SIMSBURY -- While his work in civil rights is well documented, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s time spent in Connecticut is not as often talked about.
In 1944, he came to Simsbury to work in the tobacco fields. It was part of a program that recruited African-American college students from historically black colleges in the south to work in the tobacco industry in the northeast.
"They had been recruiting in New York so they decided to go to the south where you had more educated blacks and they figured they'd be more 'civil,' and that's how Dr. King came up in that batch," said historian Dr. Ann-Marie Adams. "So that first batch was thought to be 'middle-class blacks' who knew how to act in the north."
"It really was a formative experience for him in creating that vision that he had for what things could be like in a world where people could interact and work and play together regardless of the color of their skin," said Elaine Long, President of the Simsbury Historical Society.