Called Mendians, the Africans were immediately assisted by abolitionists, who led a successful campaign in the courts to win the Mendians their freedom and the right to return to Africa. Unlike many other antislavery activities in which the abolitionists worked in Connecticut at that time, they were not greatly opposed by the white population in their work to free the Mendian blacks. As slaves and foreigners who would not remain in the state, the Amistad Africans were not perceived as a threat to the concept of white supremacy and accordingly received local sympathy and support that included housing in Farmington for a time where they were educated by local whites.

In some respects life had improved for blacks in Connecticut by 1860. They had more wealth than their parents had, they had more employment available to them, and most lived in their own housing rather than with white families. Yet, because the rapidly growing factories refused to hire blacks, a major source of income and advancement in society was closed to Connecticut's blacks. Some Connecticut-born blacks with education or skills left the state for better opportunities in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Coupled with this emigration was the movement into Connecticut's black communities of blacks from other states, including a trickle from the South, thus keeping these communities in a condition of flux. During this period a number of established black families provided a quiet type of leadership in these communities. Some of these families lived in integrated neighborhoods, had steady employment, traveled to other parts of the country, and gave their children good educations. Yet, the sting of racism hurt them deeply and they too relied on their own community to survive the hostility of a society that held all blacks in contempt.

The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments convinced Connecticut blacks that their long-sought rights would be achieved. Connecticut had formed two all-black regiments that fought in the Civil War and both returned home to the accolades of Governor Buckingham and the pride of the state's blacks. More black churches, lodges and other organizations were developed, and picnics, parties and balls were held in the black communities. Yet with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the abolitionist organizations that had listened to blacks, utilized the resources of the black community, and provided some support from the white community, disappeared.

Moreover, as blacks after the Civil War achieved more freedom, the prejudice of whites increased. Most whites had a poor image of black Americans fostered by supposedly factual evidence that Africans were inferior. Blacks were ridiculed, as some newspapers and magazines openly used terms such as "coon" and "darky" in their pages. When Southern states passed laws segregating blacks, Connecticut along with other Northern states developed a more subtle form of discrimination aimed at keeping blacks in "their place." Whites created the stereotype of the lazy, stealing, ignorant Negro, who, if he could not be barred legally from society, could be kept at a distance from the world of whites.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the increase of Europeans in Connecticut caused the percentage of blacks in the state to decrease from 1.97% in 1860 to 1.7% in 1900. In actual numbers, however, the black population increased from 8,267 to 15,226. Yet, small towns with their fewer employment opportunities saw their black population decline. In the cities a few black craftsmen, mechanics, ministers, professionals, and shop owners existed, but most blacks still earned their living as servants, laborers, drivers, and laundry workers. By 1900 some of these jobs were being taken over by immigrants because white employers preferred to hire whites rather than have integrated work forces. Those jobs as janitors or messengers that whites refused were often what was left. Local schools became integrated by law in 1868 and soon became one of the few institutions where blacks experienced less discrimination.

World War I brought the beginning of a dramatic increase in the number of blacks in Connecticut. The supply of immigrant workers for Connecticut's industrial plants dwindled with the outbreak of World War I. European immigration dropped from one and a quarter million in 1914 to a low of 110,618 in 1918. The War also forced the cancellation of cotton orders by European nations, causing a depression in the South that was aggravated by insect damage to cotton crops in 1916. In 1916-1917 alone over 400,000 Southern blacks migrated to the North to seek work. Connecticut's tobacco growers were among the first in the nation to use this labor resource. Working with the National League on Urban Coalition in 1914-1915, Southern black workers were recruited to work in the state's tobacco fields. Other Connecticut industries soon followed suit in the utilization of Southern blacks.

The great migration of blacks to the North changed considerably Connecticut's racial situation. Housing in the urban black neighborhoods was already limited, as banks had systematically refused to make loans to these areas and govermnent agencies refused to provide services equal to what white sections received. As the newcomers arrived, overcrowding became common. Black neighborhoods spread and white home-owners developed anti-black activities or moved to the suburbs. The black population in the state doubled in the fifteen years after 1915 to a total of 29,354. While the newcomers eventually became part of the black community, a new racial pattern had been set in the state. Blacks got slum housing in poor sections of the cities because they were black and poor. A new stereotype arose associating blacks with poverty and the ghetto. One writer observed that at the end of the First World War Connecticut had a race problem.

During the first half of the twentieth century black leaders urged blacks to use their votes to acquire civil rights and to vote for any black candidate no matter what his party was. During these decades blacks abandoned the Republicans for the Democrats, although a Colored Voters League in the state spoke against the Democrats in 1938 because they too had failed to keep the promises they had made to blacks.

One major twentieth-century problem for blacks in Connecticut was inadequate employment. Blacks generally had the jobs that required them to lift, dig, carry, or clean, and this work was often done outside. There was little stimulus to improve oneself and little job satisfaction in such work. Blacks developed poorer work records, more unemployment, had less money, and more mothers working than whites did. Clerical and sales positions were closed to most blacks as only the Federal Government hired clerical employees of both races. There were some black-owned businesses in the state, but they were too small to hire many blacks. There were simply too few avenues open to earn adequate wages.

The lack of dignity was another problem that continued to affect Connecticut's black population. The [black] Separate Company of the National Guard served in France during the First World War as part of the 372nd Regiment and received praise from the French people. It returned to New Haven in February 1919 to much acclaim, but the discrimination these soldiers received in the U.S. Army and conditions they found at home made them realize that democracy had escaped them. In small towns there was a tendency for blacks to play no role in the community. Service clubs, groups such as the American Legion, and public businesses such as barbershops, clothing stores, hotels, bars, and beaches, discouraged a black clientele. There were no laws in Connecticut as there were in the South that banned blacks from these services, but through subtle discrimination blacks had to accept a situation in which they were in fact segregated. The cities, where some 80 to 90 percent of Connecticut's blacks lived, had black churches, lodges, and benevolent societies that sponsored clubs, youth programs, and entertainment. New Haven's black community had its own main street with a hotel, movie house, stores, bars, restaurants and entertainment halls. While whites owned many of these establishments, their clientele was black, and the social life and atmosphere there was seen as often happier and livelier than what could be found in most New England towns.

Early in the twentieth century there appeared in Connecticut national organizations aimed at uplifting blacks such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League. Connecticut's blacks were helped during the early part of the century generally by the local churches, fraternal orders and schools. There was also more black participation in art, music and literature in the 1920s with New York's black community as the center of this outburst of artistic creativity. The "scientific" pronouncement that blacks were inferior was no longer being accepted by intelligent whites, and the news media sought not to offend its black readers.

There has been great change for the Connecticut black since World War II. The percentage of blacks in the cities compared to whites grew significantly. Of the 53,472 blacks in Connecticut in 1950, 49,266 lived in cities. By 1960 Connecticut's black population doubled with Hartford having 28,754 black residents alone. In 1970 there were 181,177 Connecticut blacks comprising six percent of the total population. The percentage for cities such as Hartford and New Haven was fifteen. Connecticut had the highest percentage of blacks of any New England state, although the percentage was lower than for most other Northern states.

After 1945 there developed a black consciousness that was aided by television coverage of injustices to blacks in the South. The struggle that developed in the South during the late 1950s and early 1960s, spearheaded by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., made a deep impression on Connecticut's black communities and led to efforts that brought an end to much of the discrimination practices that had existed in the state for many years. Connecticut's blacks not only protested injustice at home, but worked in national programs in other states to fight discrimination. Out of these efforts came the "War on Poverty" and other programs that while Federally funded, required local organization and participation. Along with tutoring programs, voter registration, and picketing of slum landlords, however, came violent race riots in the late 1960s in several Connecticut cities.

This violent protest grew out of frustration and the "I want it now" philosophy of inner city youth. While the violence was short-lived, it did get the attention of whites and immediate help came. Colleges in the state recognized the racial imbalance on their campuses and made efforts to recruit black students and teachers. Programs were developed to create more black-owned businesses. The Small Business Administration made loans to these enterprises while other agencies provided training in areas of business management and record keeping. Yet, by 1980 there were leaders who questioned whether blacks in the state were better off than they had been in 1960. There remained the feeling among many blacks in Connecticut that white society was still trying to deny them their rights as Americans.

In summing up the black experience in Connecticut certain themes are apparent. One is that blacks, from the end of the Colonial Period to the present, have been associated with the urban setting, using the city to create their own communities and institutions. Another theme is that Connecticut blacks have always been confronted with discrimination and prejudice. The black response to such conditions has varied in intensity from era to era, but a definite push toward equal rights is evident after 1945. There can also be found in nearly every period of Connecticut's history a few blacks who did receive better treatment and who were able to enjoy the fruits of Connecticut society. These exceptions tend to stand out in historical records and obscure the fact that the great majority of blacks have had less income, property, rights, dignity, and real freedom than whites. Finally, there is the reliance blacks have had on their communities. The existence of a sense of community has given blacks a sense of belonging and protection, important in coping with hostility and rudeness.

It is important to stress that the conditions confronted by blacks cannot be compared to those faced by the mass of European immigrants who came to Connecticut. These immigrants, while not without adjustment problems, were white and shared the same racial group with the society that permitted them or their children to eventually become integrated. Such was not the case for Afro-Americans whose complexion was visible and who have never assimilated into the Connecticut/American "pot." Stripped of most of their African culture and left as detested slaves, the accomplishments of Connecticut's blacks have been magnificent. Few people in Connecticut history have had to advance in the face of such consistently heartbreaking obstacles.

For Further Reading

Greene, Lorenzo Johnston. The Negro in Colonial New England. New York, 1942.

Lee, Frank F. Negro and White in Connecticut Town. New Haven, 1961.

Meier, August and Ruderich, Elliott, eds. The Making of Black America, Vol. II: The Black Community in Modern America. New York, 1971.

Saunders, Ernest. Blacks in the Connecticut National Guard: A Pictorial and Chronological History 1890 to 1919. New Haven, 1977.

Strother, Horatio T. The Underground Railroad in Connecticut. Middletown, Connecticut, 1962.

Warner, Robert Austin. New Haven Negroes: A Social History. London, England, 1940.

White, David 0. Connecticut's Black Soldiers 1775-1783. Chester, Connecticut, 1973.

* Entry under revision.