MLK’s Time in Connecticut: An eye to a world beyond the Jim Crow South

"Less well-known, even to Connecticut residents, is the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s two summers picking tobacco in Simsbury.  In 1944 and 1947, the 15-year old, Morehouse College-bound student cultivated and picked tobacco on the Cullman Brothers’ “Meadowood” Tobacco farm with a coterie of his fellow Morehouse students.  The time that King spent in Simsbury not only helped him decide to become a Minister, like his father, but also transformed his previous mindset – that African-Americans and white Americans could not interact peacefully.'"– François Steichen