“Yesterday we didn’t work so we went to Hartford. We really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And we went to the largest shows there.”

Years later, reflecting on his time in Connecticut’s tobacco fields and his subsequent return to the segregated south, Dr. King wrote, “It was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington, and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.”

Dr. King drew attention to the fact that Brown was a major blow to those racists who wanted to preserve Jim Crow segregation.

By the time he had returned to Hartford to deliver his lecture at the Bushnell, the 30 year-old Dr. King had been catapulted onto the national stage because of his leadership during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The lecture, which lasted close to 45 minutes, summarized the experience of Africans in America from slavery, through abolition and Jim Crow segregation, to the mid-1950s and the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown overturned the "separate but equal" standard established by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Dr. King drew attention to the fact that Brown was a major blow to those racists who wanted to preserve Jim Crow segregation.

“As a result of this decision, he said, “we stand today on the threshold of the most creative and constructive period of our nation’s history.”

The ideas and beliefs that shaped and propelled Dr. King’s incredible life journey were laid out in his Bushnell speech.

The Bushnell address is significant also because it occurred during a critical year in Dr. King’s life. He had recently returned from a trip to India, where he had met with followers of Mohandas Gandhi. Although at seminary Dr. King had become acquainted with Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent social protest, he left India more convinced than ever that the non-violent strategy of civil disobedience was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people struggling for freedom.

“Violence can only bring temporary victory,” Dr. King said, “never permanent peace.”

Finally, laying out a theme he would pick up later in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King challenged government, religious leaders, and others to play a constructive role in the civil rights struggle, urging them to act quickly and decisively.

As we all know, during the next nine years, Dr. King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, win a Nobel Peace Prize, take a courageous and quite controversial stance against American involvement in Vietnam, launch a poor people’s campaign, and then be struck down by an assassins’ bullet.

The ideas and beliefs that shaped and propelled Dr. King’s incredible life journey were laid out in his Bushnell speech.

The audiotape of Dr. King’s speech is housed in the University of Hartford’s archive. Any one interested in hearing this historic speech should contact the University. It’s well worth it.

1University of California Press, Berkeley; editor, Clayborne Carson A recording of “The Future of Integration” is archived at the University of Hartford, Mortensen Library.
Contact archivist Mary Mair at 860-768-4143 for information about listening to a recording of Dr. King’s lecture delivered in Hartford in May 1959.

Darryl McMiller, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science and social science at the University of Hartford, Hilllyer College.