I was born in 1961, the year JFK was inaugurated president. Through the efforts of a robust Civil Rights movement, the interrogation of Jim Crow laws had finally reached national prominence that year. Yet, Jim Crow laws seemed as solid and steady as ever.

At the same time, across the Northeast, Midwest, and West, the segregation of African Americans in ghettos had only intensified, with the continuing second wave of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to points North and West and local and national housing laws preventing them from moving just about anywhere except the ghetto.

I had no inkling of race in my early years. My family moved from a triplex in a working-class neighborhood in a racially diversifying Hartford, CT, to the lily-white suburb of Simsbury two months before I turned two. I know my parents wanted to move for more house space and a yard, but they also moved at a time when realtors in cities across America used scare-mongering as one of several methods to encourage White flight out of city centers.

From the beginning of World War II, around 1940 to 1960, African Americans increased from 4.3% of Hartford’s population to 15.4%, more than tripling in numbers (By 1980, 60% of the region’s Black population lived in Hartford). In response, the migration of White families to outer suburbs during the 1960s became all too common.

While real estate agents steered Whites looking to move out to West Hartford, Avon, Simsbury, and Farmington, they steered the slim percent of Blacks that could afford to move out, primarily to Bloomfield. Bloomfield shifted from more than 95% White in the 1950s to 30% Black by 1980.[1] In the 2020 U.S. Census, Bloomfield had become nearly 60% Black, the only majority-Black suburb in Greater Hartford. 

No other suburb west of the Connecticut River—except a few neighborhoods in Windsor— received even a sliver of the population of African Americans moving out of the city. When our family moved, you could count the number of Black families in the town of about 20,000 on one hand. Sixty years later, Blacks are still less than 3% of Simsbury’s population. Although my parents no longer live there, having moved out in 2006, the town is still not a very congenial place for people of color, particularly Blacks.

My parents' politics evolved during their first decade in Simsbury, from leaning moderate to becoming quite liberal. The influence of the Civil Rights movement certainly played a role in the shift. Both were devastated by the assassinations in 1968, first of Martin Luther King Jr. and then, only weeks later, Robert F. Kennedy.

Soon after, they helped form a small study group on racial matters in their church, The First Church of Christ Congregational Church in downtown Simsbury. Eventually, they proposed to the head minister that they lead a non-traditional Sunday service to spotlight racial disparities in the nation and the region and argue for the church to take a strong stance against racism.

It didn’t go over well. The congregation – and the minister - strongly opposed the proposal. Within less than a year, my parents left the church and joined a more progressive congregation in West Hartford.

Image courtesy of Chat GPG 4.0