In 1944, Martin Luther King was fifteen years old.  A precocious student at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, Georgia, he had applied for early admission to Atlanta’s Morehouse College.   In June, King traveled north by train with a group of Morehouse students bound for tobacco work at Cullman Brothers.  He joined a seasonal labor force of thousands of young people from many states and from the Caribbean, drawn to Connecticut by ample agricultural work opportunities and comparatively decent salaries. 

During that summer, King wrote four letters home.  He was anxious to know whether he had been accepted to Morehouse.  He told of getting up at 6:00 a.m. each morning.  He missed his mother’s fried chicken and rolls and wanted her to send some up to Connecticut although he acknowledged the food at Cullman’s was “very good,” particularly since he worked in the kitchens.  To his minister father, King wrote on June 15^th,“We have service here every Sunday about 8:00 and I am the religious leader we have a Boy’s choir here and we are going to sing on the air soon.”  In the same letter King wrote, “On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated (sic) to see.  After we passed Washington the(re)  was no discrimination at all…. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”   Three days later, on June 18^th, he wrote his mother about a trip to Hartford saying “I never though(t) that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we…ate in one of the finest rest(a)urant(s)  in Hardford.”  By mid-August, King knew he had attained admission to Morehouse, and by mid-September, King was home.  Years later in his autobiography, Martin Luther King acknowledged how difficult it was to return to the segregated south after his summer in Connecticut. 

Learn more about King’s experiences in Connecticut and hear from others in our region who worked tobacco.  The Society’s Faces of Windsor photographic exhibition will be open to the public before and after the program.  Cost is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and students, and $4 for Windsor Historical Society and Simsbury Historical Society members.  Parking is available around Palisado Green and in the First Church and Windsor Discovery Center parking lots.