by Steve Veshosky
Photographs by Nick Lacy and the Hartford Film Project

“I was downtown eating at a restaurant and a policeman came in, and another white asked him what he was doing with his dogs. He said, ‘I’ve got the best nigger chasers going.’ Now that makes me want to throw a brick and I’m a college-educated, intelligent black. That makes me want to throw a brick. There’s only so much people can take.”

Jim Rogers, during a community meeting following civil disturbances in Hartford during the summer of 1969.

These words represent feelings expressed by many city residents during a meeting in Hartford’s North End, organized by the Black Panthers in the summer of 1969.
 

	Hartford Collection. Hartford Public Library

That community gathering, called to address rioting and looting in the city and the police department’s subsequent response, was captured on film as part of an effort to improve communication among elements of the racially and economically divided city.

Today, the Trinity-based Hartford Studies Project (HSP), in collaboration with a consortium of local partners, is producing a feature-length film that includes pieces of that original footage, thanks in part to a $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation program. Nearly $120,000 in additional funding is being provided over the next three years by the College; Motion, Inc., an award-winning local film production company that has supplied a great deal of in-kind service to the project; funds from the Kellogg Foundation that are being administered by Trinity; and from monies dispersed through the dean of faculty’s office. Hartford 1969/2004: A Community Documentary Film Project, which will include footage from the 1960s as well as audience reactions and interviews conducted between 2000 and 2004, will focus on community organizing activities in Hartford’s neighborhoods and schools in the era of the civil rights movement and the war in Southeast Asia. The original footage, intended as a series of short documentaries for use in public policy advocacy, was filmed in the city during the summer of 1969 by filmmakers from the National Film Board of Canada and UCLA, working with local Black Panthers, community activists, and other Hartford residents.

The 1969 project utilized a technique known as the Fogo method, named for a fishing community in Newfoundland where Canadian filmmakers, sent by their government, helped reconcile feuding members of the island village by allowing each side to see and hear the other side on film—the result was a successful fishing cooperative created to avert certain economic disaster. Because Hartford was particularly torn by the disparities between wealth and poverty in the late ’60s, it was hoped that the Fogo method could help Connecticut’s capital city bridge deep racial and socioeconomic divisions. The Fogo team, including prominent Canadian filmmaker and Oscar-nominee Julian Biggs, arrived in Hartford with government funding supplied by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. For a variety of reasons that included a change in political leadership in Washington following the 1968 elections, budgetary concerns, and the failing health of Biggs, the 1969 footage was never released for its intended purpose.

As the members of the crew went their separate ways at the end of 11 weeks of filming, they gave 13 canisters of footage to Charles “Butch” Lewis, a decorated Vietnam veteran and founder of the Hartford chapter of the Black Panther Party. Under Lewis’s leadership, the Hartford Panthers had established a free breakfast program for school children, as well as a “street academy” that offered alternative educational programs to high school students struggling in public schools. Lewis had been an integral part of the original film crew—guiding crew members to appropriate locations for filming, arranging Panther protection, and, at times, operating a camera. Passionate about his community involvement as well as the future of Hartford, Lewis was convinced that, at some point, the film would be valuable. “I knew that what we had done up to that point was good,” Lewis remembers. “We just weren’t able to finish it. It was important work, but the filming just stopped all of a sudden.”

For more than 30 years, the bulk of the film sat, cool and dry, in a locker in Lewis’s basement. In 1999, following an announcement that an exhibit of news photographs was being sponsored by the Hartford collection of the Hartford Public Library, the Hartford Courant, and the Hartford Studies Project, Lewis’s wife, Virginia, urged him to contact the Hartford Studies Project. Associate Professor of History Susan Pennybacker and her colleagues were stunned and amazed by what they saw on the film. They immediately recognized the footage as a way to continue, albeit more than three decades later, a community-wide conversation about equality and social justice in Hartford. Additional footage was later located in a California storage facility and in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

“The first Trinity people to see the footage, in the spring of 2000, were our student, Steve McFarland, [Associate Professor of Fine Arts] Pablo Delano, [Associate Professor of History] Luis Figueroa, [Professor of Sociology] Steve Valocchi, and I. We were overwhelmed both by the images and by the passion of the testimony,” explains Pennybacker. “It brought back graphic memories of my own activities in the Midwest in 1969 as well as my commitment to social progress, and of the innocence, earnestness, and importance of local activism in the ’60s.”

	Hartford Collection. Hartford Public Library

The Hartford Studies Project was established in 1990 by Trinity faculty members and alumni/ae in an effort to preserve and study Hartford’s post-Civil War history. Trinity faculty members involved with the project include Figueroa, Delano, Valocchi, Associate Director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life Andrew Walsh, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and HSP Coordinator Elizabeth Rose, and Visiting Lecturer in American Studies Frank Mitchell. McFarland ’00, who received a master’s degree in urban planning from Cornell University last spring, serves as an assistant on the film project, as does current Trinity graduate student Diane Smith.

The HSP’s methodology is interdisciplinary and unconventional, bringing together community residents, activists, and academics through its sponsorship of public programs, photographic exhibitions, and collaborative research. Through its focus on issues pertaining to race, immigration, social policy, and local politics, it seeks to illuminate Hartford’s present through a better understanding of its past. HSP is partnering with a number of area organizations on the documentary film project, including All Our Children, the Community Renewal Team (CRT), the Hartford Public Library, the NAACP of Greater Hartford, Shiloh Baptist Church, South Arsenal Neighborhood Development Corporation, Walk in the Light Ministries, La Voz, and Broad-Park Development Corporation, Inc.

“We originally got involved with the Hartford Studies Project because we were making a short film to celebrate our 40th anniversary,” says CRT spokesperson Liz Dupont-Diehl. “CRT was founded in 1963 as part of the War on Poverty, and some of the people who appeared in the original footage have been associated with our programs. The Trinity folks were fantastic about working with us and allowing us to use their archival footage. The Hartford Studies Project and Motion, Inc. helped us produce our film and we have benefited greatly from our partnership. Essentially, the partnership allowed us to accomplish a lot more than we would have been able to accomplish on our own.”

Working with Motion, Inc., HSP is accumulating new footage to complement the old. There have been several public screenings featuring various portions of the recovered film, including gatherings of many of the people who appeared in the original footage as well as their contemporaries, families, and friends. HSP members and Trinity students have then interviewed those who wished to speak on camera. The collected stories, which include those of young and old, black, white, and Latino, as well as community activists and politicians, are helping piece together the thoughts and emotions that played such a vital role in the events of 1969 and the surrounding era.

“There seem to be a sentimentalization and a popular rendition of the ’60s that revolve around the iconic figures of the civil rights movement,” Pennybacker says. “Local complexities and ambiguities are largely left out of the conversation because actual testimony, both oral and visual, is absent. For example, the significant Latino presence of that time is rarely mentioned or celebrated. The authenticity of this material makes it part of a set of valuable historical documents, and the testimony and images that we are currently taking and filming are equally valuable as commentary on contemporary Hartford.”

Captured among the dozens of hours of original footage are the city’s first Puerto Rican parade and a community meeting during which North End mothers of small children relate instances of police officers firing canisters of tear gas into their homes. The film crew also recorded interviews and committee meetings featuring local government and business leaders, lawyers, teachers, and neighborhood residents. Included in the footage are black activists, Puerto Rican civic leaders, white politicians, students protesting racism in local schools, concerned parents, and the organizers of a community food cooperative. Many residents of Hartford became involved in the film project that summer, and the films were centered around the broad theme of their daily struggles and their hopes and dreams for the future.

Pennybacker, who is also the director of the Hartford Studies Project, serves as the documentary’s producer, while Motion, Inc. President and Visiting Lecturer in Film Studies Glenn Orkin is directing. Figueroa is lending technical expertise to the project. Pennybacker, Lewis, and their HSP colleagues and partners plan to create from that original footage—along with a host of the more recently conducted interviews—a film that will remain true to the spirit of the Fogo method: it will attempt to find common ground and purpose among communities long separated by race, class, and socioeconomic status.

“We have a unique opportunity to view the present through authoritative—not unbiased, but very useful—images of the past, to critique the present in light of recent history,” she says. “This is for some urban areas a forgotten art form, and its use here in Hartford is essential for a clear understanding of the paths and choices ahead. We dismiss or forget our history at the city’s peril. The Fogo practitioners thought their film could actually reduce conflict. I’m not sure about that, but I do think it can help explain why it happened, why it could continue to happen, and help us map out some of the decisions that have been made—so that we, as residents and voters, can make better choices in the future.”

For further information, go to www.trincoll.edu/depts/hartstud/.

 

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